22. Marty Robbins - Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959)

Tracks: Big Iron//Cool Water//Billy the Kid//A Hundred and Sixty Acres//They're Hanging Me Tonight//Strawberry Roan//El Paso//In the Valley//The Master's Call//Running Gun//Down in the Little Green Valley//Utah Carol

Review:

The last country album we had was Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and a very stripped-back and rootsy affair it was. Here on the opposite end of the spectrum, Marty Robbins presents us with a very slick, polished effort – from the cover art to the ooh-oohing backing vocals to the sweeping, cinematic storytelling of the lyrics, this is Hollywood all the way.

But then, there’s nothing wrong with that is there? This is a slick album, but it’s also a damned good one. Marty Robbins may not be a technically dazzling lyricist, but he tells straightforward stories with great power and clarity. “Big Iron” and “El Paso” are entire little films unto themselves, with amazing sweeping narratives and striking imagery. Robbins’ tendency to uncritically accept that the girl is always to blame may make songs like “El Paso” and “They’re Hanging Me Tonight” a little irksome to anyone who tends to think to much about these sorts of things, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re masterpieces of narrative music. “Cool Water” is honest to goodness desperation distilled. These are fine songs. The fact that they’re about cowboys shooting each other is just the icing on the cake.

I have to admit I have a soft spot for this album. When I was younger my dad used to always have the radio on Magic 693 AM, where Marty Robbins was a perennial favourite. Thankfully, a song like “The Master’s Call” is all the defense I need against any pundits or wags who might feel the need to mock me. Yes, it’s an overly earnest song about finding Christian redemption after almost being struck by lightning, but it’s also got some dazzling imagery and one of the most astonishing hooks to come along so far.

Although, speaking of those hooks does tend to lead me around to the melodic construction of a lot of these songs. There’s actually a fair bit of stylistic variation here, with Robbins throwing-in everything from Hawaiian guitars to Irish folk music and what sounds like nothing so much as laika on one track. “They’re Hanging Me Tonight” even manages to step right out of country and western and become an honest to god pop song! It could have been by damned near anyone. But be that as it may, he does tend to rehash his vocal delivery. That’s at least in part a hang-over from the material, but the fact that Robbins’ vocals are up front and centre for the entire album does mean that things can get a little samey at times. Thankfully, however, this was 1959, when people knew how to keep their albums short and sweet. The fact that I listened to this on vinyl, and had to get up and turn the thing over halfway through, didn’t hurt either.

There are a number of important aspects to this album, I suppose. Firstly, the massive chart success of both the album and its singles point very clearly towards the future of country music. Big, glossy songs by the likes of Glen Campbell, that’s what. I like Glen Campbell, but you can’t help but get a little teary eyed for depressing murder songs that sound like they were recorded through a soup tin. Oddly, however, this album also points forward to the sort of outlaw country that would get popular in the late 60s and early 70s, and is comprised mostly of the very same murder songs I was just lamenting. It’s a nice glimpse of a time when the two traditions hadn’t entirely splintered yet.

Another interesting thing about all this is that Marty Robbins wrote most of the songs here. That wasn’t an entirely novel occurrence by 1959 (a lot of the rock acts so far did likewise), but you do have to remember that this was still a period when, in pop music, many acts performed songs which had been written for them by stables of song-writers (usually Neil Diamond, for some reason). The most important initial contribution of the Beatles, after all, was the idea that a band should play its own songs. Robbins may not be spearheading anything, but this album does point to a growing trend.

In the end, though, all that really matters is the music. As I’ve said, it’s pretty solid. There’s some filler here, unfortunately – I have no real fondness for “Strawberry Roan”, and the second half of the second side just sort of blends together after a while. But the good stuff is just so amazingly good that it doesn’t really matter.

8/10

Download: Marty Robbins - The Master's Call Mp3
Download: Marty Robbins - El Paso Mp3

And here are the Beasts of Bourbon lamenting the death of a great man:

21. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (1959)

Tracks: So What//Freddie Freeloader//Blue in Green//All Blues//Flamenco Sketches//Flamenco Sketches (First Take)

I don’t know that bop ever sat very comfortably with Miles Davis. Even as far back as The Birth of the Cool, he wasn’t really playing by the rules. So it makes sense, some ten years down the track, that he would be the one to sit down and push things... somewhere else?

“Somewhere else” certainly seems to describe this album. Davis had experimented with modality before, but here you have an entire album freed-up from rigid chord structures and opening into a whole new sonic universe. The bassist and pianist lead through on loose scales, and often the songs are built around little more than a two-note vamp. The result is that each of the players is free to do a lot more moving around within the parameters set for them, giving the songs on this album a very open and airy sound despite there actually being an awful lot going on at any given moment. It’s certainly a contrast with the “busy” sound of a lot of the other jazz albums we’ve had to this point (I am thinking of Brilliant Corners in particular).

This is a very lovely, pretty album. “So What” drifts down out of a cloud of Bill Evans’ gentle impressionist piano (most of this album sounds like Satie or Debussy), and then suddenly slides into life on a truly wonderful, bouncing bass riff, accented by a two chord sting that shifts around from piano to trumpet and so on throughout the song. And then the drum kit snaps into life, the bass starts walking down into the depths of an ocean of cymbals (the production by Teo Macero is exceptional, and key to the album’s success), and Davis comes in on some wonderful, low, peaceful trumpet. The start of “So What” is one of my favourite starts, to any song. And the rest of the piece is quite nice, too. It just sort of wanders around, while the soloists (Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly!) take turns.

This sets a pattern for the rest of the album. With the exception of “Blue in Green” and “Flamenco Sketches”, which trade in less rhythmic, more mournful tones, you get a very steady procession of brisk, beautiful, simple rhythmic and harmonic frameworks over which is presented some truly lovely soloing. Evans’ classically influenced piano work is wonderful throughout, and one of the cornerstones of the album. Coming back to this album after a long time away, I was initially dismissive of Paul Chambers’ bass work; after a bit of thought, I’ve decided I really do quite like it. Yes, it’s omnipresent and “busy”, but it works, and the frequent interplay between the soloists and the lines that Chambers is playing is a great deal of fun. And then you have Jimmy Cobb on the drum kit, doing all sorts of weird things. A repeated snapping, cracking sort of noise that carries the momentum through stretches of “Freddie Freeloader” is one of my favourites, but then you get these neat little fills that have the habit of spinning the entire song around so it sounds like it’s just started again, which contributes a great deal to the constant feeling of freshness.

Of course damned near anyone reading this is shaking their head at this point; they’ve both already heard this album, and know just how bad a job I’m doing of describing it. Well, I’ll stop describing it then, and talk about more general things. Although honestly, despite never having written on Kind of Blue before I feel as though I’m repeating myself. What more can one say about it? This is one of the most revered and beloved albums in history. At some point, it went from merely being “a very good jazz album” to “the very good jazz album”. People have written whole books on the thing! Its influence in contemporary popular, classical and jazz music is inestimable.

But why is that? I don’t know. I guess a part of it might be that, like most great works, it’s helped to create a world of which it is a cornerstone. People might point to Kind of Blue and declare it a masterpiece because it so obviously is – it’s been so influential, and so many people love it, and ergo so on and so forth... Well, I won’t deny that Kind of Blue is a masterpiece, but if we lived in a world where jazzists hadn’t been sitting around, feeling hemmed-in by bop, wanting a new language to fiddle with, would people still praise this? I mean, if Kind of Blue hadn’t been a massive success, then would we consider it a massive success?

Well, the swinging rhythm and the tight, focused soloing on “All Blues” makes me say “yes”. But then let’s consider another Miles Davis album, his On the Corner from 1972. A completely different album. Can-like, mind-bending funk-rock that frequently sounds like someone tuning a spaceship's radio in to the frequencies of a Jovian Sabu tribute night. It’s a great, great album, but it was a critical and commercial disaster on its release. If hip-hop hadn’t come around to give people context for the sort of things he was doing, would it’s stature as an artwork ever have recovered to the levels it did?

I’m not sure what my point is. I guess my point is that Kind of Blue is a brilliant album, but no album with “Blue in Green” on it can be considered “the greatest jazz album of all time”. What the hell does that even mean? That’s like declaring Ege Bamyasi the greatest rock album of all time. They’re both utterly amazing, but it’s just sort of ridiculous to do such a thing. It has it’s stature as “the only jazz album non-jazz fans own”, “the best-selling jazz album of all time” and “the first jazz album most people buy” (it doesn’t get to keep its “recorded all in first takes” stature, as apparently the tracks included are only the first complete takes). It’s certainly absolutely beautiful on its own terms, but I guess I dislike hagiographical statements. I don’t see why the fact that everyone likes it makes it perfect.

The real strength of Kind of Blue, I feel, is that it hangs together. Davis has done some individual tracks elsewhere that are better than the lesser cuts from this album, and other people certainly have (anyone who tries to tell me that “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” isn’t as good as almost anything here will get slapped). But, as an album, it works. I think this might be because they find one simple, compelling idea and run with it. The Jesus and Mary Chain of jazz!

I don’t know. It’s a masterpiece. I get bitter about masterpieces because I can’t complain about them as much.

“Flamenco Sketches” is pretty (both takes).

10/10

Download: Miles Davis - So What Mp3

And here we have Davis' legacy in action:

19. Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George & Ira Gershwin Songbook

Tracks:

Review:

Well here you have it – an album so long, and so self-indulgent, that it almost derailed the whole project only a month in. Which isn’t really fair to Ella Fitzgerald, I suppose; her album is a chore to listen to from end to end, but then this isn’t the sort of album you should listen to from end to end. It’s a catalogue of the music of the Gershwins! You pop it on if you want to hear “I Got Rhythm”, or leave it playing around the house. It conveniently collects the majority of their tunes into one handy package – if you consider what must have been something like a 5 x LP box set convenient.

And, amazingly enough, this all holds up pretty well. Going into detail on the individual songs would be a maddening and time-consuming task, but thankfully this set lends itself to being discussed in broad terms. And, in short, it’s generally pretty good, but not great. Well, a couple of the songs are sort of great – the explosive instrumental section of “Just Another Rhumba”, for example, and “’S Wonderful”, which is just such a happy and charming little tune. Actually, most of disc 1 is pretty good. And, you know, Ella is pretty good. Not great, but good. Maybe a little flat?

This is the George & Ira Gershwin songbook, and so the focus shouldn’t be entirely on Ella Fitzgerald. Nelson Riddle did the arrangements on this album, working with Ella for the first time, and a lot of the time the instrumentation is more compelling than the vocals. That may sound harsh, but consider this – firstly, Ira Gershwin wasn’t that great a lyricist. In fact, most of his songs could be best described as “inane”. His strength lies in very simple, emotional pleas for companionship and in jokey novelty tunes, and when he plays to that strength you get some great stuff. But then, sometimes you don’t. Although, having looked on the internet, some of these songs seem to feature alternate lyrics, which means I may not have all the evidence at hand to give him a fair trial. In any event, the songs succeed more on emotional and melodic levels than lyrically. Is anyone going to defend “Stiff Upper Lip” as anything other than an awful bit of stereotyping performed badly?

Secondly, Ella sings almost everything in a very measured and deliberate manner. This is Gershwin! It should swing more. Take “Boy Wanted”, which could have gone-off like a rocket, but which instead plods along very pretty but ultimately less than dazzling. And then, Ella’s voice isn’t placed anywhere near far enough forward in the mix, thus making it seem rather small and thin and “away in the distance”, which is a pity. But then you have the wonderful vocal glissando that opens “Soon”, or the low vocal on the pretty “Somebody from Somwhere”, which comes complete with swirling harps and begs to be performed by Judy Garland, or “A Foggy Day”, which also has a lovely little brassy bridge.

In the end, this whole album is a mixed bag. You have some good songs performed badly (“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, or “The Man I Love”), some bad songs performed well (“Somebody from Somewhere”), and most of the songs are neither particularly good nor particularly bad. They are just, well, alright. The insistence of Riddle and Fitzgerald on performing every singly song in an “pop” style, adapting the material to themselves rather than themselves to the material, is a bit annoying. These are show tunes, damn it! They deserve to be swinging, trashy and rough. When Ella complained in one song that Gershwin “won’t stop pounding tin” I had absolutely no idea what they were on about. As a document of Gershwin’s music it might be argued that this fails because, ultimately, it’s far too reverential, prettying-up the tunes of a duo who’d already been canonised. Most of these songs are nothing but barely-dressed lust, and where is the sense of that? Ella does the pretty, reflective tunes well, but I just don’t know... Is it wrong to simply not like Ella Fitzgerald much? I feel guilty about it, but fuck it! This is my blog! I don’t like Ella Fitzgerald much! I think she has a fine voice but she’s a mediocre interpreter of songs.

I guess if I had to sum up, this is an album of exceptional instances and general consistency, rather than a full-on wower, but then, you can’t really expect much else can you? It’d be preposterous to assume that George and Ira Gershwin wrote only great songs, and it’d be equally idiotic to suggest that every single song that Ella Fitzgerald recorded was going to turn-out spectacular. This is an important album, because it provides a glimpse into all the strengths and weaknesses of both the Gershwin brothers and Ella Fitzgerald, and as a consequence you get a fascinating document of three of the most important figures in modern music.

8/10

Download: Ella Fitzgerald - 'S Wonderful Mp3

18. Sarah Vaughan - At Mr. Kelly's (1957)

Track: September in the Rain//Willow Weep for Me//Just One of Those Things//Be Anything But Darling Be Mine//Thou Swell//Stairway to the Stars//Honeysuckle Rose//Just A Gigolo//How High Is The Moon?//Dream//I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself A Letter//It's Got to Be Love//Alone//If This Isn't Love//Embraceable You//Lucky In Love//Dancing in the Dark//Poor Butterfly//Sometimes I'm Happy//I Cover the Waterfront

Ah! These things move in packs. Now we have another stripped-back set by an excellent interpreter of songs, albeit this time in the jazz and pop vein rather than country and blues. And damned if it isn’t good – this might well be the item for which the phrase “understated charm” was coined. See also: "deceptive simplicity"; "unselfconscious grace".

Sarah Vaughan’s voice is certainly gorgeous. She navigates the rhythms of her small backing band perfectly, and dips up and down her register with complete fluidity. There’s very much a sense here of the voice as instrument, with the lyrics a vehicle for the singer as opposed to being the point of the song. I’m sure the lyricists who authored Vaughan’s selections would appreciate your paying some attention to what’s being said, but I find with this album that I’m far less interested in the “what” than the “how”. Vaughan’s got phrasing that’d put a sax to shame, and she takes advantage of the fact that she’s mostly singing languorous torch songs to stretch out and let her voice go places. Not that she ever has any Mariah Carey moments, mind. You can hear Vaughan putting care and thought into each little twist of her voice, rather than indulging in spontaneous masturbation. It’s kind of an interesting contrast to Ella Fitzgerald’s album which is coming up tomorrow, where Ella has obviously tried to clearly and cleanly interpret the songs of Gershwin and has completely sapped them of individual personality in the process (although it’s still a good album).

And speak of the Devil (or the first lady of song, at least) – there’s actually a tribute to Ella on this album. You see, it’s a live recording, made at the Mr. Kelly’s night club of all places, and as a consequence there are quite a few muddles and missed notes. In “How High the Moon”, for example, Vaughan forgets the word halfway through and starts doing comical scatting a la Ella to fill out the time. And then you’ve got “Willow Weep for Me”, where she ends-up with a few bars to spare and starts cracking jokes. And then you have all the little bits of inter-song banter, none of it as fancy as the stuff on the Jack Elliot album, but still very charming nonetheless. Flirting with the audience and such. The thing that’s most fascinating is hearing the contrast between her singing voice, with it’s considerable range, and her small and squeaky speaking voice.

So, this is a very nice album. Maybe not a great album, I suppose, but a lovely antidote to all the over-orchestrated nonsense that we’ve been having lately. And then, what is a "Great Album" anyway? This makes me smile, damn it! It's pretty! And such a wonderful late night album! The tracks may blend into each other a bit at times, and sometimes the lyrics get lost behind the performances, but isn’t that at least sort of what you want from a late night album? I’ve listened to this half a dozen times, and never any earlier than ten o’clock at night. It’s an anodyne to worn nerves and a pick-me-up for the downtrodden. It’s, at base, just a woman with a pretty voice singing some silly love songs, but it’s also a really pretty voice. Hell it might even be the prettiest voice! It’s damn near perfect! You get the swinging tunes and the torchy tunes and it's all so happy and smooth.

So! This is a very charming, joyful album, and one that I am very happy to welcome into my library. It’s simple and simply wonderful, with every song a delicate little machine running its course into the next and so on till the end. Nothing much to say about it, nothing much to criticise. A blissful album! Sustenance for the soul. It makes you happy to be alive, I argue.

8.5/10

Download: Sarah Vaughan - Thou Swell Mp3

17. Ramblin' Jack Elliot - Jack Elliott Takes the Floor

Tracks: San Francisco Bay Blues//Ol' Riley//Bill Weevil//Bed Bug Blues//New York Town//Old Blue//Grey Goose//Mule Skinner Blues//East Texas Talking Blues//Cocaine//Dink's Song//Black Baby//Salty Dog

Another review, but hopefully a short one (it’s 12:45 AM on a school night, after all). This is a charming little album. It’s just Jack Elliott with his guitar, taking a swing at the American folk repertoire and managing nothing but hits. Elliot has a funny sort of voice – when he talks, he sounds like Ira Kaplin doing a cowboy impersonation, but when he sings he has a style which owes such a debt to the blues that at times it sounds like he’s stolen Skip James’ pipes by way of Hank Williams and hooked them up to an air-raid siren. At one point in “Mule Skinner Blues”, for example, Elliott actually holds a yodel for a full twenty seconds. It’s wonderfully expressive, and perfectly suited to his principle choice of subject matter – being funny little stories of the misfortunes of life. We are treated, for example, to just about the most resistant goose to ever be cooked, and to a farmer who strikes-up a friendship with a destructive bill weevil. You get little bits of regional history, and instruction on what the hell a Talking Blues is (basically, it’s folk-rap).

You might think, being just a guy and his guitar, that things could get pretty dull pretty quick. Thankfully, that’s not the case. “Ramblin’” Jack gets his name less from any roaming he might have done than due to a habit of letting loose with long and meandering stories. What this means is that most of the songs are introduced with a wry observation of some form, and in one case this even extends to a song in which Jack pretends to have Woody Guthrie in the studio with him, and the “pair” duet on a number.

It’s not all laughs, though. There’s a couple of prison blues (or rags, if you will), and “Old Blue” which tells the story of the narrator’s dead dog. It starts out quite jaunty, but by the end you can almost hear him crying as he sings “dear blue, I’m coming too”. Then “Black Baby” is the touching story of a guy going away, telling his gal not to worry and to take care. Bittersweet, more than anything. Utterly gorgeous vocal delivery. Of course, then you have "Salty Dog", which is, well, "salty".

Really, there’s not much to go on about here, but it’s all wonderfully done. Elliott’s guitar is very fine, and he busts-out the harmonica on a few numbers. You get some weepers and some up-beat party tunes and some stuff in between. Elliott himself is a curious character – a Jewish New Yorker and the son of a doctor, he ran away from home in his teens and remade himself as a cowboy in the mid-West. Well, he does alright by these tunes, and leaving questions of authenticity aside that is really all that matters. We don’t want to re-open the Mudrooroo debates, after all. It’s the music that matters, and Elliott is one hell of an interpreter of songs. This is one of my favourite albums so far. It’s at turns hilarious and touching. The links to early Dylan are pretty obvious (Dylan actually billed himself as “Son of Jack Elliott” for one of his first performances, and they hung-out a bit), but Elliott has a much better voice and, until we actually get to Dylan, will do just as nicely.

8.5/10 (maybe a 9? It's all arbitrary anyway... OK yes Jack Elliot you may have a 9)

Download: Ramblin' Jack Elliot - East Texas Talking Blues Mp3

16. Billie Holiday - Lady in Satin

Tracks: I'm A Fool to Want You//For Heaven's Sake//You Don't Know What Love Is//I Get Along Without You Very Well//For All We Know//Violets for Your Furs//You've Changed//It's Easy to Remember//But Beautiful//Glad to Be Unhappy//I'll Be Around//The End of a Love Affair

Review:

I’m tempted, rather than reviewing Lady in Satin, to instead quote a poster on Amazon who states that this album “appeals only to voyeurs of human tragedy and misery”. That may be a bit harsh, but it does sum up a lot of the problems I have both with this album and with many a consumer’s approach to art. You see, this is an album built around self-pity, and sold to people who care less about the music coming out of their speakers than the biographies of the musicians. Do people even talk about Billie Holiday's music anymore? Lady in Satin is an emotional rather than a musical experience, but as a person with little to no emotional investment in Holiday I am instead left with what is at best a fair-to-mediocre bit of orchestral pop.

So, let’s get down to specifics. At this point Billie Holiday’s voice was more or less fucked. It’s there for all to see. She keeps a level of control in her vocals which is impressive when taken in contrast with how raspy they sound, but that said, half the time they don’t even manage to stay in tune. In one instance she even resolves the song on the wrong note. But, I think we can blame this at least in part on the stunningly ill-conceived orchestral backing. It’s big. It’s really big, so big that half the time the instruments are so loud that they drown out Holiday’s voice, and it’s almost nothing but strings and big “woo-ooing” choirs of angels. Now, I actually happen to like big, sappy arrangements with woo-ooing choirs of angels, but they’d be out of place on a Minor Threat album and they’re out of place here.

This really is the crux of the problem. Holiday’s voice had been ravaged by drugs, alcohol and smoking, but it still had a certain slow flexibility and a heart-felt quality that would have worked marvellously with a smaller, les flamboyantly cheery band. While it must have sounded hideous and terrifying in 1958, fifty years of Punk music and Tom Waits albums have given us a world where the charms of such things can be a little better appreciate. I don’t see why Columbia didn’t give her the sort of spare treatment that had served her well previously. I guess they must have decided to try and push her as a slick pop singer and buried her vocals under the arrangements to distract people. Well, that’s all well and good, but it didn’t work. Ray Ellis’ arrangements are for the better part astonishingly tedious. So much is going on, with the warm-toned trumpet solos and swooping cellos and harps, and yet rather than become compelling the instruments instead weave together like the fibres of one big bundle of cotton wool. I tried listening through this twice and both times I almost fell asleep.

By this point you can probably tell that I don’t agree with the general assessment that this album is difficult to listen to. If this were a gut-wrenching emotional roller coaster I'd actually like it, but from poor song choices to bad performances, it’s not anywhere near challenging enough.

Ok, so now that I’ve finished savaging the thing I can tell you what I like about it. And I do like a few things. This isn’t an awful album, by any means. It’s never less than pleasant, and in a few songs everything comes together to even become down-right interesting. So! If you want to spare yourself a lot of trouble, and having to sit through the mumbled tedium of “Violets for Your Furs”, then you could do worse than pick-up “I’m a Fool to Want You”, “Glad to Be Unhappy” and “The End of a Love Affair”. None of these songs are spectacular, but the first is still quite beautiful, in a simple and guileless way, while “The End of a Love Affair” is the closest thing to an emotionally genuine moment on the whole album. Who, after sitting through this whole bizarre mess, isn’t going to feel a bit when Holiday hisses out “so I smoke a little too much, and I joke a little too much, and the tunes I request are not always the best, but the ones where the trumpets blare”. It’s actually affecting, and it goes a long way towards salvaging the album from pointlessness.

Well, that’s about it, and I hope I’ve made my point. Billie Holiday as encapsulated on this album is certainly a very pathetic individual, but I am not going to give any album top marks just for “authenticity”. I’ve always been a cynical bastard – I’m the kind of guy who gets put-off by novels or films which are described as “powerful”. I find something repulsive in the way that Kurt Cobain can off himself and suddenly he’s no longer just a pretty good pop-rock composer, but instead a tragic genius whose work finds absolute vindication in the act of his death. To suffer is not noble. To withstand and overcome suffering is noble.

I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve seen too many people get caught-up in the beauty of their own demise, and wind-up fucking themselves completely as a consequence. Billie Holiday you were a fine singer but this is just not all that good an album, and no amount of sadness in your life is going to change that. The self-absorbed, self-pitying, self-destructive artist is a bullshit construct. We make fun of Doors fans for buying it, and it wouldn’t be fair to let you off on this count. If this really was your favourite album, then it was obviously for deeply personal reasons. I respect that. I respect the bad situation you found yourself in. But yeah. The album's not much chop.

5/10

Download: Billie Holiday - The End of a Love Affair MP3

15. Tito Puente - Dance Mania (1958)

Tracks: El Cayuco//Complicacion//3-D Mambo//Llego Mijan//Cuando Te Vea//Hong Kong Mambo//Mambo Gazon//Mi Chiquita Quiere Bembe//Varsity Drag//Estoy Siempre Junto a Ti//Agua Limpia Todo//Saca Tu Mujer

Review:

Well, the cover more or less sums it up. It’s sexy! It’s cheesy! It’s for dancing! To be honest I know absolutely nothing about Tito Puente. He was in the “Who Shot Mr. Burns” two-parter of The Simpsons, where he performed that mambo about Mr Burns. I know that. And he wrote the oft-covered “Oye Como Va”, which is an OK song in both the original and the Santana version but which, to my mind, reached its peak with Amaral’s Trinidad Cavaliers Steel Orchestra and its bizarre steel-drum break-dance interpretation. So, I guess I know that, too. Um...

Oh! I also know that Tito Puente is considered El Rey, or the King of the Timbales, which is something that seems justified gauging by the contents of this album. I mean, I’m no expert when it comes to the timbales, but Tito Puente clearly knows his way around a drum kit. Which is good, since this is a dance album...

Honestly I don’t have much to say here. It’s a very solid album, but it’s not the sort of thing that demands deep analysis or extended descriptions. Well, maybe it does, but I don’t speak Spanish and as a consequence I can’t give a thorough reading of “Mi Chiquita Quiere Bembe”. According to Google that means “My babe wants Bembe”, but that’s not much help since I don’t really know what a Bembe is. Perhaps it’s some sort of beverage?

So what we have here is a lot of mambo, done very well, all quite danceable and integrated with numerous other styles about which I know nothing. You get extensive deployment of a great brass section, spidery piano and a killer vibraphone - and if there’s one thing I like it’s a vibraphone. Unlike the Machito album, this isn’t all instrumental – most of the songs are actually songs, you know, with singing. And sung well! There’s a lovely melancholy to the vocals that works as a nice counterpoint to the buoyant music. This is especially evident on the very sad-sounding and very pretty “Estoy Siempre Junto a Ti”.

Agh I really am having trouble finding things to say about this. “Hong Kong Mambo” uses the Chinese riff, but it’s pretty cool and very Les Baxter. “Mambo Gazon” is hypnotic and driving, built around layer upon layer of repeating horn figures and some mesmeric chanting that bursts out into a brief instrumental breakdown. It’s certainly the best song here, and maybe the only one that really lodges itself in your mind.

And there is the problem. Dance Mania is a lot of fun to listen to but afterwards I couldn’t really remember much of it. Although after a while, the grooves star to wear themselves into you. I found myself singing along to “Mi Chiquita Quiere Bembe” (which, incidentally, has a marvellous shuffling percussion break in the middle). Each of the songs manages to shift through a few distinct movements, and they’re all quite complex and interesting tunes. But, in the end, it’s just a sunny album to dance along to. You can bop along! It’s not overly confronting! It’s got understated charm. The ditties are catchy!

In the end, I quite like this. It’s not earth-shattering music, but there’s a level of skill and craftsmanship brought to these songs that I really appreciate. They’re really far better mad then they probably had to be. As a guy who owns more than his fair share of “Tango for Lovers” cocktail schmaltz LPs, it’s refreshing to here this done right. It’s actually swank! And I can’t not dance to “Agua Limpia Todo”, what with the little “la la la” chorus and all.

Ok, so final thoughts? It’s pleasant and friendly and it sort of sneaks up on you. I was considering writing this off as sort of vapid, but once you get into the swing of it, it’s a lovely listen. I want to strut about the Caribbean wearing a Panama hat and photographing missile bases. But I don’t know that I’d ever call this a particularly great album. It’s very, very good, however, and exceeds perfectly at being a fun little party record. I will admit, however, that I am a massive dork, and so if you don't count Doris Day among your musical idols you may not get quite as much mileage out of this.

So, yeah, this is pretty good stuff. Unlike my review, for which I apologise profusely. This is what happens when you haven't made-up your mind yet and find yourself listening to the album over as you write your post.

8/10

Download: Tito Puente - Mambo Gazon Mp3

Download: Amral's Trinidad Cavaliers Steel Orchestra - Oye Como Va Mp3

And! Los Simpsons en Espanol:

14. Little Richard - Here's Little Richard (1957)

Tracks: Tutti Frutti//True Fine Mama//Can't Believe You Wanna Leave//Ready Teddy//Baby//Slippin' and Slidin'//Long Tall Sally//Miss Ann//Oh Why?//Rip It Up//Jenny Jenny//She's Got It

Being born in 1986 as I was, I never had the opportunity to hear first-wave rock before it got defanged. I suppose that happened pretty quickly (Elvis Presley being the most famous victim), but still. Growing up with Flying Purple People Eaters and with Christina Ricci and Casper the Friendly Ghost dancing to spectral Bobby Day impersonators, it’s easy to lose touch with ones roots. I suppose this is in part a reflection of changing standards – what was shocking and frightening in 1955 is now just sort of pleasant. How many people listen to Swing and remember that at one point this sort of stuff was considered atonal, barbarous rhythm-mongering?

Which is all appropriate, given that today’s album is by Little Richard. I guess like everyone I knew about Little Richard. The guy was on Sesame Street. “Tutti Frutti” is a pop standard. But the lack of perspective which comes with close familiarity somehow numbed me to the fact that he is actually a demented homosexual in a sequined cape howling out frantic stompers that would give Napalm Death pause. It probably didn’t help that I always confuse him with Lionel Richie.

Anyway, this is a very loud and very wild album. If you ever find yourself wondering “Why is rock so loud, and wild?” then this is the album to check-out. Most of that can be attributed to the astonishing power of Mr. Penniman’s voice. The music here is well-written and well-performed, but it’s not really all that different from Fats Domino’s stuff – which is, I suppose, fair enough, given that a lot of these songs were actually recorded up to two years prior to the album’s release. Things chug along on barrel-roll piano riffs, and lots of groovy saxophone riffs keep things interesting and occasionally even funky. The lyrics aren't much to write home about and most of the songs use well-worn blues structures. The main selling point on these songs is the over-driven pace, the rough sound and the naked sexual aggression that fills most of these songs, and epitomised in the weird animalistic yowling of Little Richard. There’s a visceral punch to these songs matched only by the stompers on The Atomic Mr Basie. James Brown certainly owes something to this. Plus, they’re catchy! And about sex and drinking! If any album were likely to get you starting a band, this’d be it.

Having said all this, the hard-hitting punch of the album is also what makes it a bit wearing after a while. This is a problem with a lot of hard rocking albums, I suppose. Too little variety in the song structures, for one thing. I realise it was early in the game, but look at how many different styles Buddy Holly got into his album! I’m not saying all artists should be obligated to cram their albums with dazzling variety, but Here’s Little Richard needs something to shake things up a bit. And, to be fair, he does throw a few googlies now and then. The bizarre “Wop-bop-a-loo-ba” opening “Tutti Frutti”, most famously, but there are also the weird, funky back-up singers that sound like old men in “True Fine Mama”, and the Ray Charles-like “Oh Why”, which slows things down a bit for a pity of self-pity. And then it’s straight into the groovy little “Rip It Up”, where the backing track gets to shine.

I do like this album, but I don’t see why just because this stuff was pioneering it should be immune to criticism. Stuff improves! Who’s going to argue that the Hendrix version of “All Along the Watchtower” isn’t the definitive one? Only dickwits and nerds, that’s who. We have a Ray Charles album coming up, and if I give this a 9 then what the hell am I supposed to give that? A 12? This is good stuff, it’s fun stuff, and it beats-out Holly for consistency and Domino for thrill-factor. But, ultimately, it gets a bit wearing and I don’t like it quite as much as either. Some would argue that you’re really supposed to be drunk or dancing when this is one, and that’s probably true, but I don’t drink and I’m currently nude and lying in my bed, so both those options are out. I have the same complaint about Born to Run if that makes you feel better.

Anyway, I don’t want to waste my time apologising for my decisions. This is a very fine album the historical importance of which is difficult to overstate, and considering this sort of stuff was never really my thing the fact that I like it as much as do is a testament to, well, something. Look I don't know it's pretty good but there is just something about saxophones that makes me ant to mark things down

Incidentally, I should probably say a few things about "Tutti Frutti". Did you know that it was originally about anal sex? It was a joke song Richard played on the gay club set, but they had him change the lyrics to avoid controversy. The funny thing is that the replacement phrase, "aw rooty", sounds an awful lot when sung like "I wanna rooty". This is funny, to Australians at least, because in this country the word "root" is a milder form of "to fuck". And so, through some sort of cosmic justice, the explicit lewdness of the song has been allowed to shine through.

And there you go.

7.5/10

Download: Little Richard - True Fine Mama MP3

13. Machito - Kenya (1957)

Tracks: Wild Jungle//Congo Mulence //Kenya //Oyeme //Holiday //Cannonology //Frenzy //Blues a la Machito //Conversation //Tin Tin Deo //Minot Rama //Tururato

With spring in the air and the global superpowers on the verge of becoming banana republics, it seems only appropriate to welcome a little mambo to the blog. Not to imply by my introduction that Kenya is artistically impoverished. Machito is one of those rare few individuals to whom one could accurately apply the term “mambo visionary”, and his music displays a dazzling breadth of imagination; so much so, in fact, that half of his songs stop midway and change into different songs entirely. Thus, we get an album that comes across like the coked-up lovechild of Herb Alpert, Tito Puente, Esquival and Fela Kuti. Not that I’m complaining.

The title is accurate, anyway. Machito fuses American big-band styles and a sense of bop jazz improvisation with Cuban and African popular forms, and you end-up with a great dance album. On my personal favourite, “Oyeme”, you get a hypnotic hand percussion-and-bass introduction on a five note pattern that could be right out of a Lee Perry dub number. It suddenly bursts into what sounds like African High Life music, with a series of tense, escalating riffs on the brass section, and then a wonderful sax solo right out of bop comes squealing along in the right channel, basically preempting John Coltrane. It’s great. The overall impression is of the sort of music that James Bond might have had a car chase to in Dr. No. If you ever found yourself longing for more songs like Yoko Kanno’s “Tank”, this is the place for you. Well, actually “Frenzy” is the place for you, as the intro is more or less identical to “Tanks”. Aptly named number, too, and with one hell of a drum break.

However, not all of the songs are as good. The slowerer numbers tend to sound a bit syrupy. The title track is just sort of tedious, the sort of whimsical horn you’d expect to hear soundtracking a bad comedy Western, while “Holiday” is pleasant but very much in the tradition of the Tijuana Brass. None of the songs are outright bad, but they do tend to blend together after a while. What saves them are the interesting introductions to several of the tracks, and the tendency for the orchestra to cut out at points and lead into sudden, expansive Afro-Cuban percussion solos that must have set the dance floors on fire at the time.

So, a really good album. For a guy whose prior experience with Latin music of the 50s had mostly been Doris Day and the Grace Chang musical Mambo Girl, this was a pleasant surprise. It never really gets dull, although after the first listen the novelty might wear a bit thin. This is a party album and as a consequence not all th tracks bear great scrutiny. There are dozens of wonderful moments, however, which are more than enough to keep it interesting, and it benefits strongly from both having much better production than and being not quite like almost anything else on the list to this point. The arrangements are really quite interesting, hard hitting but lush and complex, and the way the horns and bass float over the watery drums is oddly precise, but wonderful. It's great stuff. I guess I was wrong when I said there wasn't much exotica on the list. I can't wait for the Yma Sumac.

8/10

Download: Machito - Oyeme Mp3

And for no real reason, here is Grace Chang singing a song:

12. Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool (1957)

Tracks: Move//Jeru//Moon Dreams//Venus De Milo//Budo//Deception//Godchild//Boplicity//Rocker//Israel//Rouge//Darn That Dream

Review:

Well, another review and we now welcome the wonderful Mr. Miles Davis to the blog. Unfortunately, this is not one of his best albums. Which is an unfortunate way of phrasing it I suppose, as it makes The Birth of the Cool sound like a bad album – and that it most certainly is not. It’s just, well, I don’t know – bop. I had never actually heard a bop recording by Davis before, having listened to anything prior to Kind of Blue. He does it well, I suppose, although even in 1949 he wasn’t playing by the rules.

As I understand it, Davis managed to get together a nonet, and Gil Evans to write arrangements. They set-out to do something, though I’m not sure what entirely. I do know that they wanted to smooth-out bebop a bit, and to introduce some of the more elaborate, carefully orchestrated arrangements and complex structures from both classical music and previous forms of swing, rather than the simple ‘verse-solo” sort of thing we saw a few albums back with Thelonious Monk. So, Davis had a deal to cut twelve sides with Capitol (these being pre-LP days), and used the opportunity to capture some recordings by his nonet. They were released to very little public interest or approval, and then seven years later when Davis’ star had risen they got a snappy reissue in LP format.

In terms of both historical importance and influence, this is a big deal as albums go. The title is a misnomer as this isn’t actually Cool Jazz, but it would go on to influence Cool Jazz. The more elaborate structuring, while still incorporating numerous solos, would lend itself to the development of the classical/jazz hybrid Third Stream, too (Davis’ own Sketches of Spain is a good example of this). Add to this that it was the first important role Davis played as leader, and his major recording (if I’m right) and you get a lot of reasons as to why someone should be interested. I mean, it’s not going too far to argue that Miles Davis is one of the most important figures in 20^th century music.

Having said all this, while the formal innovations of Birth of the Cool are interesting, and while it’s a pleasant listen and certainly a decent album by most criteria, this doesn’t do much for me. A treasure house of ideas it may be but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to it all the time. It’s nice. I especially like the sudden rising note two thirds of the way through “Moon Dreams’ that leads it away into what seems like another song entirely. But, in the end, I don’t care much for it. The songs are small and friendly and ultimately, just sort of... well, I don’t know. I can’t explain why I don’t much care for this. A lot of people seem to have similar reactions. I’ll put it on to listen to it. I like it. I just don’t love it.

Having said that, this is the sort of album that rewards repeated listens. It’s a good album for paying close attention to, and I can see myself loving it if I give it more time than the dictates of this blog allow. One exception to this, however, is the vocal number "Darn that Dream". It's atrocious. The singer is really quite awful. It makes me feel better about marking this down.

So, a mixed review! Still, as debuts go it's top stuff. Swings, too.

Actually, I changed my mind. It's great. I think the thing that throws you is that it's just sort of difficult to know exactly what to make of such a chimera. Anyway the potential click I was speaking of just happened. Get this! It grows on you.

8/10

Download: Miles Davis - Godchild Mp3

11. Sabu - Palo Congo (1957)

Tracks: El Cumbanchero//Billumba Palo Congo//Choferito Plena//Asabache//Simba//Rhapsodia del Maravilloso//Aggo Elegua//Tribilin Cantore

Review:

Voodoo! Freaky swampland shit! Witchdoctors crouched in the entrails of knackered goats chanting madly to evoke the gods of old Africa! Dead men hanging plague-addled from the trees as a yellow fire descends on the jungles of Haiti! The best rhythm section this side of Circadia swirling around itself like a Charley Chaplin drunk aching for a fight! New Yorker Sabu Martinez had played with some of the biggest names in Afro-Cuban music, and taken-over as conga player in Dizzy Gillespie’s band after Chanu Pazo got shot. This is the sound of a man at the fore-front of musical development in the mid-50s sitting down, looking around at the rock, jazz, and the Afro-Cuban up swell going on around him and thinking: “Where did it all come from?” And so he showed us.

Of course, that’s not strictly true. The stylistic innovations here are actually quite subtle and clever. Sabu Martinez has stripped Afro-Cuban-based music down to, well, Afro-Cuban folk music. And what’s the one core element of African music? The beat! There are drums, bass and guitar on this album, but the bass is largely unobtrusive, while the guitar is for the most part a snarling, distorted, chugging thing that sounds twenty years ahead of its time, standing grinning proudly right down in the guts of Latin rock. And when it’s clean, it forms spiralling arpeggios planted firmly mid-Atlantic. Over all this, everyone chants in a deeply syncopated style, with only the simplest melodies to be heard.

The genius of this is that Sabu then applies his virtuoso abilities in jazz percussion and his deep knowledge of Afro-Cuban music almost exclusively to the construction and deconstruction of grooves. This album is for the most part just one big, shifting mass of polyrhythm. This is, in a strange way, a jazz album (it was released on Blue Note, after all) – but with all the European elements stripped. And, from this primal framework, Sabu then proceeds to rather smart-arsedly cover Latin big band standard “El Cumbanchero”. It’s great! Going back to the start, and then working forward again with a fresh perspective. It probably helps that Martinez was recovering from a pretty bad heroin addiction at the time – this doesn’t sound like the work of a man in his right mind.

I should say, though, that even though this album is pretty marvellous (the guitar work, especially, is amazingly funky – it is god-damned funky!), not all the tracks are equal in their qualities. “El Cumbanchero” is pretty neat, benefiting from a catchy melody, but is a little thin and gets old quick. “Bilumba Palo Congo” is also just sort of... flaccid? Especially following the gruff, cackling vocal introduction that sets it up. It’s not bad, just not as good as the other songs on here. However, this speaks to wisdom on the part of whoever sequenced this – the other songs are all solid gold and as a consequence you grow more interested as the album progresses, rather than less so as is usual in a pop album with all the singles at the front.

I’ll also mention the production before I go. This album is mostly improvisational, and recorded live. This gives the entire thing a wonderfully echoed effect as the sounds bounce back from the walls of the recording space, which is magnified by the fact that the crowd, for some reason, sounds less like people than a distant, eerie wave jammed down in the back of the mix – another, bizarre component of the rhythm section.

And another thing – this album could not have worked in mono. It’s polyrhythm, man! Sabu and Co work absolute wonders by spacing the drums out across the two channels. It gives the grooves a very modern dimension and a whole other level of complexity. On the other hand, the intriguing production is kind of frustrating. You want to pump it on the stereo, but the complexity of the rhythms and the sheer sound of it kind of beg for headphones. In this way, I suppose this gives the album a nice extra layer of interest to keep you digging into what is, while fascinating, something of a one-trick pony.

So, yeah, this is great. Latin rock. African tribal chants. Proto-funk and Ur-trance. Even more laid-back forms of folk in the figure of “Rhapsodia del Maravilloso”, with its wonderful, sunny guitar work by Arsenio Rodriguez (see also: “Choferito Plena” for something a bit rougher). What more could you ask for? I will admit that I got my bongos out and tapped along – but damn it man, this is not an album to sit by and quietly nod at! The complexity of the thing is marvellous – the lack of any real central “One” beat means that there’s nothing – literally nothing – but syncopation and cross-rhythms. Thus, amazing grooves.

The album is also noteworthy, I suppose, in that it continues the fine tradition of naming jazz albums with elaborate puns. According to my research, “Palo” is a both a Cuban religion originating with the slaves, and a Spanish term meaning “type of music”. As a consequence, the album title “Palo Congo” means, if I’m not mistaken, both “Congo Style”, referring to both the Congo or sokous style of music and the place, and “Congolese Palo” in the religious sense. And add to this that “palo” also means “stick”! However, I should qualify all this with the fact that I don’t actually speak Spanish, and that at time of writing it is currently five in the morning and I have more coffee than blood in me.

So, damned fun. It’s just so unusual, especially for 1957. Bring on Tito Puente!

8/10

Download: Sabu Martinez - Choferito Plena Mp3

This is the last of the reviews written in the buffer period, so from this point forward things will be rolling day by day and in a perhaps somewhat more hallucinatory style.

10. Thelonius Monk – Brilliant Corners (1957)

Tracks: Brilliant Corners//Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues//Pannonica//I Surrender, Dear//Bemsha Swing

Review:

Ah! An excercise in contrasts! Rambling songs anchored by a single, atonal theme that is improvised on throughout the song. Sonny Rollins, Ernie Henry and Clark Terry on horn and Max Roach on drums. The madman with the hat and beard holds it all together with his demented, clanging pianos that would put Debussy’s teeth on edge. The first song contains a drum solo that sounds like a box full of pilates balls falling down a stairwell, clatters about the place like a room full of beetles and blowflies and then coalesces at the end into a simple but engaging groove. This one track took five takes to get right, and it still sounds like it’s about to fall apart at any moment. But Jesus! The cross-rhythms. There’s a drum kit and a bass there but it almost doesn’t matter – it SWINGS! It’s just the same section repeated half a dozen times at different speeds! It’s madness! Ornette Coleman was lurking just around the corner to take it all perhaps a little too far. Thurston Moore was clutched in is mother’s womb busily detuning his guitar. Bebop has arrived. This is it!

Well, no, Brilliant Corners didn’t invent bebop. I think maybe Charlie Parker did but I can’t remember. That’s pretty bad, that I can’t. Anyway it was about ten years old (though you wouldn’t know it, with all the swing on this list), and not really anything at all like this. This is hard-bop, whatever the hell that means. Anyway, stuff like “Brilliant Corners” is the reason I listen to music. Fifty years on, the track isn’t quite as immediately baffling as it once was. Now, it’s just sort of groovy. But dig in a little. Thelonious Monk was the first jazz artist I ever heard anything by. I listened to “Round Midnight” and “Straight, No Chaser” over and over again and tried with a complete lack of success to emulate the kind of complex rhythmical interplay present in his music. I couldn’t even play guitar – I couldn’t even tell if my guitar was in tune – and I was using Bitches Brew and Thelonious Monk as guiding lights of musical inspiration. I suppose, even at the start, I liked the weirder stuff. But still, a pretty stupid move.

You see, a lot of people listen to modern jazz and think “Ah! This is just noise! You can do whatever you want!” A lot of people read modern poetry and think the same thing. This leads to a lot of crap poetry, but thankfully playing jazz music requires a level of technical prowess which tends to vet a lot of enthusiastic but misguided amateurs. Hey! I’m not elitist. Beboppers were elitist. I say – if you can’t play jazz then grab a guitar and a copy of No Wave New York and see what happens.

I don’t pretend to understand “Brilliant Corners”. I understand “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues”. It’s a blues composition, thirteen minutes long, riding a simple, easy structure and taking time out for each of the players to drop a technically-dazzling solo in between recitations of the theme. It's a relatively straightforward track and it's smooth as silk. The other tracks are, for various and individual reasons, just plain weird . The harmonic systems are completely out of sync with convention. I don’t understand on a technical level – I never bothered to learn much harmonic theory beyond some very simple stuff necessary to crank-out rock music. The notes lock together less on direct, one-two connections between each other, like you’d get on a 12 bar blues or a simple solo in a scale, than on the general sense of overlap between notes. I guess if it makes sense to say this, rather than being based around a root note the scales and keys are based around a point of absence which numerous notes abut. OK, so I’ve just made anyone with even a basic understanding of Western tonality very, very angry, but who cares. To put it simply – it’s all out of tune and Thelonious Monk doesn’t really seem to care.

The point of all this is that Brilliant Corners is utterly ramshackle, but holds together beautifully as a cohesive, harmonically balanced album. Thelonious wasn’t as radical as some of his contemporaries – the man wrote pretty melodies and hewed to comprehensible bop structures. This isn’t Sun Ra. Actually, why is there no Sun Ra on this list? Or Ornette Coleman? The only “free” stuff, really, is a bit of Miles Davis in Bitches Brew, which isn’t actually free, and John Zorn’s Spy vs Spy, which is kind of a cheat in that it combines No Wave with Ornette Coleman covers and thus gets the organisers of this list out of having to put too many “avant garde” releases on here. I mean, Brilliant Corners is a brilliant album (how many reviews have said that? I warrant, too many, but perhaps not enough), yet at the same time it’s thoroughly accessible. I have nothing against accessible music – I almost never listen to Ornette Coleman myself; but I do think that either one of his early albums (Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation is both thoroughly accessible and massively important) or Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch would be very, very welcome additions Mr. 1001 Albums Big Cheese. Although I will grant that, never actually having read the book, they may in fact devote whole pages to singing the praises of Boredoms, the Contortions and, say, Alice Coltrane. And no, she’s not Free either.

Anyway. There’s nothing worse than a guy who doesn’t no what he’s talking about rambling about people not knowing what they’re talking about. Leave me alone! I’m sleep-deprived. It was this or a four thousand word essay on Feminism in 1950s middle-America that’s now worryingly overdue.

So, some of the other tracks? I wrote, only to have my computer crash, that “Bemsha Swing” shares more than a little in common with John Coltrane’s later “A Love Supreme” (or at least, I think so - it sounds damned like something I've heard before). The principal refrain, as well as the solos, all bear a suspicious resemblance. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – it just serves further to highlight how good this is. Coltrane borrowed one small element from a shambolic 7-minute masterpiece of stormy dynamic interplay and marvellous rhythmic sax soloing (how the hell does... Ernie Henry I think navigate that ever-shifting beat?) and turned it into one of the most purely beautiful songs ever produced. This album is a watershed – it’s an Aladdin’s cave to be returned to again and again.

“Pannonica”, in contrast to “Bemsha Swing”, is a gentle number with swaying horns spelling out a delicate, shifting melody, a swinging rhythm on the drum and bass and a celeste of all things chiming out eerie accents. The song itself is relatively comprehensible, but the unusual combination of instruments gives it an added element which is utterly otherworldly. It’s simultaneously demented and enchanting, which sums the album up I suppose. Except that I still haven’t mentioned the classically-tinged solo piano piece, “I Surrender, Dear”. Tom Waits once said that Thelonious Monk once said that there are no wrong notes – only how you resolve them. You can hear that above all in this piece – he surveys the rough landscape of the song, plots a straight line to his destination and then clambers erratically about over hills and mountains to the conclusion. Yes, Thelonious Monk invented Parcour.

It’s a strange, fragmentary, angular style that’s quite captivating in its complexity, leaving no dynamic stone unturned. But it’s melodious. He fills-out the bare bones of melodies, or assembles their rough approximations out of scattered nots. This is Modernism, baby! This is cubism of the keys.

The name, to wrap up, is a thus a great and obvious pun. Monk takes a sudden dazzling turn, at the same time as he presents nothing but sharp angles. This is pointy music. It doesn’t seem quite as much, maybe, to modern ears, but back in 1957 this was baffling stuff. The careful, mathematical precision Monk brings to his compositions and playing is brilliant

This is a must-hear album. This is the sort of thing that makes you do some serious thinking. Also, it is a fun time for dancing. People forget that – that you can dance to modern jazz. That was actually one of the major things that pissed-off the Old School (Melle Mel was furious). Well. It’s not called the “Bemsha Swing” for nothing. I can only assume that "Bemsha" means "Stoned Revenant", but anyway. If you'll excuse me, I have a soul train to catch.

*duck-walks away into the distance*

9.5/10

Download: Thelonious Monk - Bemsha Swing [mp3]

9. Count Basie Orchestra – The Atomic Mr. Basie (1957)

Tracks: The Kid from Red Bank//Duet//After Supper//Flight of the Foo Birds//Double-O//Teddy the Toad//Whirly-Bird//Midnite Blue//Splanky//Fantail//Li'l Darlin'

A violet-hot hydrogen bomb going thermal into the White Sands of your skull! Rattling the bones right out of your mouth to tap round the room with your erstwhile ego! If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions! Hang on, wait a minute – this isn’t be-bop. There are no hip neo-decadent Beats here. Why, it’s positively old-fashioned. Good lord, it’s SWING! Well, they don’t call it the Kansas City Stomp for nothing. Ever since I first read about Count Basie I always envisioned him as coming roaring out of the Mid-West like a steam train, thundering down into Harlem on the back of his band while the whole city started swinging to his piano. Animated cats were involved, and the Count had a red velvet cape and hair like Blacula. Of course, that’s not really an accurate description.

From what I gather, Basie toured hard and worked hard to get to the top, fighting his way up through Harlem clubs and gaining rep from a number of key gigs – such as his famous battle against Chick Webb the drumming dwarf that lasted all night and really lit his candle as a name to watch-out for. I don’t know much about the Count, as to be honest I’ve always preferred stuff post-bop. I do like Ellington, but as much because of his own compositions as because of the obvious debt owed to him by Charles Mingus, who is my absolute favourite band leader and the only one I know anything much about. But, from what I see here, I enjoy Basie quite a bit, and I might even dig into his catalogue.

Anyway, beside the point. Basie, like many others, suffered a massive career set-back after the war as the popularity of Big Band declined. Singers, now, were taking the stage. Guys like Frank Sinatra were putting the spot-light on the voice, whereas before the singer had just been another engaging element of any solid jazz ensemble. Basie wasn’t a composer, relying more on outside arrangers and freely-improvised “Head” compositions – tracks wherein the leader states a theme, and then the band grooves through it an elaborates basically on impulse. He played dance music, basically, and with the gradual death of live audiences for Swing there wasn’t much way for a live dance band, even a top-notch one, to survive. Ellington had composed pop and jazz standards and was able to survive off of them while in hibernation, but Basie didn’t have such a massive store of heavily licensed material to draw from given the freer approach he took to composition – although he made-up for this on an artistic level with a willingness to foster younger artists and with his dazzling instrumental technique.

So, as I understand it (as Wikipedia has given me to understand) his career took the up-and-up when he started to play to the times by attaching himself to big name singers. It makes sense – he’d had Billie Holiday as part of his live group back in the 40s, and a whole bunch of vocalists since. Then he got Neal Hefti in to do some arrangements (including this album), and things started going great-guns. He ended-up sliding out of life over the next few decades on the strength of his “Elder Statesman of Jazz” cache, as well as the generous tithes he received from his titled lands in Europe. After formally knighting Dizzie Gillespie at a sitting of Parliament in Birdland in late 1956, he declared himself accepting of bop and incorporated it into his music as a new and powerful weapon against the rise of rock-based voodoo cults. Unfortunately, he accidentally split the atom in the process – an event which led to the development of the first 100 megaton hydrogen warhead, thus escalating Cold War tensions to such a point that Eisenhower was forced to send Stalin every single poppy in Georgia as a way of apologising. Thankfully, this little-known but important historical incident can now be heard in hi-fidelity monophonic sound roughly 40 seconds into “Double-O” (Basie’s code name with the FBI). It is perhaps the first recorded instance of jazz fusion.

Or at least, so I’ve read.

So, what can you say about this album? Basie and his band swing hard. There’s a massive rhythm here – the bass is as high in the mix as it was ever likely to get in 1957. The drumming is phenomenal, although everything is strictly 4/4. Basie’s piano-playing is still rooted in pre-bop swing, and even quotes ragtime in the opening number, but he incorporates elements of bop everywhere – perhaps most obviously in the charming “Fantail”, but also in the dazzling displays of extremely rhythmic, hypnotic arpeggios that he brings out in “The Kid From Redbank”, for example. The band is huge and brassy and the riffs from the bank of horns are marvellous and enormous. And Basie’s roots in simple head compositions and free improvisation made him ideally suited for squaring himself with the bop crowd while still keeping to a swing format.

It’s not all big massive dance-floor anthems, however. The album is cannily structured like an actual concert, opening with perhaps the hardest, most foot-stomping number in “The Kid from Redbank”, and then dropping down into a few mellower, slow-dance and slove-jive numbers before mounting up into dizzying, but still (compared to the first track) relatively restrained “Flight of the Foo Birds”. And then “Double-O” hits, at first innocuous, but about a minute in it really does reach out and knock you right off your arse and on to the dance floor. This ebb and flow is maintained across the whole album, never less than danceable, closing out on the beautiful “Lil’ Darlin’”, which is utterly delicate and really rather lovely, with a gorgeous solo by someone whose name I can’t find. The album is full of great solos, actually, although none of them ever really grandstand and overwhelm the principle aim of the music, which is dancing. Dancing! Dancing! Dancing!

Put this album on anywhere and people will shake their arses off. It’s not a revolution in sound, but it does show both the roots of jazz, and the ways in which such jazz was moving forward and compromising at the time in a struggle to stay relevant in a world of radical formal innovation at a break-neck pace. So, at bottom it’s fun, it’s pretty, and it has a really apt cover. Hell, it manages to outswing Sinatra! And that guy loved swinging! He even named an album after it.

The downside of all this is, I suppose, that the tracks tend to all blend together. But then, isn’t that how you want it to be at a party? This is the same problem that faces Sinatra’s albums, I suppose – cohesive mood over the immediacy of individual tracks. It’s a problem common to a lot of Jazz, actually – not being pop music, it can often invest more interest in the playing than the composition. It’s a classic reason why a lot of people have a problem with bop, and would lead to massive divides in jazz listening public. But damn it, it works! The individual tracks are all nicely done in their own right. It’s just that individual segments within tracks hit harder than the songs themselves, thus lending I suppose to the feel of this as very much a “concert” performance. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I should be sitting down and listening carefully to, although it’s well-played and composed enough to warrant the attention given.

Speaking of details, I’ll just close-out on the production. This is one of the best-sounding records so far. The rhythm section is warm and thick but you can pick-out every detail. The horns come crashing over like waves. Ted Reig’s done a great job of capturing a joyous and beautiful recording.

I was really quite pleasantly surprised by this. I’ve never been a huge fan of Swing, or even, if we’re honest, of the other Basie stuff I’d heard. Here, however, he’s won me over. You may not remember much of it when you turn it off, but while your listening? It’s fun!

8/10

Download: Count Basie Orchestra - The Kid from Red Bank.mp3
Download: Count Basie Orchestra - Li'l Darlin'.mp3

8. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - The Chirping Crickets (1956)

Tracks: Oh Boy!//Not Fade Away//You've Got Love//Maybe Baby//It's Too Late//Tell Me How//That'll Be the Day//I'm Lookin' for Someone to Love//An Empty Cup (and a Broken Date)//Send Me Some Lovin'//Last Night//Rock Me My Baby

Well, as Police Chief Klein once said regarding the Ramones, "They're ugly, ugly people".

I should be honest and admit that I don’t think any rock album at this point is going to get full marks. The genre was still in its relative infancy! Furthermore, most rock albums at the time were just quickly-assembled packages of recent singles with b-sides and album cuts. Add to this the fact that bare-bones rock & roll has never exactly been my favourite genre, and you can see why I might not exactly go nuts over this stuff.

The “Chirping” Crickets does, however, present us with quite a lot worth going nuts over. Buddy Holly’s influence on the nature of rock is difficult to overstate. The only guy of comparable importance is Chuck Berry, and while the two guys do share a lot in common in terms of music (with Berry obviously having influenced Holly quite a bit), they’re still very different beasts. You listen to songs on this album and you can point and say – yes, this song invented The Beatles. Yes, the verses on “Rock Me Baby” more or less invented the Rolling Stones. Buddy Holly and the Crickets are like a framework onto which later acts have all laid their influences to create the wacky madness that is modern rock.

Having said that, it’s worth noting that Holly and Co clearly aren’t cooking this stuff up ex nihilo. The vocals on the rockers have a lot in common with early Elvis. “Not Fade Away” uses the Bo Diddley beat, and even cops the melody of his hit “Bo Diddley” for the vocal. “That’ll Be the Day”, probably the most famous song here, is in most respects just a swipe of Chuck Berry’s “Automobile”. However, Holly and the Crickets make it their own – they cut the blues groove out almost entirely and focus on the country and pop elements, turning it into a jerky rockabilly number which is in itself not really quite like anything else – there’s a nice little breakdown on guitar, and Holly’s vocals are very nicely done. At this point in rock music, these were big innovations - it was all about mixing shit together. Things went along slowly. Also, did you know that Holly was apparently inspired to write “That’ll Be the Day” by John Wayne’s catchphrase in the Searchers? Is it true? Who knows? Anyway, back to the music. “Not Fade Away” has great “boop bop bop” backing vocals and some nice chicken-pecking guitar work, and strips the skuzzy blues element out, once again, for a far more country-pop feel. Add to this the fact that Holly’s in fine voice throughout, and it’s a great song. The sense of rhythm these guys display is marvellous. They stirring all the harder guitar elements up with a wonderful fats Domino smoothness, and it’s great.

To focus more on the country element, however. Holly started-out singing bluegrass. Harmony is everywhere on this album – all though the “Chirping” Crickets never actually sing, every single song features the backing vocals of all-male group The Picks, who manage to sound entirely like women. “Tell Me How” is basically just a country song. The best rocker here is rockabilly, in the form of the amazing “Oh Boy”. Holly wrote many of the songs here, but not this one. Its hooks are amazing, and it’s the hardest thing on the list to this point. I’m constantly impressed with the amount of stuff that these bands managed to do with a simple 12-bar blues. It doesn’t hit as hard as a Little Richard number but it’s just as strong as a lot of his work in pop terms – almost all the force comes from the singing and the simple pound of the drums, but Jesus Christ! Holly growls and squeaks his way through the thing, riding on the drawn-out notes of the Picks and their doubling vocals. It manages to work gospel, country, blues and R&B into one song and I’ve had it stuck in my head for three days as of writing. And the lyrics! “All my life I’ve been waiting – tonight there’ll be no hesitating. When you’re with me, oh boy, then you’ll see that we were meant to be”. It’s some cheeky shit, I will grant, and a classic of the admittedly somewhat narrow-minded “Blue balls” school of rock. But hey! This is music for teenagers. Teenagers are horny devils. Replace “teenagers” with “people” and you have the vast majority of art, anyway. The difference is, the older tradition had been to play coy, whereas rock seems to have decided it might be better to simply go out grinning with prick held high.

Another great number is the more R&B “Maybe Baby”, with one of the coolest opening riffs going and a marvellous, hiccupy refrain. Holly did write this one, and it’s great. The guitar on the bridge is nothing but rattling madness. It’s followed by a ballad, “It’s Too Late”, which is a great crooning pop number. My favourite part is when Holly steps back from the mike to belt out the choruses and his voice develops a massive echo due to the added difference. After this is “Tell Me How”, a nice little pop ditty with lots of nonsense “la la la” singing from the Picks in the absolutely wonderful intro. The backing vocals are the catchiest thing here! La la la! And then the cymbal comes in on the bridge! Ah, it’s all wonderful and clops along beautifully. Holly’s vocal delivery here is marvellous, although the melody is suspiciously similar (although nowhere near as good as) “Peggy Sue”. His most obvious comparison here is to Roy Orbison (fair enough, as he co-wrote one of the songs here with him). It’s one of the weaker numbers here, but the vocal delivery and the amazing intro save it. This is a fine song, owing more to pop than anything,.

And that’s what really makes the album work, that it’s a pop album. Care is taken in the actual construction of most these songs – they have the nifty little introduction, an interesting middle 8 (check the dazzling little slithery guitar in “Looking For Someone to Love”). And the whole song is anchored by a catchy hook, and then a nice little finish. Most of these songs don’t even have a verse/chorus structure – it’s just a single repeating verse pattern and nothing but hook. Ah, it’s pop in essence and really quite wonderful. This stuff would be as influential on Phil Spector as it would on the Beatles or the Stones. The fact that these are rock songs being written by professional song-writers with long backgrounds in pop, who half the time are coming from outside the genre, are a great strength.

Having said that, there are one or two duds. Or at least, songs that aren’t as good as the more up-tempo stuff. “I’m Looking For Someone to Love” is better than half the rockers on Elvis’s debut, for example, but is still just a rather by-the-numbers piece of swing. “An Empty Cup (And A Broken Date)” is about as good as its title, which is to say “not very”. It’s just a rather ordinary ballad with a terrible backing vocal by the Picks. “Send Me Some Lovin’” is a bit better, but still not anything to write home about, although it does have a nice build in the middle. And unfortunately, all this means that the album starts to falter a bit on the second half. But then!

“Last Night” has a great, great hook, with Holly’s classiest vocal performance. It’s unquestionably the best ballad on the album, bobbing along over a “bum bum bum” vocal riff from the Picks and a simple four-note bass line. It’s beautiful. It’s delicate. I love this song. Quite strummed guitars! Ah, now this is a lovely pop song. The Picks unfortunately step-up to a lead vocal for the outro, but other than that it’s great.

The very last song, “Rock Me My Baby”, is half great and half just okay. The verses are god damned groovy. Unfortunately, the choruses are just sort of tedious Bill Haley fair. It even references Bill Haley in the lyrics! It’s not a bad way to close an album, I suppose, and it’s not a bad song. The all-over-the-place nature, combined with the fact that they actually manage to hold such a schizophrenic song together, lends it a lot of charm.

So, all in all not a bad album at all. There are a couple of shaky moments, but this is a fine, fine piece of work. Damn near everything from Fats Domino to Howlin’ Wolf Judy Garland finds its way into the album somehow, but it doesn’t sound disparate at all and as a consequence you don’t just have a bunch of different styles here – you have a genre! Early-60s rock is born! Bring on the Ronettes. Well, no, really they owe more to Fats Domino than anything. And to be fair the Beach Boys were ripping-off Chuck Berry songs, but anyway. It’s funny how the far more abrasive Berry ended-up influencing the Beach Boys.

This album is a fascinating testament to the varied people making it, and to their deep and differing life experiences. It’s a shame that Holly would die the following year, as he was both a fine, fine performer and an excellent songwriter in his own right. The number of ideas on display here are captivating, and the hooks! Such hooks!

Not a perfect album, but a really damned good one.

8.5/10

Download: Buddy Holly & the Crickets - Oh Boy.mp3
Download: Buddy Holly & the Crickets - Maybe Baby.mp3

7. Frank Sinatra - Songs for Swingin' Lovers (1956)

Tracks: You Make Me Feel So Young//It Happened in Monterey//You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me//You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me//Too Marvelous For Words//Old Devil Moon//Pennies from Heaven//Love is Here to Stay//I've Got You Under My Skin//I Thought About You//We'll Be Together Again//Makin' Whoopee//Swingin' Down the Lane//Anything Goes//How About You?

It’s something of a cliché, but tough guys do tend to be sentimental buggers. I suppose Sinatra epitomises this – he cast himself as something of a stand-offish loner, and as a consequence most of his songs were about broken hearts. It’s a perfect marketing move, of course. What’s more likely to appeal to the chicks than a rebel with a heart of gold?

And Sinatra certainly appealed to the chicks. Back in the 40s he was on top of his game as one of the first honest to goodness teen pop idols. Girls went wild for him! It was really rather unprecedented, and it made his name, but at the same time any career built around youth and sex appeal has a rather limited lifespan. So, as the Fifties loomed and Sinatra got older, his popularity began to wain. He left the stage in ’48, and returned in 1950 only to suffer a devastating haemorrhaging of the throat while performing live at the Copacabana. By 1952, his career was in tatters and Columbia had dropped him. It looked like the end.

Of course, it wasn’t. In 1955 Sinatra (“allegedly”) used his Mob connections to get the career-saving role in From Here to Eternity. He won an Oscar, he got onboard with Capitol, and he went back to being a superstar, recording some of the best albums of his career or anybody’s. Sensibly, however, he chose to revamp his persona, aiming at a more mature market with albums alternating between dark, introspective balladeering (see: In the Wee Small Hours; also the excellent Where Are You?, which shakes things up due to the switch to arranger Gordon Jenkins, who offers a slightly peppier and considerably lusher, more orchestral take on the ballad format), and up-beat swing albums like this.

Following In the Wee Small Hours with Songs for Swingin’ Lovers must constitute one of the most powerful one-two punches in the history of pop. The familiarity of both the material on this album and the innovative methods of arrangement that Riddle applied mean that some of the shine has worn-off, but you can’t really argue with the slinky woodwinds opening “I Thought About You”, or the steady build of “Anything Goes” from a slightly flaccid start as strings and horns pile up on one another into a single, monumental groove. This is actually an example of one of the most impressive aspects of this album. Everything grooves just fine, anchored by a strong rhythm section, but nothing about the beat is restrictive. Violins and horns swirl around each other and then descend on the drums for a particularly swinging section. Frank’s voice floats above it all with quiet assuredness. He manages to tighten the somewhat formless opening of “It Happened at Monterey” into something wonderful and sweeping by its end.

Managing to loosen-up and expand the sound of so many classic pop numbers, most of which were written originally for little more than a piano or a small jazz combo, is quite astonishing. And the jazz element is very strong here, despite this being a pop album dominated by strings. “We’ll Be Together Again” is a relatively subdued ballad, closing out on some brief, beautiful saxophone soloing, for example. And what can you say about “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”? The most famous recording here, it’s lighter than air at first, and then blooms into a big, brassy instrumental passage and some high, airy crooning from Frank. His phrasing is astonishing. He fits perfectly into the delicately constructed groove of the song, riding the changes effortlessly and never once overextending himself. His phrasing on the opening of “I Thought About You” kills me, and the refrain on “Swinging Down the Lane” is wonderfully infectious.

This is a difficult album to say anything new about. All the songs are at worst quite solid. The only real complaints I could make are that it’s perhaps a little lacking in variety (strings back everything, the same ensemble, it's all played recorded live in studio so there's no change in production), and consequently sounds overlong. This wouldn’t have been much a problem if I had to get up and change the sides over halfway through a party, but listening to it through on headphones the problem becomes apparent.

This is nitpicking, though. Apparently Sinatra once said about one of these Capitol records that the general idea was to put side one on at dinner with a partner, and by the end of side two you’d be right where you wanted to be. Given that this closes-out on “Anything Goes” and “How About You?”, that seems fair. Most of the songs are top-notch choices, but a few of them are just cheap sentiment. Sinatra transcends all this to create one hell of an aphrodisiac. There’s none of the gut-wrenching emotion of the In the Wee Small Hours, but would you really want to listen to anything that can be described as “gut-wrenching” during a nice evening alone in bed with your lover? Sinatra’s voice and Riddle’s truly beautiful music combine to systematically seduce the listener with wistful, silly little songs of loving. This is one of the other clear advantages of the 12” that Sinatra’s seized at – you can’t really make-out for any length of time to a 45, can you? Every aspect of anxiety and longing is covered in this collection, all enough to soothe anxious nerves and get you in the mood. One particular recurring lyrical theme is the idea of missing a great chance – it’s kind of coercive, maybe, but it works.

Of course, if there’s one complaint it’s the same that can be levelled at In the Wee Small Hours – even more so, actually. Namely, the music is quite stirring but it doesn’t always exactly demand attention. To Sinatra and Riddle’s credit, however, there is no filler. This is great stuff. The level of compositional complexity and excellence is something I really miss about a lot of older pop music. And it was innovative, too! Name a crooner who doesn't owe something to this? This sort of stuff has been around for so long that it’s very easy to forget that it was once new.

So, yeah, this is a pretty good album, though maybe not quite his best, if only because history has blunted its impact through overplaying and rip-offs.

8/10

Download: Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin.mp3