The 1001 Album Challenge

58. The Beatles - Rubber Soul (1965)

2009-12-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

Track List: Drive My Car // Norwegian Wood //You Won't See Me //Nowhere Man // Think For Yourself // The Word // Michelle // What Goes On // Girl // I'm Looking Through You // In My Life // Wait // If I Needed Someone // Run For Your Life

The first in a long run of landmarks. The Beatles! The Who! The Byrds! It's going to be a big couple of days here at the blog.

After a few false-starts and a lot of good singles, the Beatles finally come into their own as album artists. Everything about this record, from the production to the song-writing and the inventive instrumentation (acoustic guitars, sitars, and even a box of matches), is a step-up not just for the band but for the rock genre in general. Of course, all this means is that rock and roll is no longer quite so far behind pop as it once was, but that's really just praising with faint damnation. This is impressive stuff!

I mean, just look at the artwork - the four boys, no longer quite so nice-looking, and with their features all twisted and weird against a forest backdrop. The new album is slightly mellow, slightly folky, and more than a little weird - and the cover captures all of this perfectly. From the unspeakably pretty "Norwegian Wood"(which helped introduce the sitar into Western pop), to "Nowhere Man" - the first non-lovesong the Beatles wrote, and one of their most depressing - and the pretty little wedding favourite "In My Life", there's a lot of great stuff here.

Of course, it isn't all good - it's a rare Beatles album that doesn't have at least one stinker on it, and this time out we have a couple of doozies. "What Goes On", anyone? Unbearable, tuneless country. "Oh, but that's a Ringo song," I hear you say. "It doesn't count". Well then, how about the admittedly more tuneful misogyny of Lennon's "Run Fer Yer Life"? It'd be a great song, if not for John's threatening to murder his girlfriend if she even so much as thinks of leaving him.

Is this a masterpiece? No! But it is a landmark in pop music, and a very nice listen (even if it does reek entirely too much of pot). And (thank God) things only get better from here.

B+

54. B.B. King - Live at the Regal (196

2009-08-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Traxx:

1. Every Day I Have the Blues 2. Sweet Little Angel 3. It's My Own Fault 4. How Blue Can You Get 5. Please Love Me 6. You Upset Me Baby. 7. Worry, Worry 8. Woke Up This Morning (My Baby's Gone) 9. You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now 10. Help the Poor

Review:

Right. I've got to go into town to return a library book and get my phone fixed, so let's keep this quick. I think the last blues album we had here, Muddy Water Live at Newport, was something that I found initially off-putting but quickly grew to love. B.B. King, on the other hand, is a fellow I found myself liking immediately. He has a great conversational style, taking-on a sort of "Wise old man" approach cross-bred with the Lonely Lady, and doling out a whole lot of (usually sound) relationship advice. He's also a pretty funny guy, in that understated way I always associate with Johnny Cash. And he has lines like "If your woman doesn't do exactly what you ask, don't you go hitting her upside the head - because all that'll do is make her a little smarter; she won't let you catch her next time". Which I found funny. Haha.

Anyway, B.B. King is not just a funny and likable guy, he is (or was -no, is. Holy shit, how is this guy still alive and performing? Forget Robert Johnson, it's obvious that B.B. King's the one who sold his soul) a great musician. He has a remarkably versatile voice, wandering from deep rumbling to smooth crooning and that sort of high, whining style I associate with the Delta. And he is an absolutely amazing guitar player. Unfortunately, he doesn't really let rip on most of these songs, preferring to leave things to his more-than-capable backing band, but wow! When that guy plays a guitar, it stays played. Maybe this is what happens when you rescue a guitar from a fire and then name it Lucille. Is that the secret to great blues playing? I do not know.

Anyway, not only are King and his band firing on all cylinders, the material is damned solid, too. There's everything from straight-up blues to a weird sort of Latin dance number in "Help the Poor". And "How Blue Can You Get", in while King points-out the foibles of a perpetually dissatisfied lover, is just hilarious. It's a spectrum, really.

So, this is a very good album but I'm not going to elaborate upon it because damn it I have to get to the shop.

A

And now, in wonderful static monochrome!

53. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (1965)

2009-07-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Part 1: Acknowledgement // Part 2: Resolution // Part 3: Pursuance // Part 4: Psalm

Review:

I'm coming to this album again for the first time in a long while, now imbued with the perspective that comes from having slogged up through the foothills of this list. It's interesting, having a slightly (albeit, only slightly) expanded knowledge of jazz, to listen through A Love Supreme and appreciate the ways in which Coltrane and his band have pulled-apart bop structures and then reassembled them into something loose and free and very, very beautiful. Kind of Blue was extremely free in its improvising, but the tracks on that album still seemed to hew to the notion of introducing a theme, playing it a few times, and then suddenly wandering off on a free and abstract (albeit, very pretty) jam. Conversely, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady displayed an awe-inspiring degree of compositional acumen, effectively rewriting the rules of jazz from the ground up.

On A Love Supreme, however, Coltrane seems to have found a balance between the beauty that comes from improvisation and the beauty that comes from adherence to traditional forms, and has hit upon a way of mixing bop with free jazz that is extremely loose and lyrical, and at times rather wild, but which also maintains a great deal of coherency, and progresses logically from album opener to close as though it were one single track (which, I suppose, is a fairly valid way of looking at it). The result is an album which is both highly experimental, and immediately accessible - a gorgeous, swirling mass of cymbals and saxophones anchored by Latin dance rhythms and woven-through with unusual-yet-catchy melodies. It's like watching the waves churn-up foam from the ocean on a cloudy day.

I will admit that there are bits of this album that I don't really like - specifically, the middle section, where the horns and piano die down in favour of some improvisation by the drums and bass. Now bear in mind, I have nothing against drums and bass - I just don't think the solos are all that great. Then again, it does break-up the album, providing some interesting sonic contrasts, and paves the way for the absolutely beautiful "Psalm" to finish with. The tones conjured-up on this album really are gorgeous - it's amazing to think what they acheived with a more-or-less live recording in 1964. It sounds like nothing else on Earth.

I don't adore A Love Supreme (which is odd, because by all rights I should) but at the same time I can't find much to fault it for. It's beautiful, spiritual music that manages to be just abstract enough to be moving, without ever giving-up the rhythms and melodies that make a person listen in the first place. I think this is a classic example of one of those albums where, even if you hate it with every fiber of your being, you will still be a better person for having listened to it (the Ulysses of jazz albums, maybe?). I'm very, very glad that it exists, even if I don't listen to it more. Maybe I should play it more often, and then I'd finally love it as much as every other person on the planet happens to.

Anyway I like it. It's a very pretty sound.

A+

52. The Beach Boys – The Beach Boys Today! (1965)

2009-07-30T01:34:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Do You Wanna Dance // Good to My Baby // Don’t Hurt My Little Sister // When I Grow Up (To Be A Man) // Help Me, Rhonda // Dance, Dance, Dance // Please Let Me Wonder // I’m So Young // Kiss Me Baby // She Knows Me Too Well // In the Back of My Mind // Bull Session with “Big Daddy” // The Girl from New York City

Review:

I like the Beach Boys! And why? Because they were a very good band. They had delightful harmonies, they had oddly-structured melodies, and they weren’t afraid (at least, under the management of Brain Wilson) to throw rock to the wind in favour of big, strange, all-encompassing pop. On this album, they start to move on from Chuck Berry-derived rock & roll and into the realm of Phil Spector, Les Baxter, Burt Bacharach and Bachman Turner Overdrive. Well, maybe not that last one.

I am biased in my fondness for the Beach Boys, in that they were in certain ways the soundtrack to my life. I suppose they are an omnipresence in the Western musical world, but that doesn’t change the deep personal resonance attendant upon listening to my granddad sing “Barbara Ann” to my sister while setting her on his knee. Nor can in tarnish the memory of solving year five maths problems to the sounds of “Surfin’ USA”, punctuated at regular intervals by the intonations of the voice actor declaring the sums and how long we had in which to get them right. And looking about at the current Indiescape, with its ten thousand bands all desperate to resurrect Surf’s Up, one can only feel a sense of vindication coupled with a deep and penetrating weariness. Move on, you jerks! I want it all for myself. I own “Wind Chimes” to the depths of my jealous heart.

Putting this aside, this is quite a good record. “Help Me, Rhonda” is very beautiful. The first half of the album boasts up-beat pop numbers, all of them extremely enjoyable, while the second half veers into nostalgic melancholia that would come to define the best of the band’s later work. If I am correct (and I’m probably not) this is the album where Brian Wilson locked himself away in the studio and decided he’d tour no more. Even if this wasn’t actually the album where he did it, such was a bold and well-chosen move that would send deep quivers down the spine of the pop-sonic landscape.

If I wanted to say something beyond the vague ululations of reminiscence, then I would declare that “Do You Wanna Dance” is a kick-ass bit for dancing, what with the explosion of the chorus*; that “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)” asks some hard questions and has some soft melodies; that “Dance, Dance, Dance” has a kick-ass riff and a nice descending melody; that “Please Let Me Wonder” is so delicate and pretty as to be heart-breaking; that the same goes doubly so for “Kiss Me Baby”, which is almost painfully beautiful; and that “She Knows Me Too Well” basically invented the 1970s (ABBA, the Carpenters, Chicago... ain’t nothin’ wrong with that).

It’s not Pet Sounds, but then what is? What this is is very, very good.

A golden victory for squares in the realm of pop.

8.5/10

*the Ramones did it better.

51. Otis Redding - Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul

2009-06-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Ole Man Trouble // Respect // Change Gonna Come // Down in the Valley // I've Been Loving You Too Long // Shake // My Girl // Wonderful World // Rock Me Baby // Satisfaction // You Don't Miss Your Water

Analysis:

I must ask myself the following question – What does Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul mean to me? It’s no good blathering on endlessly about formal developments that could easily be pinpointed by a visit to Wikipedia. Rather ask – do I like this album? And the answer is yes. Do I love it? No, maybe not. And here I must show my work.

Otis Redding presents probably the most mature, fully-developed soul album yet enlisted. His unique and influential voice – woody and raw, yet capable of great emotional expressiveness and feats of technical daring – is contrasted with impeccably played and produced Stax-brand™ Memphis soul to give the world something peculiar in the realm of pop music. There is little doubt that this is pop music, you see – and it is infectious pop music at that. Redding, Isaac Hayes and Booker T. & the MGs combine forces like some sort of soul-powered Voltron to lend the magical, horn-laden, bronze-coloured touch to such songs as “My Girl”, “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “A Change is Gonna Come”. In the case of “My Girl”, they even manage to better one of my absolute favourite songs! And then they switch around, take the ferocious rock of the Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, and turn it into a wailing, lunatic soul-stomp extravaganza. And then they do straight-up blues on “Rock Me, Baby!”. There really are a lot of covers on this album, but they’re all quite successful, so it’s not something to complain about. And, as opposed to what was the case with all of those Beatles and Stones albums, here the covers selections are well-chosen and used purely to augment a selection of equally brilliant originals – including the very first version of “Respect”! Granted, the Aretha Franklin version is better, but most things come-up short in such comparisons.

The interplay of a host of different elements is really what makes this album work. I think someone described this album as a “dictionary of soul”, and you really couldn’t come-up with a better term for it than that. Every song on the album is unique in style, and yet, everything comes-out sounding like Otis Redding. Of course, a great deal of credit for the success of this album rests with the band, but Redding’s voice is another key element in the album’s success. It’s not really the sort of voice I’d tend to favour – a sort of wild, raving voice that tends to wander off into gospel-esque, lunatic frothings and manic-depressive asides – but when buried in amidst the rock-solid playing of the MG.s it creates the perfect contrast. This is the sort of thing Al Green would do very well in the 1970s, playing his strange little voice off against these immaculately-assembled backing tracks. Add to this the fact that Otis Redding is, unlike someone like Mariah Carey, actually credible as a performer as well as a technician and, well, it’s enough to convert even this finicky old grouch (I am actually only 23). Granted, it gets a bit much when he starts rambling about biology in “Wonderful World”, but what are you gonna do?

To many people, this is the greatest soul album of the 1960s, if not of all time. I don’t know if I agree with that assessment, but then I’m hardly qualified to judge. It’s certainly brilliant, however – not a bad track on it, all performed wonderfully. A unique sound that proved influential on generation after generation of recording artists... Fun party jams like “Down in the Valley” following the mournful introspection of “A Change is Gonna Come”, and not a seam showing... What more could you ask from in an album? Well, maybe the ranting on “You Don’t Miss Your Water” could go – because damned if that isn’t just embarrassing. Oh, also this album does not contain a single song as good as “Having a Party” or “Lost Someone”. There, I said it.

A word on formats, however – This is available in a 2 CD set featuring mono and stereo mixes. Unlike The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, which sounds great in stereo and terrible in mono, or Pet Sounds, which sounds amazing in both, this is very much an album that should be heard in monophonic presentation. I’m sure someone could make a decent stereo mix out of this, but that someone apparently isn’t the Rhino Entertainment Company.

9/10

Download:

Otis Redding - My Girl

Bob Dylan – Bringin It All Back Home (1965)

2009-06-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Subterranean Homesick Blues // She Belongs to Me // Maggie's Farm // Love Minus Zero/No Limit // Outlaw Blues // On the Road Again // Bob Dylan's 115th Dream // Mr. Tambourine Man // Gates of Eden // It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) // It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Analysis:

Another side of Bob Dylan, with the man this time trading-in his folksy raconteur persona for equal parts rock-freak and philosophical balladeer. Since these two qualities were given a side each on the old vinyl, I might as well discuss the whole affair in two parts.

Side A:

The album opens with “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, which is just a great song – a weird, surrealistic torrent of 1960s fringe-culture wrapped around a pounding blues-rock beat that just EXPLODES from the speakers like something in the process of exploding. Skipping-out on conscription; brewing-up acid in the basement; shady dealings in back streets; living in clapped-out tenements; hippy jerks. It’s just such a cool song, really, encapsulating most of what people think they know about the 1960s in America, while at the same time being cynical enough about it to avoid falling into a Ginsbergian transcendentalist bullshit-fest. Makes sense that the Weathermen would swipe a line from it.

The cynicism of the opening song carries through the album, and it’s probably the most appealing thing about it. A lot of people take this as the album where Bob Dylan gets well-and-truly fed-up with all the god damned hippies and the counterculture movement in general and just said “Damn it man I’s a-gonna do my own thing”. And really, in makes sense. “Maggie’s Farm” has Dylan quipping that he “ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”, and delivering the rather pointed observation that

Well I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them.
They say “sing while you slave,” and I just get bored;
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”.

It’s a pretty good touchstone for anyone who’s ever gotten fed-up with the sort of bullshit, pseudo-intellectual, quasi-political nonsense which infests any gathering of bright young things seeking legitimacy for their anti-establishment railings.

This “Fuck off and leave me alone” vibe carries pretty well in “Outlaw Blues”, which is a fun song but not much of anything to go on about beyond it’s being pretty rocking. Although it does have the great line “Don’t ask me nothing about nothing – I might just tell you the truth”. Oh, and Dylan talks about wishing that he were somewhere on an Australian mountain range, which is something that I feel obligated to mention out of feelings of misplaced patriotism. He doesn’t seem to enthusiastic about the prospect, though, so eh. Anyway, this leads into “On the Road Again”, in which Dylan delineates the various reasons why living in this one place sucks, and why on Earth he should ever desire to stay there, finishing up with the question “You ask me why I don’t live here? I oughta ask why you don’t move!”. It may be a metaphor. And then the side ends-out on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, which is just a silly song about a silly story, and I don’t really care about it all that much.

Anyway, so side one seems both pretty rocking and pretty mocking, right? Well, I think I said something about Dylan being a burnt romantic, and you get this coming through in the two songs I hadn’t dealt with yet – “She Belongs to Me”, and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. These are both very pretty and very delicate love songs which could be pin-pointed as the exact point of origin for every ballad that Tom Waits ever did. In contrast to his rather bitter and isolationist views on politics and such, Dylan still seems quite happy to play the complicated and confusing games of love. I suppose any port in a storm.

Having gotten Side A out of the way, let’s focus on the good stuff

SIGHED BEE

Where the first half of the album is effectively Dylan just playing about with everything-at-the-wall rock music, the songs on side two are something completely new. Delicate folk-inspired music presumably put-in as a consolation prize for his pre-electric fans, this is four songs all over five minutes long, playing with abstract poetical concepts in a way which hadn’t really been done before. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is absolutely beautiful. His voice is beautiful, the guitars strum in these little, hypnotic ways, and the lyrics really are poetry. It’s really just the narrator reflecting on the act of reflection, yearning for some sort of beautiful place outside of anything. It’s probably about drugs, then maybe it’s not.

Then you have “The Gates of Eden”, which, if I were in a symbolical mood, I would argue was a strange rumination on the loss of the American Dream. Then again, that seems to cover 90% of American art, so who knows? I do know that it has an incredible melody, with the vocals climbing up the scale and then dropping down seven semitones and a whole scale (if I’m correct) for a marvellous effect. It’s neat.

Also neat is the opening riff on “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, which is a somewhat terrifying song where Bob Dylan does that thing where he stretches-out the verses for as long as possible, a few bars longer each line, with no real harmonic variation except perhaps for a slight slide up by a semitone or somesuch, before breaking into the hook, and then taking forever to finally get into the chorus, which is a very small and simple “It’s alright ma, I’m only etc...”. It may be apparent at this point that I have trouble explaining the theoretical concepts of music. Which doesn’t matter, because this is a frightening song. The whole thing is underpinned by a bouncy, shuffling sort of rhythm. It’s fascinating, what Dylan does vocally on this track, singing everything behind the beat on the verses and then shifting into a smoother style for the bridge and chorus. Structurally, it’s a marvel. Oh, and lyrically it’s good too, railing against the impossible unpleasantness of modern life, all the hypocrisy and such at present, in a very fiery and worrisome manner. It’s a masterpiece on all levels.

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Chipper!

And then the album ends with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, which is both a much softer song, and a similarly depressing one, this time kind of a break-up song I guess. I suppose it helps to ease the listener out gently, rather than having “It’s Alright Ma” drive them to suicide. After all, if everyone who listened to the album were dead, then how would it get good press by word-of-mouth. Still, it’s sad.

So, a pretty neat album. The first half is quite good, but not necessarily brilliant, while the second half is maybe the most consistently excellent thing Dylan ever did. I liked it! I didn’t at first, but then I did, and there you have it.

So should I bother rating this? What's the point to ratings? The point is that it makes me feel like I've pinned this album and can finally move on with my life.

It's a 9.5/10

Download"

The Gates of Eden.

49. The Sonics - Here Are The Sonics (1965)

2009-04-28T23:12:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Witch // Do You Love Me? // Roll Over Beethoven // Boss Hoss // Dirty Robber // Have Love, Will Travel // Psycho // Money // Walkin' The Dog // Night Time Is the Right Time // Strychnine // Good Golly, Miss Molly

Review:

Well this album is loud. I mean, really loud. Elephant stampedes, air raid sirens and atomic bombs are called to mind. Seriously, parts of this album would leave Guitar Wolf clutching their (his?) ears and moaning; I can only imagine the impact it made in Seattle in 1965. And of course I mean this all in the best possible way. The Sonics play 50s-style rock with a 1970s-style punk mindset, and the result is an album which is almost as hard, groovy and insane now as it must have been back in 1965. The singer can't sing, the band can't really play their instruments, and as a result everything the group has is thrown into a Neanderthal rhythm section and the ability to be as loud, dirty and wild as possible. And did I mention loud? These guys were really loud. L-O-U-D. Louuuuuuudddddddddddddddd

d.

The music itself is mostly just a mix of 1950s standards in the Chuck Berry/Little Richard mode, but it's all elevated to the next level by putting all the emphasis on groove. The version of "Do You Love Me" include here, for example, is the most infectiously propulsive thing on the list up to this point. I can't not dance to it. The version of "Money" is better than the Beatles', and the version of "Walking the Dog" leaves the Stones so far behind it's not even funny. And while the material is mostly shop-worn, the band throw-in a couple of original compositions which are easily the best things on the album. "The Witch" is a bizarre song about, well, a witch and the inadvisability of trying to make it with her, and it has this great stop-start rhythm that goes "BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM!

COZ SHE'S A WITCH!"

Seriously it's like Louis Prima meets the Stooges.

In addition to this you get "Strychnine", which is a weird and wild and feral song about getting your kicks by drinking strychnine, that doesn't quite sound exactly like anything else. Interesting lyrical conceits these guys have - an obvious influence, far down the line, on weirdo punk bands like the Misfits and the Cramps. A welcome addition to the musical lexicon! We'd live in a sadder world without kitschy horror-punk.

Given how cool these two songs are, it's a pity that the only real weak note on the album is an original composition. "Psycho", while not without its charms, is basically just a rewrite of "Do You Love Me" with none of the elements that made it work (although it does boast one really, really cool Can-style drum break). I don't mind it, but it's far below the level of the rest of the album, which is a real pity.

So, there you have it. This isn't great art. The Sonics are puerile, juvenile, atavistic and technically inept - and those are their good points! Seriously, as garage rock goes it'd be hard to better this. You've got the rockin'; you've got the groovin'; you've got the hedonistic abandon of youth... An all in an album that sounds like it was recorded through a cardboard box in a hurricane. Sure, it might get wearying after a while, but the whole album's only thirty-five minutes long! Talk about "purity of vision"! It's amazing what you can do with three chords, a few overloaded amps and a complete disregard for the integrity of your ear-drums.

9/10.

Download: The Sonics - The Witch MP3
Download: The Sonics - Strychnine MP3

Oh, and here's the Cramps doing a pretty good cover of Strychnine, too:

48. Jerry Lee Lewis - Live at the Star Club, Hamburg (1964)

2009-04-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Mean Woman Blues // High School Confidential // Money // Matchbox // What'd I Say Part 1 // What'd I Say Part 2 // Great Balls of Fire // Good Golly Miss Molly // Lewis Boogie // Your Cheating Heart // Hound Dog // Long Tall Sally // Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On // Down the Line

Review:

My complaints about this album are basically the same as those I had about the Little Richard album a while back - yeah, it's fun and all in small doses, but Jesus Christ is this album a chore to sit through. Forty minutes that feels like four hours, in which Lewis slams (and I do mean slams, and with a frequent disregard for whether his backing band can keep with him) his way through a selection of originals and standards. The performance is great, I'll own - Lewis' lunatic speed-freak sexually deviant nature has been well-documented, and it's all on display on this record. This is probably the rawest and most sexual album we've had up to this point. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to carry an album on rawness alone and, as much as I hate to sound like a whiny 1950s father figure, most of the songs just sort of sound the same - and not in a good, Bo Diddley sort of way. It's good, but I really have to be in the mood for it - and given that lately I've mostly been listening to ambient house and folk music, it's fair to say that I may not be at my most receptive just now.

So, for what it is it's pretty good. Lewis is wild and crazy, his song selection is good, and the Nashville Teens do a great job on the backing tracks. I think my main problem is that the guys seem to favour a "smash and howl" approach where I would generally be more in favour of a chugging groove. "What'd I Say" and "Money" both have neat rhythms, though, and really a lot of the songs have somethng to recommend thems. I tell you this, though - I'd better pick-up the pace, because I'm getting might impatient for the advent of funk music.

So what deep insight do I have to offer into this album? It's really good, but also really wearying. If I were a tipsy German dude sitting in the audience then I bet I would have had the time of my life. As it stands, though, I just.

Don't.

Care.

7/10.

Download: Jerry Lee Lewis - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On MP3

47. Buck Owens and His Buckaroos - I've Got A Tiger By The Tail (1965)

2009-04-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

Tracks: I've Got A Tiger By The Tail // Trouble and Me // Let the Sad Times Roll On // Wham Bam // If You Fall Out of Love With Me // Fallin' For You // We're Gonna Let the Good Times Roll // The Band Keeps Playin' On // Streets of Laredo // Cryin' Time // A Maiden's Prayer // Memphis

Review:

Buck Owens looks just like my brother! He really does! My brother is only thirteen, granted, but if 2020 rolls around and his portrait doesn't look just like the one above then I'll eat my genetically-modified space hat. It's really quite uncanny. Whether my brother will then go-on to host a successful revival of Hee-Haw is another matter entirely.

You know what else is weird? The music on this album. Well, maybe not, but I don't really know all that much about country music. I just know what I hate - and I don't hate this. It's a little bit rockabilly, but it's mostly just hard-edged, old-timey hillbilly music. Apparently this was the "Bakersfield Sound", which was a hard-edged reaction against the over-produced "Nashville Sound" that was doing quite well at the time? Apparently. What this all translates into is an album where all the music is quite stripped and raw, with a prominent back-beat and lots of twangy guitars and unadorned, yokel vocals yodelling about how a man's only true friend is his dog. Actually, the lyrics on this album are generally pretty good - nothing spectacular, mind, but they're often quite funny, although not always in a very PC way. For example, "Wham Bham" (and thank you mam), which is basically about exactly what you'd expect something with such a refrain to be about, and "We're Gonna Let The Good Times Roll", which is about a man's baby finally coming home to stay and includes lines about the pair locking themselves in the house and barring the windows and doors. Credit to Mr. Owens - it never quite crosses the line from ridiculous and funny to "weirdly threatening". On the other end of the spectrum, there are songs like "The Streets of Laredo", which is about sad, dead cowboys, and "If You Fall Out Of Love With Me", which comes right after "Wham Bam" and features antithetical lyrics requesting that, if a girl fall out of love with the man, she not let him know about it.

So all in all this is a pretty neat little album. There's a nice bit of stylistic variation between the raw and rockin' tracks and those that boast subtler, fiddle-and-slide arrangements, and Owens himself displays an impressive vocal range that covers everything from deep crooning to a high-pitched "Yeeha!" sort of spruking. I can't really see myself listening to it all the time, but I don't really listen to anything all the time - not even Kate Bush, and I love Kate Bush.

I'm not sure what to say about this. It's very good, but I don't really know enough about country music to offer an intelligent appraisal of it beyond saying "I really like "I've Got A Tiger By The Tail"". Incidentally, I really like "I've Got A Tiger By the Tail". It kind of reminds me of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" by Connie Francis, although this time around the lyrics are about marrying a troublesome woman. Actually, that's one thing about this album that irks me somewhat - there's a sort of casual, low-key misogyny running through the proceedings, the kind that's never bad enough for it to ruin a friendship, but which is always enough for you to view the friend a little bit askew. Actually, even calling it misogyny might be a bit much. It only pops-up on a few tracks, always in a humorous context, and it's really just more of a bum attitude than anything, and meant in good fun. I don't want to give anyone the impression that this the country equivalent of an N.W.A. album. Although they were probably joking too... Anyway, if I want to avoid getting tangled-up in a web of semantics then perhaps I should just try and avoid saying anything at all. Ignore the last hundred odd words, if you will. This is what happens when you spend four years at university looking for patriarchal subtexts in everything.

Anyway! There you have it. Not a bad album. Apparently it's considered a genre classic, but I wouldn't know. All I know is that, from the small time I've spent with it, I really like it.

8/10

Look at this:

A bit ostentatious, honestly.

46. Dusty Springfield - A Girl Called Dusty (1964)

2009-04-17T12:14:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Mamma Said // You Don’t Own Me // Do Re Mi // When the Lovelight Starts Shinging Through His Eyes // My Colouring Book // Mocking bird //Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa // Nothing // Anyone Who Had A Heart // Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa // Nothing // Anyone Who Had A Heart // Will You Love Me Tomorrow // Wishin’ and Hopin’ // Don’t You Know

Did you know that Dusty Springfield once punched-out Buddy Rich? Apparently they were on tour together, and he made a snide comment about her being a woman after she had the temerity to ask if she could use his band (which, incidentally, was booked as the shared band) to rehearse. A few hackles raised, a strong word said, and then BAM! That alone makes Dusty Springfield alright in my book.

Anyway, I spent this evening listening over A Girl Called Dusty, and had a very pleasant time with it too. That’s right, not only was Miss Springfield a talented pugilist, she was also one hell of a singer, and she put together a pretty cool album way back when. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that she had a really good ear for the right material. With A Girl Called Dusty, we finally get a full-fledged, crazily-produced album in the Motown style, and there are quite a few times when the production gets a little off the wall. Thankfully, all the material (with the exception of “My Colouring Book”) is good, all of Dusty’s performances range from fair to excellent, and the insane Phil Spector-ish walls of choirs and drums and strings and horns are often actually a lot of fun, and in the end this is just a really cool soul album. It’s pretty darn good!

Still, it’s kind of a pity that the arrangements are so overboard at times. Even on Dusty in Memphis, which is often praised as the album where Springfield finally realised that she was a good enough singer that she didn’t need to bury herself under layers of arrangements (and which is the only other album of hers that I’ve heard - only $9.99 at JB-HiFi! What a steal! Oh, and I suppose a cassette of one of her disco albums too), there’s still far too many strings and backing vocalists. Can someone tell me if she ever cut and album that was just her and a little four-person blues combo or some such (aside, obviously, from “The Look of Love“)? It seems like it would be something worth hearing.

Which isn’t to say this isn’t worth hearing. “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa” is fantastic, what with the big groovy rhythm section and the chorus that just keeps getting bigger - I was OOOOOONLyyyyyy TWENty FOUR HOUrrrssssss froooMMMMM TULLLLSAAAAAAAA!!!! as it were. “You Don’t Own Me” not only has freaking amazing vocals but is just a freaking amazing song - scary, sexy, stern and empowering all at once (somehow). “When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes” swings so lovely, and the version of “Anyone Who Had A Heart” is all creepy and melodramatic and really good, even if not as good as the original. It sounds, I swear, like nothing so much as early-70s Bowie. “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”, however, is one of those clear examples of producers mangling Dusty’s vocals. The backing track on the song is great, and sells the thing as a whole, but then you have Dusty’s vocals piped right into the middle awfully quite as though they’ were being played back via a P.A. system. Very odd. And unfortunate, since Dusty had such a wonderful and versatile voice. I mean, she does big balladeering, and then she turns out and closes the album with a rocking Ray Charles number complete with proto-rapping. The woman had talent! The woman knew how to make a knee turn to jelly. With hair like that, I suppose it would have helped o have been able to sing.

In the end, this is a nice, if not exactly earth-shattering, little album. It’s a very fine bit of African-American pop music being done by a bunch of pasty British people and that, after all, is what the 60s were really about. Yes, forget Kennedy and Vietnam and putting people on the Moon - the 1960s were about the growth in popularity of female British soul singers. I thought everyone knew that. After all, I think the fact that Dusty Springfield inspired Roisin Murphy’s Ruby Blue is at least as important a contribution to world culture as Robert Frost crapping on about his road trip at the Presidential inauguration. I may be wrong, but then I may also be half-asleep. I bet it’s both. I mean, if I can't even remember that the Rolling Stones were suppose to come after this then what hope have I for anything as complex as 20th Century History. Professor Prudence Flowers, your student has failed you.

So this is good. Quite good. The next one is better, though.

8/10

I’m not sure if I’m going to keep putting tracks up for download, since they went and deleted my Genius of Ray Charles entry just the other day on account of the MP3s I mean, I could repost it but I'm really lazy. Then again maybe I can work around it.

As a compensatory gesture, here she is singing a couple of her songs in German:

45. The Rolling Stones – The Rolling Stones ( 1964)

2009-04-16T05:18:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Route 66 // I Just Want To Make Love To You // Honest I Do // Mona
(I Need You Baby) // Now I’ve Got A Witness (Like Uncle Phil And Uncle Gene) // Little By Little // I’m A King Bee // Carol // Tell Me (You're Coming Back) // Can I Get A Witness // You Can Make It If You Try // Walking the Dog

Woo! The Stones dude! Best band ever! Well, maybe not, but they sure were an important one. I guess one of their big contributions was helping rock to evolve as a form, while at the same time keeping it raw and vicious as possible? I guess that’s a good thing, since without them we’d never have had the Stooges or the Velvet Underground, and then where would we be? Well, I guess people who didn’t like glam or alt rock would be alright. Or Neu! and Can. Or, really, half the music on the world today... Personally I’m still hanging-out for the big skiffle revival – I know it’s waiting just round the corner. Any day now! By this point it should be clear that I know nothing at all about the Rolling Stones. Anyway.

I think my favourite moment on this album comes when Mick Jagger cries-out “Sting it, Ben!” on “I’m A King Bee”, only to have someone deliver a little guitar solo that sounds, somehow, exactly like the stinging of a bee. The rest of the song is kind of stupid, what with the goofy lyrics coupled with a complete lack of humour, but that one little part is pretty ace.

This is a pretty neat little album. No-one would ever mistake it for a masterpiece, but once I accepted that it was just an unassuming blues album, I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. It’s basically just an Anglicisation of the Chess Records sound, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The lyrics are generally dumb (in the case of “I’m A King Bee”, they are spectacularly dumb) and the production is really, really cheap, but sandwiched in between those two things are a few pretty neat songs. I’m particularly taken by “Mona (I Need You Baby)”, which is a gritty and groovy Bo Diddley cover with the best vocals on the album, “Can I Get A Witness”, which has a wonderful jumping boogie piano (and was apparently originally a hit for Marvin Gaye), and “Tell Me”, which was apparently one of the first song Jagger and Richards wrote together. Interestingly, in contrast to the rest of the album’s driving blues sound, the song is a quite nice doo-wop influenced number with multi-part harmonies and a jangling acoustic intro. The story goes that Keith and Mick were locked in the kitchen by their manager, and he refused to let them out until they’d written some original songs. I find it amusing that, under such circumstances, they’d churn out something so pretty. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect to find on the first Velvet Underground album. Maybe if they’d focused more on originals the whole record could have been this good. Although "Walking the Dog" is pretty cool too, I suppose.

So. In the end I like this. Most of the songs are nothing to write home about, but it’s at least pleasant to listen to (unlike the early efforts of another prominent British blues-rock band of the early 1960s). It’s an interesting little signpost on the road to modern rock music, and it’s enjoyable enough if you have a fondness for such things. I think it’s telling that the best songs here have a big emphasis on the groove. “Tell Me”, “Mona”, “Can I Get A Witness” – all big grooves, you know. Personally, I can’t wait till we finally get around to “Sympathy for the Devil”.

Download: The Rolling Stones - Tell Me MP3
Download: The Rolling Stones - Mona (I Need You Baby) MP3

Fun Facts: “Walking the Dog” was the first Stones song to make it to number one on the Australian charts! And here it is, being performed somewhere other than Australia:

44. Solomon Burke – Rock ‘n’ Soul (1964)

2009-04-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye) // Cry to Me // Won’t You Give Him (One More Chance) // If You Need Me // Hard, It Ain’t Hard // Can’t Nobody Love You // Just Out of Reach // You’re Good for Me // You Can’t Love ‘Em All // Someone to Love Me // Beautiful Brown Eyes // He’ll Have to Go

Well this is a nifty album. An album that grows on you. Not only is Solomon Burke a great singer, a former undertaker and a Monarch of the Realm, but he’s in possession of that chief virtue of any singer/songwriter – a healthy disrespect for genre conventions. It’s in the title, really – he brings the rock, he brings the soul, and on several tracks he brings a strange, vaguely Cuban hybridisation of the two. You have to love an album that invites direct comparison to Ben E. King, Burt Bacharach and Marty Robbins. Yes, there’s country here too! “Just Out of Reach” is an honest to goodness country ballad. And he covers a Woody Guthrie song! How wonderful is that?

And not only are all these songs really well-performed, but the arrangements are great. The basic core of the group is Solomon, bass, drums, and guitar. The drums are spare but lovely, and you get some neat semi-Latin rhythms on “You Can’t Love ‘Em All”. The bass is... serviceable. It serves the songs great, but it’s never flashy. The guitar, however, is absolutely amazing. You get spiralling, picked rhythms on most of the tracks, all a little bit country, and then you get some ace bluesy noodling on the slow gospel “Someone to Love Me” (which sounds kind of like Otis Redding). This track also features a truly wonderful backing chorus, which is something that pops-up through a lot of the album. Additional elements, such as piano, choir, and the odd bit of brass (and even a woodwind, at one point) are sprinkled liberally through the record, but rather than saturating the songs, they’re used intelligently to augment the recordings. The result is an album which is really very, very well produced. Once again, the most obvious comparison would be Otis Redding, whose Otis Blue, with its stripped-down production, seems to have taken a few pointers from the Solomon Sound. In any case, I really like “Someone to Love Me”. If I have learnt one thing from doing this it is that I have all the time in the world for slow-burn gospel.

So on top of this we have Solomon Burke’s singing, which is pretty great. The guy was apparently a preacher before he became a singer, and the gospel influence is pretty prominent throughout this album. Thankfully unlike Otis Redding (who I will continue to compare him with) Burke doesn’t feel the need to ramble about over his songs with a complete disregard for the rhythm of his backing track. His voice fits with the album perfectly, in that it’s very good while at the same time never flashy for flashiness’ sake.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to all of this. While the album is immaculately put-together, it also suffers from being kind of lacklustre at times in terms of song choices, and in a few instances the tracks are getting by more on the strength of Burke as a performer than of the songs themselves. Still, this actually contributes to the charm of the album – it’s a good, old-fashioned pop album, with no real low-points and the one genuine high in “Cry to Me”. “Cry to Me” was used in Dirty Dancing, didn’t you know? One thing I never understood about the Dirty Dancing soundtrack (and believe me, I am intimately familiar with the Dirty Dancing soundtrack – ah, to be young in the early 90s and have an older sister) is that they used all those old songs to evoke a period feel, and then they dumped-in stuff like “Hungry Eyes”, “The Time of My Life” and Patrick Swayze classic “She’s Like the Wind” (someone was hoping for a chance to audition for the Scorpions). I mean, I like all three of those songs (shut up) but I always thought it a little jarring. Maybe it was meant to evoke the timelessness of the story? In any case, the use of “The Time of My Life” in the climactic dance-party sequence does make thematic sense as a way of pointing towards the exciting new world of the future, without actually having to pay the rights to use a Beatles song. Still...

In any case, this is a pretty neat little album. “Cry to Me” is amazing, “You Can’t Love ‘Em All” has some exceptionally goofy lyrics but sounds wonderful, “Someone To Love Me” is gorgeous and “Just Out of Reach” is a lovely country ballad. I’m also kind of fond of “He’ll Have to Go”, but that has more to do with my Dad have a tendency to burst into loungey renditions of it at inappropriate moments (another favourites of his happens to be “Evergreen” by Barbara Streisand). I wouldn’t call this a masterpiece, but it’s a damned nice listen.

7.5

Download: Solomon Burke - Cry to Me MP3

Download: Solomon Burke - Someone to Love Me MP3

I wish I could dance.

43. Jacques Brel - Olympia 64 (1964)

2009-04-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Amsterdam // Les Timides // Le Dernier Repas //Les Jardins du Casino //Les Vieux //Les Toros //Le Tango Funebre// Le Plat Pays // Les Bonbons //Mathilde //Les Bigotes // Les Bourgeois // Jef // Au Suivant // Madeleine

Morbid, sarcastic socio-political show tunes from Belgium, you say? And with theramins? Sign me up! Who knew Lee Marvin was such a talent?

I’d previously only been familiar with Brel’s work in translation, but thankfully this list has forced me to finally face-up to my ignorance and give the original versions a chance. Unfortunately, this resulted in my being a stubborn idiot and deciding that, yes, I know enough French to understand the philosophical paronomasia of an acerbic Belgian. Well, in actual fact I only know enough French to understand one word in five when sung, which resulted in my following along to each song with the lyric sheet in front of me since for some reason my written French is much better than my spoken. And yes, I know that, having gone to all the trouble of looking-up the lyrics in French, I could have just looked-up the English translations, but damn it man it’s the principle of the thing! And if that means that I’m only vaguely aware of what most of “Les Timides” was actually about, then so be it!

(Actually, I did look-up a fair few of the translations, but that’s neither here nor there. I'm actually rather bitter about my bad French - I mean, we had a bunch of Parisian students visit once when I was in year 11, and they all spoke near-perfect English. Most of the people in my French class could barely make it through the play we had to write about trying to order lunch. Although there were those two guys who staged a dazzling rap battle about trying to find a bus station).

So. Jacques Brel. I used to be of the opinion that I vastly preferred covers of the man’s work to the originals, but after seeing Brel give these tunes the live treatment I’ve changed my mind. You see, the emphasis with these songs is quite heavily on the lyrics, and the lyrical trend is for each song to launch the kernel of an idea in the first stanza and then, through each succeeding stanza, work the notion up in greater detail until the whole things reaches a big climax – or anti-climax, depending on the song. So in effect Brel has written a bunch of show-tunes, and he acts them out as you’d expect any cabaret star to do. He works himself into a fervour over the whoring, fatalistic sailors in “Amsterdam”, and he hams it up gloriously as the cretinous suitor in the exquisitely creepy “Les Bonbons”. Then you can almost hear him crying as he sings of “Les Plats Pays” – which is an absolutely astonishing portrait of his home country – and then he minces like a twit in the role of one of “Les Timides”. It’s all brilliantly done, and gave me the sensation of an original cast recording that was far more successful than any such thing could be, given that I wasn’t missing-out (I assume) on the various silly dances.

In any case, my point is that the lyrics on this album are great. “Amsterdam” is a wonderful glimpse into this sort of hellish, beautiful vision of life amongst the mariners, while “Les Toros” is a great song about bullfighting in which the toreadors dream that they’re Garcia Lorca, while the bulls “dream of a hell where deceased men and toreadors will burn”. Anyway it sounds better in French. Then you have not one, but two! ruminations on death in “Le Dernier Repas” and “Le Tango Funebre”, and “Au Suivant”, which is a damned disturbing song about losing ones virginity in the assembly-line of a military bordello (it is a metaphor). Oh, and “Les Vieux”, which is a very sad song about getting old, and “Les Bigotes”, in which the conservatives get their reward “dans le ciel qui n’existe pas”, and then, well, really the whole album is a winner.. The only songs I don’t really like are “Les Jardins du Casino” and “Les Bourgeois”, but then that’s just me. And really it has more to do with their merely being quite good songs on an album jammed full of masterpieces. Allez au diable, vous maudits jardins! Baisez mon ane, vous bourgeois!

Really, this is just a great album. Jacques Brel is often held-up as a pinnacle of Francophone song-writing, and I can certainly see why. You have a man writing truly beautiful poetry, setting it to a great tune, and then performing it all with a vigour and gusto to set your head turning. It’s really excellent. It may be a cliche, but French when used properly is a truly wonderful language, and it’s things like this that make me wish I spoke it better. Well, this and Stephane Mallarme, but I suspect I wouldn’t understand him very well in any case.

Aargh this review is shit but the music is wonderful.Except - Who the hell is Frida the Blonde?

9/10

Look at him go!

He just can't stop!

2009-04-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Hard Day’s Night // I Should Have Known Better // If I Fell // I’m Happy Just to Dance With You // And I Love Her // Tell Me Why // Can’t Buy Me Love // Any Time At All // I’ll Cry Instead // Things We Said Today // You Can’t Do That // I’ll Be Back

Review:

Another year, another Beatles album. This one was the soundtrack to a hit movie! Isn’t that exciting? It isn’t that exciting? Well, I bet that in 1963 the whole thing was pretty damned exciting. In any case I'm going through a "rock" phase at the moment, so if I was ever going to generous to early Beatles then now is the time.

The Beatles have advanced a lot since the last album, even if only in terms of song-writing focus. Meet the Beatles was a bad-to-mediocre affair with a couple of stand-outs. A Hard Day’s Night is a mediocre-to-good album with a few let-downs. It’s all a trade-off, really. The songs are still basic early 60s pop-rock, but that’s not such a bad thing given that the Beatles helped to define the style of the times. And of course the two big singles, the skiffly “Can’t Buy Me Love” and lust-draped title track, are both glorious and show an obvious sort of progression. But then you have the other tracks.

Well, if nothing else they do show variety. You have “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” and “I’ll Be Back”, two little Shadows-styled numbers the former of which is vastly more enjoyable than the latter, and “Any Time At All”, which is also reminiscent of the Shadows but which somehow manages to both rock hard and conjure visions of Petula Clark. You have “Tell Me Why”, a deliberately goofy Everly Brothers knock-off by way of a game show theme, complete with backing vocals by the rest of the Beatles pretending to be ladies. “If I Fell” is a tepid ballad that sounds like Prudence & Patience cast-off, but much more successful is “And I Love Her” – which has stupid lyrics, but is otherwise a very finely done sort of Country & Western ballad married to a bongo-styled beat and some very nice minor riffs on the chorus. And it’s quite sweet, which is always nice. It reminds me of the ballads of early Zeppelin. And it had woodblocks, of all things! Another neat song is “I Should Have Known Better”, which sounds quite Motown, but which boasts a prominent bluesy harmonica and a decidedly “rock” chorus. And I’ll Cry Instead” is ok too, if only because I have a soft spot for skiffle. Decidedly not OK is “You Can’t Do That”, which boasts an interesting backing track but is let down by utterly abysmal vocals by John Lennon. And I mean truly, unbearably awful. I wonder why they even put this on the album – I mean, there were already 11 songs! Did they really need another one?

It’s this sort of “throw everything at a wall and see what sticks” attitude that seems to be undoing the Beatles at this stage. If this album had ended with “Can’t Buy Me Love” then it’d be a very strong, interesting set of songs. Heck, if the track order had been rearranged a bit so that it didn’t trail of so suddenly, that might have helped too. I suppose this is what happens when you record a side’s worth of A material that made the film, and then decide to pad side 2 with all the songs that weren’t good enough to be in the movie. It’s especially problematic given that the first, good, half is not especially brilliant to begin with. Then again, this can be countered by the fact that, for the first time, the album features only songs written by Lennon and McCartney. The singer-songwriter era is really kicking into gear now, which is a pretty exciting development for all concerned.

So, in the end an important artistic and commercial development on the part of the Beatles, and a pleasant listen for anyone with a fondness for early 60s pop-rock. But that's about it.

7/10

Download: The Beatles - And I Love Her MP3

41. Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto – Getz/Gilberto (1963)

2009-04-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

Tracks: The Girl from Ipanema // Doralice // Para Muchuchar Meu Coracoa // Desafinado (Off Key) // Corcovado (Quiet Night of Quiet Stars) // So Danco Samba // O Grande Amore // Vivo Sonhando (Dreamer)

Well this is a lovely little album. A poorly-packaged album, perhaps, what with the tendency for the little information booklet to fall out of its little cardboard flap every time I pick it up (curse you Verve Masterworks!), but the music itself is quite lovely. The two songs that most people probably know from this album are “Corcovado” and “The Girl from Ipanema”, the one a lounge standard and the other a lounge standard that went to number 5 on the Billboard pop charts, but thankfully the rest of the album is pretty good too. This isn’t really surprising, since this album is generally held up as an artistic high-water mark not only of bossa nova, but of jazz in general. That it was also a massive commercial success is just icing on the cake.

So what is the deal behind this album, you ask? Do you really care? Is anyone even reading this? According to my web logs most of my traffic comes from people Googling the album cover of Birth of the Cool. On that note, I’ve earned the right to be glib. Basically, the deal with this album is that Stan Getz, having been bitten by the bossa nova bug back at Jazz Samba, eventually decided to do the next logical thing and collaborate with the inventors of the genre. So we have Antonio Carlos Jobim, both a nifty pianist and the most prominent songwriter in the genre*, and we have Joao Gilberto, the innovative guitarist and singer who hatched the bossa nova rhythm by locking himself in a room for six months and fiddling with his guitar, and they play a clutch of their songs while Getz takes some very lovely solos alongside them. Joining the trio we have Tommy Williams on bass, the awesomely named Milton Banana on drums, and, for two tracks, Joao’s non-professional wife Astrud singing very ~~flatly~~ prettily in English on the two big singles. And there you have it.

The results are of course quite charming. Everyone knows “The Girl from Ipanema”, with it’s little “bim-bom-bim” intro and indelible melody line, but it’s just the highpoint on a uniformly excellent album. (What’s that? You don’t like “The Girl from Ipanema”? Go to hell). The two tracks with Astrud are the stand-outs, but one gets the sense that this was just Stan Getz displaying business savvy in insisting on having a pretty girl sing in English on the two strongest songs. None of the other songs really jump out and slap you in the face with their brilliance, but then that isn’t that kind of album. The melodies are sinuous and subtle, working their way under your skin, and the rhythms just sort of bobble along in this happy little way. Each song starts with a little vocal section, and then you have the solo, and then maybe you have another little vocal packed away in there somewhere. All very nice. As a result, the tracks sort of blend into one another, but if you play any one of these songs by itself its individual genius soon becomes apparent. “Desafinado” is of course marvellous, “So Danco Samba” is just such silly fun, and Stan Getz delivers truly wonderful solos on both this and “O Grande Amor”. In fact, Stan Getz really shines through most of this album – he was already the best thing about Jazz Samba, and he’s obviously just gotten better with time – although if Getz/Gilberto belongs to anyone then it’s definitely Gilberto, who really is a beautiful (albeit very stoned-sounding) singer. Although having said this, Gilberto is all over “Doralice”, and that’s the one song on the album I’ve really not got much time for. O accursed “Doralice” :( Then again, it does stop the album from getting monotonous – if nothing else, Getz/Gilberto is a very well-paced album.

In the end, there isn’t much I can say about this album. The best word to describe it is probably “Charming”. It has such an unassuming quality to it, as though the whole thing were being tossed-off in an afternoon with no thought given to the possibility that it might become a success. “Casual genius”, you might call it – which is probably the defining trait of the genre. The result is an album that sounds like three AM in a swanky nightclub when everyone has left except for you, the band, and the girl that you’re dancing with.

I'm kind of mad that I was wrong about "Agua de Beber" being on this one, though. I love that song.

9.5/10

Download: Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto - O Grande Amor MP3

*incidentally, in the interim between reviewing Jazz Samba and getting around to this, I checked-out a couple of other bossa nova projects. Jobim's album with Elis Regina, Elis & Tom, is really good and definitely recommended. The same goes for Regina's Aquarela de Brasil from 1969, and for Elizete Cardoso's Cancao do Amor Demais from 1958. I also recall Jobim's The Composer of Desafinado, Plays being decent, too, with instrumental versions that are really heavy on the lush strings. I have now exhausted my knowledge of bossa nova completely.

40. James Brown – Live at the Apollo (1962)

2009-04-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Introduction to James Brown//I'll Go Crazy//Try Me//Think//I Don't Mind//Lost Someone//Medley: Please, Please, Please, etc. //Night Train

So now ladies and gentlemen it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time? Thank you and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time national and international know as the hardest working man in show business...

A little soul, a little jazz, and now we are back round again to soul. Today we are getting down like James Brown. Or with James Brown. James Brown is the man making the music, and we are getting down alongside him in his particular manner. A manner which apparently involves lots of young women shrieking and making lewd, if the audience reaction captured on this recording is anything to go by (and we can only hope). Well can I believe it, too, as this may be the sexiest album ever recorded. And to think that the whole thing almost never came to be! Even though, at the time, everyone knew Brown’s real strength lay in his live act, the man himself was the only guy who thought it might be a good idea to actually record it. In the end, he told his label boss “To hell with you, Syd Nathan; I shall do it myself” and then he went off and recorded the album at his own expense, across three nights at the Apollo Theatre in New York. From that day forth, all sets on amateur night would be limited to no longer than ten minutes each.

Which is to say that this is a pretty great album. A lot of people argue (and their opinions are of course quite valid, though in fact they may be wrong) that this is the very best live album ever put to tape. I don’t know if that’s true, but then again it’s probably irrelevant anyway. If we compare with Sam Cooke (most obvious point of comparison) then we have a less ferocious, and considerably less raw, album here. However, James Brown’s album is by far the better recorded, and this is an important (and good thing) for one very big reason. In a word, James Brown’s band is tight. “Tight” tight. Imagine the tightest band you’ve ever heard, and then imagine it tighter. Do this even if you have heard James Brown’s backing band. His band is actually tighter than his own band. I don’t know how he managed it, but there you are. Possibly he had a gun under his cape. Then again, it’s more probably got something to do all the practice from his insane touring schedule, and the fact that Brown used to fine his musicians fifty dollars for every note they missed. I wonder what effect this approach would have had on a band like say... the Raincoats, perhaps?

The neat thing about the tightness of Brown is that it’s integral to his music. His twelve-piece band is very rhythmic in focus, and every single instrument is coming in right on time, playing a neat little phrase or soloing along perfectly against the beat. At this point James Brown was still the Godfather of Soul, not yet having been appointed Minister of The New New Super Heavy Funk (I believe George Clinton was prime-minister of that particular Parliament); as a consequence, the beats are more of the soul stomp or boogie-woogie variety, and we get a lot more throat-tearing ballads and plaintive crooning than one might expect from the singer of “Hot Pants”. Still, everything is just so damned well-executed. Things start-out slow, with a few nice ballads, then build-up to the insane jazzy groove of “Think” – which is one hell of a song, and makes me think I should be in a car chase in The Blues Brothers. The real strength of Brown as a singer was of course in his sense of rhythm, and he chants and claps hands like a loon across all two minutes of the song. Then we lull again, and the songs start stretching out, and we get a suit of beautiful ballads, the best of which is a full ten minutes long. “Lost Someone” is one of those wonderful songs that is filled with a massive amount of momentum, but which never actually goes anywhere. This may actually be my favourite sort of song, I should note – and in any case, it’s an obvious antecedent to Brown’s later, full-fledged funk (I also suspect Isaac Hayes may have taken a few pointers from this song). The band starts by running through the song as it was released as a single – a beautiful bit of gospel – and then extends the closing refrain seemingly indefinitely, riding on nothing but two gorgeous horn riffs and a six-note bass riff. And then Brown brings the audience in, basically making love to them through his song, asking them to cry “Yeah!” and having the hordes of young girls in attendance scream “YEAH!!!!” back, and every time right on the beat. And even if you are the straightest of men, you will cry "OWE!" and swoon for him when he calls for you to say "Owe". And you will envy the girls he starts singing to specifically. The way these guys – Cooke and Brown – bring the audience in as another instrument is just marvellous. I’ve never heard the studio version of the song but I can’t imagine it coming within a thousand miles of this. Brown almost breaking down into tears, croaking-out his pleas of “I’ll love you tomorrow!” Grunts and screams and the whole thing recycling itself over and again... It’s just such a wonderful song. I could listen to it all day. And then it ends, and out of nowhere it launches into the "Please, Please, Please" medley, a thunderstorm of hot and sweaty R&B. A+, James Brown and the Famous Flames. A+ indeed.

The sense of springing forward while standing still that I mentioned earlier is actually a part of what makes this album so great. Knowing what we know about Brown, the expectation is that things will get funky at some time or another. And, in fact, the whole rhythmic foundation of the band sounds like it’s on the verge of making the jump into on-the-one and break beats. But it never comes. And by the end of the album, which is only thirty-five minutes long, you’re left dazzled and energised with nowhere to go but back into the album again.

This is a truly wonderful record. In fact, I might even say that it’s better than Sam Cooke’s. I didn’t think that at first – in fact, on the first listen I considered it kind of so-so. Now, however, I’d regard it as a masterpiece of passionate concision. James Brown was a master showman, and this album is a collection of perfect songs, performed faultlessly and in exactly the right sequence. This isn’t a showy album – it doesn’t slap you in the face with its brilliance. It just quietly sidles in behind you when you’re not looking and then proceeds to kick your arse.

If you are reading this and you haven't heard this album, then drop what you are doing and acquire it at once.

9.5/10.

Download: James Brown - Lost Someone (Live at the Apollo) mp3

39. Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and The Sinner Man (1963)

2009-04-03T02:32:00.000-07:00

Tracklist: Solo Dancer // Duet Solo Dancers // Group Dancers // Trio and Group Dancers

Review:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is just damned imposing. See also: impressive, impassion, and impossible. It's not an album, it's a monument. That this whole thing was actually composed – that somewhere, out there, there are charts for this thing – is simply baffling beyond believe; much easier to believe that it poured-out of some chink in the fabric of reality. In fact, I bet this is what Cthulhu listens to when he’s relaxing at home. But of course, it was written down, and arranged, and rehearsed, and yes it was even played – by Charles Mingus, no less, supergreat jazz-dude and the man I’d most like to buy a drink for (if I had a time machine).

The Clown was the first jazz album I ever heard. I downloaded it along with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, after someone starting asking people to choose between the two albums in a thread about “Haitian Fight Song”. Well, I sided with The Clown, and since then I’ve never looked back. Something about Mingus’ music just sort of clicked with me – like Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming, the Fiery Furnaces’ ADD-fuelled story-telling collages, or VU-inspired lunatic guitar-terrorism, it just seems like the perfect soundtrack to the human mind. This seems appropriate, given the album’s origins. Charles Mingus was a famously unstable man, and he not only spent time in a New York mental hospital prior to writing this album, but had his psychiatrist contribute to the liner notes. The album itself is actually a ballet, written as a sort of insight into the nature of Mingus’ manic-depressive mind. The result is a schizophrenic tempest of Latin guitars, swing-rhythms, careening trumpets, lyrical piano passages, pummelling drums, pulsing bass, and turn-on-a-dime tonal shifts; an album that’s simply awe-inspiring in its complexity, emotional effectiveness and raw, unhinged beauty.

The most impressive thing about this album is probably that it isn’t actually an album, in the traditional sense. Rather than being a collection of songs, “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady” is actually a single coherent composition, complete with recurring phrases and a sort-of narrative build. At the same time, Mingus seems to have conceived of the thing as a recording project, and unlike most jazz albums of the time The Black Saint... actually makes extensive use of sophisticated studio techniques such as overdubbing, editing, and the mixing-in of new elements. Mingus was one of the finest writers to ever work in jazz, and the combination of his prodigious compositional ability, the virtuosity of the assembled players (who were given freedom to refine their parts even further in rehearsals), and the meticulous approach afforded by the recording studio all combine to produce what is simultaneously one of the most elaborate and the tightest albums ever produced. Hell, forget albums – I’d go so far as to argue that this is one of the finest things anyone ever composed, period. Which is appropriate given that Mingus (who was not always the humblest of men) self-consciously constructed the thing as his defining masterwork. How often does that actually succeed? Not nearly often enough.

It’s a masterpiece, really. It sways from beauty, to terror, and round about along every possible feeling in between. Put it loud on a stereo, lie down to listen, and I bet you won’t move for the next three quarters of an hour. Mingus knew how to apply good writing to the evocation of a mood, and in this album he conjured-up every mood you’d ever care to feel, and he guides you through them like Virgil through Hades to the glorious madness of the conclusion. This is what the world would sound like if you captured it in a bottle, with all the hope and horror that such entails. Perfect.

A+

Download: Charles Mingus - Trio Dancers mp3

(although really you should listen to this in its entirety.

38 - Sam Cooke - Live At The Harlem Square Club 1963

2009-03-31T04:37:00.000-07:00

Tracklist: Feel It//Chain Gang//Cupid//Medley: It's All Right - For Sentimental Reasons//Twisting the Night Away//Somebody Have Mercy//Bring It On Home to Me//Nothing Can Change This Love//Having A Party

Review:

Oh fuck this. I didn’t pay cash money for a copy of Aqualung just so that I could abandon this thirty-four albums in. No, that’s an act that takes a toll on your soul... A life time of repentance lies before me.

Speaking of soul, here we have what just might be the first full-on soul album on the list. It’s a little bit country, it’s a little bit rock... It’s also fucking incredible. You may notice I’m swearing a lot more, also. I find that the speed with which I complete these reviews is directly proportional to how much shame I would feel in letting my grandma read them. In any case, this album deserves praise conveyable only by the use of profanities. It just might the best live album anyone ever did ever. Leastways, I can’t imagine it being possible to ever do much better.

Anyway, Sam Cooke is playing at the Harlem Square Club, and appropriately enough he sounds like a total square. He’s got a speaking voice to make a high school mathematics teacher look cool. What’s amazing is that he’s also a bloody incredible singing voice. He manages to blend the throaty quality of guys like Little Richard or Otis Redding with a technical polish and rhythmic sense largely alien to those other (admittedly still pretty great) artists. All of which would mean shit if he didn’t also have an incredible backing band, pumping-out a soulful – and I do mean honest-to-god soulful – mix of stomping rhythms, crooning horns and bouncy, bouncy basslines. The result is what just might be the most joyful, beautiful album I’ve ever heard. He comes out, the crowd goes wild, and it doesn't let-up for 38 glorious minutes.

I’d always suspected that Cooke was good, what with songs like “Cupid” and “A Change Is Gonna Come”, but as great as those tracks are they’re also kind of syrupy and over-produced. I tend to like music that’s syrupy and over-produced, but here the general raw ambience of the live setting, contrasted with the sweetness of the music, produces the perfect mix. Add to this Cooke working the audience like a born showman, making little asides to the audience between (and even during) songs, coaxing them to sing along and the like. This is one of those albums where the live audience is just as important as the star players – hell, they sing most of the words on “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”. And I can’t imagine “Having A Party” being anywhere near as good without the chorus of worshipful female fans. Or the "Hoo! Hah!" grunting on "Chain Gang".. The guy came out of church music, pioneering the singing of secular Gospel, and it only makes sense that he’d be brilliant at stage-front exhortations and the conjuring of the overwhelmingly uplifting. I mean, this is an album where the ballads are just as rocking and wonderful as the actual rockers! And the flow of the show is masterful, starting with a killer batch of fist-pumpers, then lulling a bit, and closing on the anthemic (and aptly-titled) "Having A Party". Not that the music is at all "churchy". In fact, "raw, blinding sexuality" might be a better description. It may sound a cliché to say it, but I would kill a man to be able to go back in time and attend this concert.

So, do you feel like you wanna twist awhile? I said, DO YA WANNA TWIST AWHILE!? Pass the handkerchief around! I said pass the handkerchief around! Cause I don’t know if you can hear me, but if feels good to twist the night away. I said it sure feels good when you’ve got someone to twist the night away with. Man, rock folks can try as hard as they like, but no-one is ever going to make anything more joyous than soul. I mean, Stevie Wonder albums make me so happy I tear-up! And tear it up! That is pretty damned happy. And can you believe that Sam Cooke wrote most of the songs on this album? One hell of a guy. Granted, the lyrics aren’t always especially deep, but they’re all pretty good stuff of the up-beat, lets-love-and-dance variety (although "Chain Gang" does manage to blend the albums best beat with some rousing, politically-conscious lyrics). Anyway, you can't argue with the music.

Unfortunately, Sam Cooke died pretty soon after this, in deeply peculiar circumstances. The varying reports of how he came to be gunned down in a motel office are “In A Grove”-like in their interlocking complexities. I can’t say I’ve felt a lasting regret about this, since I only know two of his songs outside of this album, and this album is something I've only just become acquainted with, but it’s really a real pity, really, in any case. This is just astonishing.

9/10

Download: Sam Cooke - Chain Gang mp3

Download: Sam Cooke - Having A Party mp3

37. Phil Spector & Various Artists - A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector (1963)

2009-01-22T21:15:00.000-08:00

Tracks: White Christmas//Frosty the Snowman//The Bells of St. Mary's//Santa Clause is Coming to Town//Sleigh Ride//Marshmallow World//I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus//Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer//Winter Wonderland//Parade of the Wooden Soldiers//Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)//Here Comes Santa Clause//Silent Night

For an Antipodean, the iconography of Christmas can be quite puzzling. Every year, in the midst of summer, the streets are draped with those cut-out snow flakes and Father Christmas prances about in snowscapes on TV. I'll wander into a supermarket and hear "White Christmas" coming over the PA, but unless I'm feeling particularly confrontational I generally won't give it that much thought. But the fact remains that it's High Summer in December here in Australia, and still we cling to things like reindeer and winter wonderlands despite the absolute lack of relevance to our culture. I suppose we interact with the more wintry aspects of Christmas in the same way that most people associate with the Holy Land, but it still seems faintly ridiculous each year when November rolls round and the fake frost starts gracing the storefront windows.

This acceptance of an alien Christmas experience is actually typical of much Australian culture. Essentially a Western enclave tacked-on to the bottom of the Far East, we've never really embraced either our neighbours or our peculiar lot. Almost everyone here is either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant, associating themselves with their mother countries, and those that are "Australian" many generations deep tend to cling tightly to whatever their original stock was - be it English, Scots, German or Czech. The result is a country that tends to live outside of itself to a considerable extent, simultaneously fiercly proud of its local culture and deeply insecure about how it is perceived by the rest of the world. If I could sum-up my perception of the Australian condition in a few words, it would be of a group of children who have been sent-off to a Summer camp and are enjoying themselves a great deal, but at the same time are waiting desperately to be allowed to go back home to their mothers.

I suppose it's something Americans feel too, this idea that their country is something of a sham - just a reflection in a cheap mirror of the genuine Old World. But Americans have had so long to create a history for themselves, and have such a powerful mythic foundation built on the very idea of their newness and self-conscious self-differation from the Old World, that they ride this out quite well. In short, they've decided they're better than Europe, and they've set-about proving it. Australia, by contrast, is deeply conscious of how short it falls in comparison to its perceptions of the US and Europe, and has tried to cover this up with a great deal of hollow bravado. The best example of this is our incessant desire to go off and stick our noses in the business of others, fighting in wars that don't have much to do with us and consistently trying to bat above our weight (Kylie Minogue is another good example, I suppose). America did this too, and had the resources to pull it off - except, apparently, in competitive soccer. Meanwhile Australia is a tiny country, and we're more like the child who gets excited over winning a merit award at primary school, not realising that every other child gets one too.

The point of all of this, arriving in my long and ponderous way, is that I have never ridden in a sleigh but I have worn shorts outside on Boxing Day (though not boxers, regrettably). I also like Christmas music too, although being an Australian atheist it has about as much relevance to me as an Israeli cattle shed has to a full-blooded Welshman.

So, having said I like Christmas music the question now arises of whether or not I like this particular Christmas music. The answer is... it's OK I guess. The problems that beset this collection are the same as those that crop-up in any Christmas album - you have some very fine and enjoyable tunes done badly, some very bad tunes done finely, and some good songs done great. So while this means that things are largely par for the course, there are a few elements to this album that help to lift its game.

The first is, most obviously, Phil Spector. General consensus holds that Spector is batshit insane (evidence to support this ranges from minor eccentricities like having musicians sit-in silent on recording sessions for fear that their absence would change the sound of the room, to more grandiose lunancy such as locking Ronnie Spector away for months in his house or forcing the Ramones to repeat their parts ad infinitum at gun point), but be that as it may he did provide a number of vital contributions to popular music - namely, girl groups and the Wall of Sound. Now I'm not saying he invented the former, but he just might be able to claim credit on the latter, or at least that's what rock historians always say.

The Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" was actually a pretty simple thing. Spector had an enormous echo-chamber set-up, with angles and planes abounding within it so skewed as to make R'lyeh look like Bauhaus. This was Gold Star, his one-of-a-kind studio, and a lot of his productions (or at least the backing tracks - I can't recall precisely) were recorded more or less live in the studio. Everything would echo around and the glorious, suffocating harmonic reverberations created, well, a massive wall of sound. It was a bit thin, really, in terms of the equalizing, but damned if it didn't sound great blaring out in mono. The pinnacle of this sort of thing is probably "River Deep, Mountain High", on which Spector asembled a massive orchestra including multiple bass-players, conga drummers and banks of electric guitarists - although some people (myself being one of them) think that he was permanently one-upped in this by the release of My Blood Valentine's Loveless twenty-odd years later. Then again, maybe Brian Wilson managed it only a couple of years on - he had a more sophisticated set-up consisting of a closed-off metal echo chamber with a speaker at one end and microphones strung along its length to pick-up the different levels of reverb as the soundwaves traveled down the tunnel. This meant that Wilson could pump a single track of audio through the chamber, listen to the different pick-ups to find the exact sound he wanted, and then record the treated track and mix it back down into the finished recording at whatever level he wanted. Compared to this, Spector was basically just getting a bunch of guys together to yell loudly in a public toilet.

Anyway, it worked, so there's that. It also more or less came to typify Spectors sound until he became something of a one-trick pony, but then who cares if you only know one trick as long as it's a good trick. And besides, the Wall of Sound is especially useful for Christmas songs since it manages to make damned near everything sound like it's happening inside of a snowstorm.

The other big plus to this album is that, in addition to wonderful covers like Darlene Love's "White Christmas", the Ronette's "Frosty the Snowman" with trademark throaty vocals, and the Crystals' explosive rendition of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", you also get a truly great original in the form of the sublime "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". It's really just a big tidal wave of yearning, but the hook is glorious and Darlene Love provides a truly beautiful soul vocal. It's really one of my very favourite songs, and one of the few Christmas tunes that I feel like listening to all through the year (the other is Julie London's "I'd Like You for Christmas", if you really must know).

Unfortunately while there are exceptional songs here a lot of the other material is just sort of "there", if you sass me. And then there's the problem that most of the good songs here have both been played to death every single year since their release, and thoroughly ripped-off in terms of sound and style by seemingly every single hack R&B singer to even so much as glance at a microphone. It's infuriating! And then there's Spector's fantastically ill-advised voice-overs in which he thanks everyone for buying his album... Best to say as little of those as possible. And I've not even touched on the fact that ninety percent of Christmas music is just vapid novelty numbers anyway.

In any event, while this is a good album, I think the main thing that it proves is that Philles records should have just stuck to singles like they apparently seem, for the most part, to have done. It's kind of funny that despite being one of only twelve long-players they put-out it mostly just seems like an over-extended vehicle for its stand-out single. In fact, this is probably the real reason that this album is here - Spector's early work is massively influential, and this provides just about the only chance in LP format to examine it undiluted, even though anyone being honest with themselves would instead recommend a singles compilation of some kind.

So, in a word: a great Christmas album but a somewhat scattershot LP.

7.5/10

Download: Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) Mp3

36. Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1962)

2009-01-18T05:13:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Blowin’ In the Wind//The Girl from North Country//Masters of War//Down the Highway//Bob Dylan’s Blues//A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall//Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright//Bob Dylan’s Dream//Oxford Town//Talking World War III Blues//Corrina, Corrina//Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance//I Shall Be Free

"Unlike most of the songs now days've been written uptown in Tin Pan Alley, that's where most of the folk songs come from now days, this is a song, this wasn't written up there - this was written somewhere down in the United States..."

- "Bob Dylan's Blues"

Oh hey there Bob Dylan, doing your whole bob-dylany thing. You are one the reasons I am doing this list and it is quite nice to have met you at last.

This isn’t actually Dylan’s very first album, but it’s the one everyone pretends was his first since his actual debut is apparently not that great. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, however, is pretty great. It’s simple stuff, really – just Dylan strumming and plucking away at his guitar for the most part, taking breaks from the vocals to let loose with a bit of simple harmonica work. But! Dylan was both quite a fine songwriter and an equally able interpreter of material, and as a consequence manages to overcome his musical limitations and spare backing. The result is a pretty cool mixture of acoustic blues and folk, even stepping over the pond to steal the melody and construction from “Scarborough Fair” for his lovely little love song “The Girl from North Country”. As to the voice he uses to sing it all? Well, a lot of people like to declare Dylan an awful vocalist, but I’d argue that he was really more just a lazy one. Songs like “Visions of Johanna” and the aforementioned “North Country” show that he was capable of summoning something genuinely pretty from his throat, but a lot of the time he goes for emotional more than musical resonance and as a consequence you get the intensely irritating vocals that have become his hallmark. Still, he had character and that makes up for a lot.

Anyway, enough of all that and back to the songs. Most of them are pretty blues, in the whole Jack Elliot way (“Down the Highway” could actually be a left-over track from ...Takes the Floor, judging just by the sound of it). However, Dylan puts his own spin on things, partially I suppose through not being a good enough musician to emulate things perfectly, and creating his own unique sound in the process. Then there’s the fact that he’s a great songwriter, and it’s of course in the lyrics where this whole thing shines. After an age of pop music musing over vague notions of love, here finally is an album with some genuinely great lyrics about genuinely interesting things.

Examples? Well, you want a song about the civil rights movement? How about two! “Blowin’ In the Wind” is a solemn, lyrical mediation on just when exactly equality is going to get its arse into gear and deliver. Not deep, but beautifully phrased and rather moving, and anyway working in the abstract is always more effective when trying to promote a political consciousness. On the opposite end of the scale, “Oxford Town” is a wry bit of reportage about a black guy and his family who get “met with a teargas bomb” in Mississippi, ending with a couple of unfortunates getting lynched. Quite political, yes, but maybe not funny enough. How about “Talking World War III Blues”, a hilarious song where Dylan explains to his doctor a dream he had in which he wakes-up after a nuclear war and wanders around an empty city getting spurned by all the bigoted fools who’ve managed to survive. The best line? How about “I lit a cigarette on a parking meter and walked on down the road... It was a normal day”.

Then you do get some love songs, but these are love songs light years removed from the general vapidity of a Buddy Holly or a Beatle. From the aforementioned “Girl from North Country”, which is a very simple and pretty song with some lovely lyrics, to the bitter and funny break-up number “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, which features the classic line “I ain’t saying you treated me unkind, you could have done better but I don’t mind, you just wasted my precious time – but don’t think twice, it’s alright”.

The two centrepieces of the album, however, are “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. “Masters of War” isn’t really a song I’m especially enamoured of, to be honest. It has a great jangly, sinister guitar part, and it’s full of bitterness and rage at the military industrial complex, but it’s really a rather simple song that succeeds more through pure rage than anything else. It does have a few great lyrics, though: “A world war can be won, you want me to believe – but I see through your eyes, and I see through your brain, like I see through the water that runs down my drain” is pretty neat, I suppose, as is “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled – fear to bring children into this world”. It’s all noble sentiments, but in the end it wears a bit thin – this isn’t the sort of song it’s fun to listen to more than a few times. I guess I just find it a bit dull and preachy.

“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”, however, is a stone cold classic from beginning to end, and the song that got me interested in Dylan in the first place. Oh where have you been, my darling young one? “I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard” –“I met a young woman whose body was burning” – “I met a white man who walked a black dog” – “I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it” – “I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleeding”. On and on the brilliant lyrics pile-up, a shopping list of the horrors of the modern world. It’s almost the perfect protest song, with lines applicable to damned near every woe you’d care to name. Dylan reportedly claimed that he was frightened that he wouldn’t live long enough to write all the songs he wanted to, so instead he crammed the first lines of dozens of prospective songs into this one piece. It’s a great, great song in any event, barely dated after forty years (as depressing a fact as that may be, when I think about it). But, you know, there’s hope in the end – the narrator decides to head out into the horrible landscape he’s just delineated and carry the torch, so to speak. It’s fairly obvious Dylan was engaging in a bit of personal myth-making at this point, but it’s also a marvellous and inspiring tune.

The rest of the songs on this album aren’t quite up to the same standards as those I’ve just discussed, but they’re generally pretty good anyway. The main problem is that they tend to suffer from either being novelty numbers (“Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance”, which is stupid fun but nothing more, or “I Shall Be Free”, which tries real hard to be funny but doesn’t manage to be much more than mildly engaging) or not being about much in particular of interest to the listener (“Down the Highway”, which seems to be about Dylan’s troubles with his then-girlfriend, who had vanished off to Italy at the time). “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is a pretty alright I suppose, or at least tries to be. Dylan’s telling this whole story about how he had a dream about how much he wanted to be back with his friends, and how he would give every penny he had, but while it’s lyrically engaging his performance is so dour that it sinks it for me (judging by this and “Masters of War”, Dylan doesn’t always pan-out when he tries to be really serious – the guy is funny, and thankfully he realised that in time). As for “Corrina, Corrina”, it changes things up by going a little “rock” and incorporating drums and stuff, and manages to be pleasant enough – what really sells this is Dylan’s wonderfully tender vocal. Oh and “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is pretty cool too.

So, thirteen songs, none of them what I’d call “bad” and many of them quite good. This isn’t a perfect album(no perfect album would be 1/3 filler, even if the filler is pretty fine) but it is a very good one and I’m looking forward to Dylan’s next a great deal.

8.5/10

Download: Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall Mp3

Download: Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright Mp3

35. The Beatles - With the Beatles (1962)

2009-01-10T02:16:00.000-08:00

Tracks: It Won;t Be Long//All I've Got to Do//All My Loving//Don't Bother Me//Little Child//Till There Was You//Please Mr Postman//Roll Over Beethoven//Hold Me Tight//You've Really Got A Hold On Me//I Wanna Be Your Man//Devil In Her Heart//Not A Second Time//Money

“My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!”

- James Bond.

Recently a messageboard I frequent had a thread about what music everyone’s parents listened to. It seemed as though almost every poster had grown up hearing the Beatles. I felt very left-out, having had no more than casual exposure to the Beatles until my sister lent me a burnt copy of Revolver when I was almost 18. I didn’t mind it, but by that point my musical tastes had been fairly well-established, and as a result the only song that really clicked with me was “Tomorrow Never Knows”. I did follow up on this, slowly and with a near-complete lack of interest, but I’m still hardly what you’d call a Beatles “fan” in the full-on, “Abbey Road is the single greatest album ever produced” sort of way. I mean, Abbey Road sucks! Most of side A is alright but the medley is a pile of rubbish, and most of the songs are dispensable with the exception of the Harrison numbers and “You Never Give Me Your Money”. Revolver, however! Now that’s a great album! But we’re not discussing Abbey Road or Revolver at the moment and I suppose I should stay on topic or risk another two thousand word review.

The point of all this is that I have a love-hate sort of relationship with the Beatles, in large part fuelled by baseless antagonism, and as a consequence I am encountering almost everything prior to Revolver for the very first time. It’ll be handy to fill-out my historical knowledge a bit, since I’m pretty soft on the British Invasion – even if I am doing this list more to learn about soul music and ramble on about David Bowie.

So! With the Beatles! First British album to ever sell one million copies! Does it deserve such status? The second UK album by the group, rushed into production four months after debut Please Please Me dropped to quench the thirst of Beatlemania, it’s a very, very, very uneven affair. At this point the Beatles were still a Shadows-meets-the-Everly Brothers sort of combo with a rough soul edge – nothing spectacular but still quite capable of writing fine songs. Unfortunately for the better part of this album they fail to do so. We have some great, great songs, of course – I’m especially fond of the early Harrison number “Don’t Bother Me”, which has a great sort of early Stones feel, with some nicely dark, introspective lyrics at odds with the rest of the album. But for every “It Won’t Be Long” or “All My Loving” – big, dumb fun finely done – there’s an example of unmitigated crap such as “Hold Me Tight” and “I Wanna Be Your Man” (basically just the titles, sung over and over and over – apparently the latter was written in five minutes as a favour for the Rolling Stones!) or the shit-tastic cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”. The original is a fine song. This cover is barely bar-band quality.

The covers are a bit of a problem here, actually. There are fourteen tracks on the album, and only 7 originals. Granted, a some of the originals are rubbish too, but it does give some idea of the hastily-assembled, “Who cares about quality as long as it’s saleable” approach to the music. There’s not an ounce of the studio trickery, or even basic quality control, that would come to define the Beatles’ work later in the decade. In fact it all sounds like it was recorded with a tin and some string. “Money” is cool, I suppose – a pretty neat cover that incorporates wacky piano and a nifty guitar riff, and some marvellous backing vocals (still, not as cool as the Flying Lizards). It’s the sound of the Beatles in later years! The sound of A Hard Day’s Night! The sound of not sucking. “Till There Was You” isn’t bad either, with a bouncy sort of jazzy beat and little more than acoustic guitar. It sounds like someone’s playing bongos in the background – does this hint at an early, aborted Afro-Cuban direction for the group? Anyway, it’s not spectacular but Paul is in very fine voice on the track. The singing here is actually, in general, pretty well done. Not bad either (but just “not bad” – I am bugged by the breaks for handclaps) is “Please Mr Postman”, complete with girl group harmonies!

I don’t want to give the impression that I hate this. I don't, really. The problem is just that the last half of the album is (with the exception of “Money”) so! Damned! Irritating! That it completely ruins the goodwill built-up by the first half, which is really fun stuff, with a few genuinely excellent songs. So, I suppose the usual pop-album complaints. I shouldn’t be too hard on it, anyway – if you read the Beatles’ comments on most of the songs then they freely admit that a lot of them were just thrown together in a few seconds.

But then, I think we can afford to be hard on these albums, given how much better the guys would be in later years. So!

5.5/10

Download: The Beatles - Money (That's What I Want) Mp3

Download: The Beatles - Don't Bother Me Mp3

34. Ray Price - Night Life (1962)

2009-01-09T22:46:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Introduction - Theme - Night Life//Lonely Street//The Wild Side of Life//Sittin' & Thinkin'//The Twenty-Fourth Hour//A Girl in the Night//Pride//There's No Fool Like A Young Fool//If She Could See Me Now//Bright Lights and Blonde-Haired Women//Are You Sure?//Let Me Talk to You

"So me and the Cherokee Cowboys are knocking on you record player once more, and we hope that you can just kinda sit back, kick-off your shoes, and relax just a little bit, and listen to our latest album..."

Well, I suppose I should explain myself. You see, I’m following a couple of other “1001 albums” blogs, and the consensus between them seems to be that Ray Price’s Night Life is a ridiculous load of hooey. Myself, however, I quite liked it. In fact if it weren’t for a few unfortunate missteps I might even have loved it. I put the blame with my father, personally – growing-up I was saturated with AM nostalgia stations to the point where I am now perfectly capable of enjoying “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks. My dad also has a considerable fondness for country music, and it’s rubbed off on me to an extent. So, given that Ray Price comes across as some sort of strange fusion of Perry Como and Hank Williams, I’ve been well-equipped by life to appreciate his... unique charms.

Putting excuses aside, this is really a pretty fine album. Apparently it is “honky tonk”, but making overtures towards the “Nashville Sound”. I had no real idea what that meant, so I looked it up – apparently honky-tonky is a stripped-back, rhythmic sort of country music with emphasis on things like pedal steel guitars and melancholy lyrics (so basically stereotypical country), while the Nashville Sound is the slick, pop-influenced style of more heavily orchestrated country music coming out of, well, Nashville during the late 50s and early 60s. I guess Patsy Cline falls into the latter category? There are actually a few songs here that sound a lot like Patsy Cline, largely I suppose because Willie Nelson, who wrote the title track, also wrote the Cline hit “Crazy”.

And speaking of that title track – what a song! A song worth buying an album for! “The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life...” That about sums-up the tenor of this collection, which has actually been referred to as Country’s first concept album. You get a ghostly, reverb-drenched vocal by Price, appropriately downtrodden and mournful lyrics, and some truly awe-inspiring slide work by Buddy Emmons. It’s a beautiful song, and works as a great intro to the album. Certainly better than the album’s actual intro, which consists of Price addressing the listener directly and explaining that he’s about to sing a collection of down-tempo songs about down-trodden bar-flies. We have ears, Ray. We could figure that out for ourselves.

The rest of the album can’t really match “Night Life” for quality, but it does remain top-flight and consistently engaging throughout its length. The lyrics can occasionally be a little silly – I don’t know that anyone can really take the line “I didn’t know god made honky-tonk angles” seriously, aside from Ray price apparently – and their relentless sentimentalism and “woe-is-me” content did grate on me at times, but thankfully this latter aspect is only really a problem when Price sings in the first person. Songs like “There’s No Fool Like A Young Fool” may not be saying anything especially new, but if there’s one thing country music is good for it’s tugging the heart strings, and if there’s one type of person I’ve known a lot of in my life it’s young women who’ve made some fantastically stupid decisions. Unfortunately, it’s a bit patronising, but its heart’s in the right place.

So, to sum up – I quite like this. Even if one ignores the lyrics, Ray Price’s voice is amazing, Buddy Emmons’ guitar is amazing, and there’s a marvellously subtle use of accompanying instruments like barely audible backing vocals and pianos tinkling away miles into the distance. It may be woefully sentimental and at times rather silly, but it’s the perfect sort of album to pop on and drift off to, and I will admit that I find it very, very hard not to sing along. “Bright Lights and Blonde-Haired Women” is catchy as hell!

So, yeah – Country! An excellent album! I bet you like The Trinity Sessions and Neko Case and maybe you should like this too.

8.5/10

Download: Ray Price - Night Life Mp3

2009-01-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Desafinado//Samba Dees Days//O Pato//Samba Triste//Samba de Uma Nota So//E Luxo So//Baia

Hooray bossa nova! Hooray Brazil! Well, I’ll be honest and admit that my exposure to Brazilian music is rather limited and pretty obvious – I’ve heard the first Os Mutantes album, Joia by Caetano Veloso and of course the album everyone’s heard even if they’ve never heard of it, Getz/Gilberto. But I did spend a good part of my first few months with the internet downloading Sergio Mendes tunes from Limewire, so at least there’s that.

I really do like Bossa Nova, though. Many’s the afternoon I’ve whiled away with an Astrud Gilberto compilation on the turntable, drifting of amidst the narcoleptic haze of minor chords. I guess I’m attracted to it for the same reason most people are – it manages to be about as quiet and unassuming as it’s possible for a pop song to be while still remaining complex and interesting. I don’t know how people from Brazil approach it, but I tend to view it as such lovely, sunny music, like an evening breeze. Unfortunately this sort of listenable quietude has given it the reputation of being elevator music, but as I said the joy of good bossa nova is that it doesn’t step across the line into muzak – there’s usually a great deal of tension in the song, keeping it tightly wound and more than a little danceable.

Given my fondness for this sort of thing, I was looking forward to Jazz Samba quite a bit. Saxophonist Stan Getz is one half of the Getz/Gilberto team, and he has such a marvellous cool jazz sort of tone. Getz was instrumental in introducing Brazilian music to American audiences, both through this album and through his collaborations with Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim. He wasn’t the first, granted – Dizzy Gillespie had already been playing “Desafinado” with his big band for a while, and the film Black Orpheus had of course broken Brazilian music in a big way back in 1960. It actually makes sense that Black Orpheus would have that sort of affect on people. It’s actually a very slight, perhaps even vacuous sort of film (once you get past the idea of an all-black cast playing dignified human beings in 1960 – although I’m not sure you can describe anyone as dignified if they spend most of film running about in gold lame short-shorts), but the makers had such an obvious fascination with the ornamental aspects of Brazilian culture, and layer on the sensory overload to such an extend what with all the swirling colours and constant songs and dancing, that I really doubt that anyone in 1960s America could have failed to be moved. For sheer spectacle, Black Orpheus makes Singin’ in the Rain look like A Man Escaped. Plus they had Jobim doing the songs, and that guy is ace.

To get back around to this album, though (although it’s my blog and I am free to ramble as I will) – Stan Getz recruited Charlie Byrd, fresh back from a state-sponsored tour of Brazil, and together they recorded Jazz Samba. “Desafinado” went on to be a massive hit and really lit a fire under the 1960s bossa nova craze. I can see why “Desafinado” would be a smash – it’s a great song to begin with, and benefits especially from Getz’ lovely sax work and the neat little pulsing bass intro. The percussion is a bit busy, though – there is this especially annoying little tick-tick on a drum rim that is through the whole song and bugs the heck out of me. Maybe the beefier percussion is meant to serve as the “samba” element of the album? And then of course there’s also Charlie Byrd’s guitar work... I’ll be perfectly frank and admit that I could do without Charlie Byrd. He’s a very able guitarist, but he solos his way through everything and the results are just too damned busy. There’s also the problem of his being mixed too bloody loud, and the result is an irritating, tinny jangle away in the right channel that just will not shut up! Why can’t he just play nice little warm chords like Joao Gilberto would? I guess that’s the “jazz” element of the album... I shouldn’t be too hard on Byrd, since he was apparently the driving force behind putting the album together, and he does sound alright when he isn’t trying to noodle away at the same time as Getz. He does have terrible guitar tone, though.

All in all, this is a noble and largely successful attempt to “do” Brazilian music. The best songs here are the Jobim numbers “Desafinado” and “Samba de Uma Nota So” and they are genuinely great recordings, thanks in no small part to some great work by dual bassists Keter Betts and Gene Byrd. The fact that there are two bassists does give some idea of the problem inherent in this album, though. It feels over-stuffed and noodly, and that is never something I want to be able to say about a bossa nova album. The drumming isn’t very good, either...

So, if you’re interested in bossa nova then the best bet might be to just download the two tracks below and then get Getz/Gilberto instead. This is a good album, but hardly a classic – the other cuts can’t hold a candle to the two stand-outs, and “Samba Dees Days” is genuinely annoying. Overall it’s given over a little too much to light-jazz noodling. Remember what I said about good bossa nova being able to avoid the pitfalls of muzak? Still, it’s a very listenable album with some genuine highlights contained therein, and I suppose someone who'd never heard this style of music before would adore it.

Having said all of this, the best version of "One Note Samba" is still of course the one Stereolab did with Herbie Mann.

6.5/10

Download: Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd - Desafinado Mp3
Download: Stan Getz & Charlie Byrd - Samba de Uma Nota So Mp3

32. Booker T. & the M.G.'s - Green Onions (1962)

2009-01-08T03:00:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Green Onions//Rinky-Dink//I Got A Woman//Mo'Onions//Twist and Shout//Behave Yourself//Stranger on the Shore//Lonely Avenue//One Who Really Loves You//You Can't Sit Down//A Woman, A Lover. A Friend//Comin' Home Baby

OK, so let's be perfectly honest - I am a complete and utter square. I own terrible "tango for lovers" albums and watch dubious romantic melodramas, and I loved this here Booker T and his M.G.s album too. It's a bundle of badly-dated, go-go boot-wearing, hip-gyrating fun. I say this with some trepidation, as a poke about the internet indicates that most people don't really hold this album in that high a regard. I'll grant that it's hardly a classic, and doesn't really stick with me after listening, but it's still a pretty cool album, all things told.

Booker T. and the M.G.'s were formed as the house band for Stax records, playing on damned near every recording the label put out through the 60s and forging in the process a distinctive "Stax Sound" - tight grooves, cool organs and twangy guitar riffs. And they were one of the very first racially-integrated bands in rock music - two white, and two black - which is a pretty neat thing and carries on from the racial politics and subversiveness of the last album we had, though how much of it was calculated as such is debatable. Anyway, Green Onions was apparently slapped together as a cash-in on the title track, and a part of that can be heard in the number of free in-studio improvisations and in the reliance on covers material. The results are hardly earth-shaking, but this is still some extremely enjoyable music - you get jumping dance music like "Twist and Shout" and the massively-influential "Green Onions", and you get laid-back, swinging affairs like "Lonely Avenue" and "Behave Yourself". It's kind of reminiscent of Jimmy Smith, I guess, except working in a more overtly rocky idiom.

This isn't really essential listening, aside from the title track which you will have already heard even if you don't realise it (it is the riff that sounds just like "Gloria" from Them), and maybe "Comin' Home Baby" which sounds like a dry-run for Seventies cop-show music (oh hey and the cover of "Twist and Shout" is pretty ace, too, once it gets to the big swelling mid section). Oh god! But the title track is just so damned funky and cool, and there's a damned good reason why it managed to be such a big hit - although cranking out the copy-cat "Mo' Onions", as fine as it is, may have been a bit much. Anyway this may not be essential listening, but it is a pretty handy document of the band, who would go on to define so much 60s soul and rock music. Everything from cheesy Italian sci-fi soundtracks to the Beatles and the Doors owe a clear debt to these guys. Plus it is fun! Do the Monkey! Now do the Mashed Potato! Now oh I don't know I'm not Johnny Bravo god damn it.

I kind of wish they had called this album "Leeks".

7/10

Download: Booker T. & the M.G.'s - Green Onions Mp3
Download: Booker T. & the M.G.'s - Comin' Home Baby Mp3

31. Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music (1962)

2009-01-07T19:29:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Bye Bye Love//You Don't Know Me//Half As Much//I Love You So Much It Hurts//Just A Little Lovin'//Born to Lose//Worries Mind//It Makes No Difference Now//You Win Again//Careless Love//I Can't Stop Loving You//Hey, Good Lookin'

Hooray! He's back! A storming, jazzy groove complete with thundering drums and big, joyous sax, and out burst just about the happiest backing vocalists you've ever heard to declare at the top of their voices

Bye bye love

Bye bye happiness

Hello loneliness

I think I'm going to die!

This is one of the swingingest, most upbeat songs we've had yet, and Ray Charles is clearly insane.

One of the best things about this whole venture is that it's introduced me to The Genius of Ray Charles, and now the Genius is here again with another very fine album. Granted, it's also a very different sort of album (something the title has probably clued you in to). Ray Charles had by this point moved over from Atlantic to ABC, securing in the process an astonishing contract that guaranteed him complete artistic freedom. In a wonderful and truly cracked gesture, Charles decided to release an album of pumped-up, swinging covers of country & western standards. The image of a black guy in a dinner jacket belting it out from beside the title "Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music" was probably a bit confusing to some country fans, way back in 1962. Of course in these enlightened days we know far better, what with the vast profusion of black country & western singers pouring out of America and topping charts around the world. But, back then, it may have been something of an oddity.

Of course, the shock value is reduced somewhat by Ray's straight-laced interpretations of the songs. I can just imagine the chagrin of the label execs - "Oh, so you've added a soul groove and funky snare drum to 'You Are My Sunshine', Ray? A bit old hat, isn't it?" That song wasn't actually on the original album, having been added as a bonus track, but that's a pity since it's really an amazing tune. I won't review it though, since I'm like that.

Anyway, putting all that aside Ray Charles does a great job here. The production is much cleaner and more evenly balanced than it was on The Genius of..., which is great since the arrangements here are even bigger and fancier than they were on that album. Swooping backing vocals, massive beds of lush strings, heavenly choirs, funky bass, funky brass, and Ray's excellent piano work all wrap around one another like wicker work, and Ray sits in the middle and spills out all these sad little tales of woe. It's such a strange album, and pulls-off my favourite trick of being suicidally depressing in its lyrical content while for the most part just being so much damned fun. Did Ray Charles invent the Cure? Let's ask Siouxsie Sioux!

Oh, but then there are the sad parts too... The big wooshing strings-and-choir opening on "Worried Mind", for example. And then along comes Ray's piano (you can actually hear the piano on this album!) and, ah, it's just lovely. But god those strings sound beautiful, drenched in reverb and such. And Ray sounds great, too, his voice far lower and more... woody? on this album and providing a lovely contrast with the music.

Look, I can't really thing of much else to say about this except that it's brilliant and you should buy it now if you don't already own it. It's a glimpse into a strange and beautiful world where people can mix Sinatra, Marty Robins and Count Basie . It's such a clever way to blend genres and it deserved the massive commercial success it received. Hell, I downloaded this from the internet but I am going to order a copy on eBay right away!

I don't have a credit card and so I cannot use Amazon.

Ah damn it no-one is selling it.

I'm going to JB Hi-Fi.

9/10

Download: Ray Charles - Makes No Difference Now Mp3

30. Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard

2009-01-06T16:57:00.000-08:00

Track List: Gloria's Steps (Take 2)//My Ma's Gone Now//Solar//Alice in Wonderland (Take 2)//All of You (Take 2)//Jade Visions (Take 2)

This is actually quite an impressive album, although it may be more fun on an intellectual level than when it actually comes to listening to the thing. When we last heard from Bill Evans, he was tickling the old goanna on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue album, and doing a very good job of it too. Evans has a very flowery, pretty style, and it worked wonderfully in the context of Davis' slightly more... aggressive? musical approach. Left to his own devices, however, Evans allows this tendency to run free, and the result is an album which is extremely listenable, but which could easily be dismissed as intellectualist elevator music.

It's actually kind of funny, in it's way - despite the surface prettiness of the album, it makes a lot of demands on the listener. I suppose I like overtly jarring music because it forces me to examine what's going on almost against my will. Here, however, I'm perfectly capable of ignoring all the harmonic complexities and virtuoso playing and, ashamed as I am to admit it, this is in large part what I did.

Which is really a pity on my part, since this is actually a very good album. A live set, it was apparently structured around Evans' desire to showcase the bass-playing of Scott LaFaro, even opening and closing with LaFaro compositions filled-out by a few standards. This turned-out to be a good move on Evans' part, since LaFaro died just days after recording this, almost certainly the last thing he ever put to tape. LaFaro is truly a brilliant bassist, adept at everything from big, fat, loping rhythms to Jaco Pastorius-style avant-noodling. He anchors this set, but never really takes control. The most interesting thing about this album is the way that no-one really leads in these compositions - well, that's not strictly true, since Evans is usually anchoring the tracks with a main theme which gets reworked and repeated throughout the track to hold it all together. But, you know, the bass, drums and pianos merge perfectly into a sort of seething ocean of sound. Harmonically, it's very complex, following on from the whole "modal" notion of everyone moving within scales that work together and creation interest through forward momentum and harmonic tension more than big, flashy chord changes. The most obvious point of comparison would be the noodly bits on Kind of Blue, except that I actually think this manages to pull this off a little better at times, even if it isn't always as immediately likeable.

I don't know how I feel about this album. It's quite pretty, and very interesting if I pay attention to it, but nothing about it really grabs me... This is especially true if one takes into account the fact that most of the songs are extremely similar on a casual listen. Though they raise the tempo in "Alice in Wonderland", giving the album a nice, upbeat centrepoint.

Still, it may be brilliant but it doesn't really grab me, and so I am not going to give it a brilliant mark!

7.5/10

Download: Bill Evans Trio - My Man's Gone Mp3

Muddy Waters - At Newport 1960

2008-12-15T23:16:00.000-08:00

Tracks: I Got My Brand on You//(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man//Baby Please Don't Go//Soon Forgotten//Tiger in Your Tank//I've Got My Mojo Working//I've Got My Mojo Working (Part 2)// Goodbye Newport Blues

NOTE TO THE READER - Since first reviewing this album I have listened to it yet again, and I like it a lot more than I did initially. 8.5/10

I don't go into albums hoping to be disappointed. In fact I listen to very few albums that I dislike, since I try to pick and choose and avoid stuff that I know I won't enjoy. The problem with a list like this, however, is that it frequently thrusts me into contact with things that, while excellent representations of their style and times, are not the sort of music I'd ever really want to listen to.

Which is a long way of saying that I guess this is pretty good, but it's not really my thing. I don’t know, it’s not really my thing. It’s a very well-played album, and the melodies are generally very strong, but Muddy Waters sings everything in such a stiff style that it doesn’t really resonate. Ok, so this is a brilliant album by the standards of electric blues – it’s just that I’ve never been a huge fan of electric blues. So, while I don’t really care for it all that much I will give it very high marks and urge people to go listen to it I guess. I like Howlin’ Wolf – is that enough?

Putting aside personal reservations, this is a very impressive album. The arrangements are dense and complex, folding tinkling piano and smooth underwater harmonica together over a plodding, boom-bap drum beat through which Waters occasionally sees fit to slither his rather impressive guitar. There’s some nifty slide work, and lots of fancy bends, and in the end the guitar sounds almost as much like the harmonica as the harmonica does. Then, Muddy, while he may have a vocal rhythm I’m not all that taken with, does have a wonderful deep voice, like a piece of oak. And he changes it up a bit, too – you get long, slow stuff on “I Got My Brand On You”, while “Tiger in Your Tank” is positively snappy – lots of toe-tapping fun. Hell the bridge on “Tiger in Your Tank” even rocks, and hard, with some amazing slithery guitar work. After “Tiger in Your Tank” things pick-up significantly, actually – Muddy Waters sounds much more natural in his vocals and everything swings without the stiffness of earlier on. The apex of this is the two-part “I Got My Mojo Working”, which lasts seven minutes and roars along on a snare drum, a snappy piano vamp and the handclaps of the audience. There's call-and-response vocals and amazing propulsive drumming and it's one of the hardest rocking things we've had so far. And then they do it all over again.

You get lots of pretty good stuff here. Technically, it’s very impressive, and the material is very strong. Most of the problems I have with it might actually be attributable to the fact that this is a live recording, and so loses a lot of the dense, low-fi, smoky charm of a studio recording.

I will never be the biggest fan of this sort of stuff, but it’s a very fine album, and managed to impress me despite myself. I think I think the problem might just be that it's one of those albums that isn't brilliant overall, but which has a few tracks that are good enough to make it essential listening. It’s a great example of Chicago blues, anyway, fusing gospel, jazz and, well, blues, into something extremely impressive - and Waters had an obvious hand in fellows such as James Brown and the Rolling Stones. I just wish Waters actually cared what he was singing about on the earlier songs, instead of just using the lyrics as a vehicle for his up-beat shouting. I mean, he did a great slow song with the closing "Goodbye Newport Blues"! It's a genuinely affecting song in which Muddy seems to really care about what he's singing, talking about his music and his life instead of cliche nonsense about doing chicks. I guess he just had to work up to it. This is a problem with live albums, I suppose. On the one hand you capture the moment but on the other you have to spend half the album waiting for the moment to arrive.

I am doing a bad review of this album but I don’t care.

7.5/10

Download: Muddy Waters - I've Got My Mojo Working Mp3

Download: Muddy Waters - Goodbye Newport Blues Mp3

28. The Incredible Jimmy Smith - Back at the Chicken Shack (1956)

2008-12-01T21:24:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Back at the Chicken Shack//When I Grow Too Old to Dream//Minor Chant//Messy Bessy//On the Sunny Side of the Street

I feel as though I should like this more than I do. I mean, it’s on the list isn’t it? That means it must be either very good or very important – or possibly both. Well, in this instance I know it’s the latter. Jimmy Smith is apparently responsible for popularising the use of the Hammond organ in jazz, which is kind of a big deal. He does make a good case for it – he mimics an upright bass with considerable alacrity, carrying the songs on simple walking lines and some interesting comping and subtle melodics. Every now and then, he busts out a solo, and he does quite well there, too. As a consequence of all the organ everywhere, the result is a feel much closer to the blues than to straight jazz, and it’s probably for this reason that people tend to type this as a new, hybrid form – soul-jazz.

In keeping with this “soulful” bent, things are by and large quite laid back and relaxed. There aren’t many grand gestures here. The result is something extremely pleasant and listenable, more about a sustained and cheery mood than anything else. The organ chugs along, there’s some subtle yet persistent drumming back in there somewhere, and the solos are for the better part taken by a smoky sax on the right and a gently Latinate guitar on the right. It’s extremely cool and soothing.

Unfortunately, this also translates into it not always being immediately dazzling. I do like this album, but I doubt I could ever care about it. I have always liked the Hammond, but at the same time I’ve never been all that fond of smoky, switched-on blues. This is the sort of stuff you’d expect to hear playing in a middle-brow art house cinema before the film starts. I don’t have much of a problem with it, I suppose, but it’s not doing much to excite me beyond featuring an organ.

Which, I suppose, is unfair to Jimmy Smith. Look at the cover – he’s not trying to change the world. I’m basically criticising this for being exactly what it sets out to be – pleasant, frequently silly mood music for summer afternoons spend frying things on a hotplate. Smith’s captured the feel of late February wonderfully, and he’s owed props for that. This is a charming, unpretentious little album, worth checking by anyone with a fondness for either soul or jazz. It swings when it needs to and grooves fine most of the rest of the time, and that’s probably enough. The title track builds gradually in insistency throughout its length without ever breaking a sweat, and is ideal for either slow dances or fucking. “Minor Chant” has a neat little melody that I’m sure I’ve heard somewhere before and some pretty cool break-out drum solos. And “Messy Bessy” has a great mid section where everything falls in together and gradually just gets more, I don’t know... “Intense” seems like an inappropriate word to use in connection with an album this determinedly relaxed.

So! I put this album on again intent on giving it a poor review, and instead it works its magic on me and I end up reviewing it poorly. I do feel less tense, now. I have taken a nap in two years, but now I sort of want to. I can almost feel Smith, reaching out from the aether, gently rubbing his key-polished fingers into the rigid cords of my trapezius. No real high or low points, just sort of there, but in a good way. I suppose in that sense it manages to sum up most everything I love and hate about jazz in one package.

And hey! It's basically all the good parts of the first Doors album with a sense of humour and none of the shit, so it's worth it just for that.

7.5/10

Download: The Incredible Jimmy Smith - Back at the Chicken Shack Mp3

2008-11-29T00:45:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Made to Love//That's Just Too Much//Stick With Me Baby//Baby What You Want Me To Do//Sigh, Cry, Almost Die//Always It's You//Love Hurts//Lucille//So How Come (No One Loves Me)//Donna, Donna//A Change of Heart//Cathy's Clown

The Everly brothers do have a lot of good ideas. They take the basic Buddy Holly country-rock template, graft on their impressive close-harmony singing, and then flesh things out with wide-ranging borrowing from other fields of pop and rock. Album-opener “Made to Love” boasts a surfy Link Ray beat and vocals that wouldn’t be out of place in a doo-wop song. “Cathy’s Clown”, the most interesting track in sonic terms, features a staggered marching-band beat over which the Everlys caterwaul melancholically in a style directly comparable with the early Beatles (who ripped-off this song). It has more in common with an old-fashioned pop song of the type one expects Doris Day to start belting out than the bluesy nonsense of Elvis and his like, complete with time changes and several clearly distinct sections.

Obviously, the levels of writing are considerably higher than usual, with a lot more chord changes and a more sophisticated approach to melody. And the arrangements are fascinating - guitars are layered and positively swirl, while “Always It’s You” boasts a glockenspiel and elaborate studio delay effects – gone is the irritating cheapness which has dogged all the rock albums on the list up to this point, and I for one thing that it’s about damned time. And hey, Roy Orbison ripped-off both “Love Hurts” (“You Got It”) and “Lucille” (“Pretty Woman”), so there’s that.

So, the Everlys have a lot of interesting ideas. Unfortunately they aren’t always being put in the service of memorable songs. “Made to Love” is a great catchy fist-pumper with empty-headed yet oddly endearing lyrics about women being programmed for love (Ah! To hear Dietrich cover this). “Donna, Donna” is similarly grand, yet less affirmative and more about how badly Donna screwed the Everlys over. And “Cathy’s Clown” is simultaneously the oddest song here and intensely enjoyable. All good there – the problem is, that’s only three songs on a twelve song album.

The other tracks aren’t worthless, they’re just not hit-you-in-the-face amazing. Lyrically, this is a very shallow affair – the Everly Brothers do an admirable job of capturing the Teenage Condition, but unfortunately the Teenage Condition is exceptionally tedious, relying as it does almost entirely on gut-reaction tear-jerking and pleas to the heart - a quick read of the track list tells you all you need to know. And look at the cover! Are you sad? Well, no fear - the Everly Borthers will date you even if no-one else will. If you can give yourself over to an entire album of self-absorbed whining then it’s a lot of fun, but you’re probably better off either ignoring the lyrics or listening to this just after the captain of the varsity football team gave Becky Winthrop his pin instead of you. And I mean ugh! She is such a slut! I mean, everyone knows she went down on Buck Jones in the back of his Plymouth after the Castle Beach Clam Bake. Oh god I am so fat... And if I don’t lose at least ten pounds then how am I ever going to marry Frankie Avalon?

Putting personal matters aside, this is a pretty good pop album. It has a few great moments, and is uniformly enjoyable – and how many albums can you point to where all the songs are good? Not many, really. And I may have complained of the simplicity of the lyrics, but on the other hand it does add a nice bit of immediacy to things. Plus, all the songs are short – about 2:20 on average – and both very slick and highly melodic. It may be sort of inconsequential, but then again pop music isn’t meant to be art. It’s meant to be a fun time or a simplistic augmentation of your current emotional state. And on that level, and as an interesting and important progresion in the development of rock, this more than delivers.

7.5/10

26. Miriam Makeba – Miriam Makeba (1960)

2008-11-23T22:32:00.000-08:00

Tracks: The Retreat Song//Suliram//The Click Song//Umhome//Olilili//Lakutshn, Ilanga//Mbube//The Naughty Little Flea//Where Does It Lead?//Novema//House of the Rising Sun//House of the Rising Sun//Saduva//One More Dance//Iya Guduza

Well, this is a nice album, although I get the feeling they may have included it more because it’s Miriam Makeba’s debut than anything else. Is this an important album in the history of African music? Well, it has “The Click Song” on it, and that was a big hit in the West, so maybe it is. I poke about on the net and no-one ever seems to mention this that much. Miriam Makeba is a big deal, anyway, what with having been a major anti-apartheid and civil rights activist and getting exiled from South Africa during a trip to the USA - so I suppose it warrants inclusion on that point alone.

Of course, saying all that makes it seem as though I don’t think much of this. It’s good, though. Quite good. Frequently, very good, and perhaps at times even great. Makeba does a lot of different things here, and she manages to do most of them well. This suits her background – a South African with a jazz background and strong interest music folk, classical and pop. I guess that makes her a lot like Nina Simone, although Simone would have been less inclined to fill her album with jaunty calypso numbers about naughty fleas wanting a bite of Brigitte Bardot. Ah, but then I don’t actually know if some of these songs are calypso – they sound like calypso, but then where exactly is the line between Afro-Caribbean and straight-up African? I don’t know much about African music, and almost everything I do know is limited to West Africa, with folks like Fela Kuti and Bembeya Jazz National and Konono No.1 and all that jazz (quite literally). Miriam Makeba may have lived in Guinea for a time, but that was all well into the future and there isn’t all that much that’s Guinean about the music here. So, my frame of reference for South African music is limited largely to this, and to Paul Simon’s Graceland. And there isn’t much that sounds like Graceland here, either.

Putting my incoherent rambling aside. The predominant modes here are down-tempo jazz with a light guitar backing, like you might expect to here on a 50s Julie London album, and big boisterous African-style tunes (no I do not know the name of the genre) with lots of call-and-response vocals and deep, chanted rhythms. But, Makeba mixes it up, and the results on both fronts are something curiously quintessential in character. Some of the most revelatory moments are the ones where she just sings a cappella as a lead-in to some of the songs. Her voice really is extraordinary.

There are some very good songs here, and only two that even approach bad. “House of the Rising Sun” is sort of mangled, since Makeba attempts a sort of jazzy deconstruction and doesn’t quite pull it off. Her voice is beautiful – something that holds true for all the songs here – but as a composition it’s a little disjointed. “One More Dance” has immense novelty value, as it is just so incredibly weird. Basically, Miriam duets a rather standard song in the vein of “Baby it’s cold outside”, with the difference being that the song is about her putting off going home to tend to her dying husband, and the man she is dueting with is, throughout the song, in paroxysms of laughter. Actually I don’t know if it’s fair to call the song bad, so much as it is just so extraordinarily weird.

On the flipside, however, we have three songs that are absolutely extraordinary. Firstly, there’s “Mbube”, which is sort of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” except that it is far more complicated and fun and exciting, does not have the wimmuways, and is generally just better all round than the more well-known version. Hell, it's just glorious really. Secondly, there’s “Where Does It Lead”, which is an utterly beautiful folk ballad which is really the main reason I mentioned Nina Simone in the second paragraph. Makeba sings at full force over a sparse, faintly Latin guitar backing, and it’s really just utterly mesmerising stuff. There’s a sort of stiff, classical character to the vocal which gives it an otherworldly air. And then there’s “The Click Song”, which gets its name from the fact that it’s sung in Xhosa, and as a consequence features a quasi-tango rhythm lots of, well, clicks. But then it also features these delightful little growls, and they remind me of an African housemate I used to have who would get angry sometimes, and who I had something of a crush on. So. Lola, if you are reading this – you are pretty.

Between all of this is a lot of other great stuff. “Novema” is a lazy, up-lifting song with wonderful rhythm. Makeba has such a tremendous ability to put joy into her songs. It helps, I suppose, that a lot of them are just overlapping rhythmical interplay seemingly built around the concept of shouting joyously. This is a quite an understated album, really, and mostly just coasts along in a series of cheery, laid-back grooves. I have absolutely no idea what Makeba is singing about, but it sounds great and that’s really enough for me. I mean, “The Retreat Song” sounds happy as hell, so I have no idea what they’re retreating from. Although she may just be happy to run away. Who knows? People who speak the language, and ethno-musicologists, probably.

I have realised at this point that most of what I could say about this album is kind of just repeating myself. It’s really good, anyway. The fact that I don’t understand the lyrics means that I can’t really appreciate it as a particularly deep experience, but the mix of African and Western styles combined with the generally blissful, earthy tone meant that I enjoyed it anyway.

Although it is kind of funny to hear stereotypical late-fifties “oohing” choirs on an album like this. It certainly pushes the gospel aspect forward a bit.

8.5/10

Download: Miriam Makeba - The Click Song Mp3
Download: Miriam Makeba - Mbube Mp3
Download: Miriam Makeba - Where Does It Lead? Mp3

25. Elvis Presley – Elvis Is Back! (1960)

2008-11-22T18:14:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Make Me Know It//Fever//The Girl of My Best Friend//I Will Be Home Again//Dirty, Dirty Feeling//Thrill of Your Love//Soldier Boy//Such A Night//It Feels So Right//Girl Next Door Went a-Walking//Like A Baby//Reconsider Baby

Yes, Elvis is back and better than ever! I couldn’t resist saying that, and I’m sorry. It’s not even particularly accurate – I mean, yes this a better album than Elvis Presley was, but that’s not really saying all that much. And there’s the fact that I said most of what I have to say about Elvis back in my review of his debut... Well, let’s get on with it.

Firstly, just what is Elvis back from? The army and a corresponding drop in public profile, that’s what. Elvis got called-up in ’57, and after finishing filming on King Creole he was promptly shipped-off to Germany for two years, where he would no doubt spend a great deal of time mucking-about in tanks and making lewd comments about bratwurst. And fun as that may be, it also meant two years without new Elvis! These days a two-year break between albums might not seem like that big a deal but back in the late fifties, acts were popping-out two or three albums a year -often more. And now such a drastic ebb in the tide of Elvis. How would the world survive in such a horrible state? It’s like the Ruskies finally dropped the bomb and we’re suddenly living on tinned beans and old lingerie catalogues. How terrifying.

Well, the stop-gap solution was that RCA did a bit of a Buddy Holly, and kept releasing singles and albums from a stockpile they had accumulated during intense recording prior to his enlistment. And it worked. So even though he was half-way around the world he’d never really gone away (what a relief). But he couldn’t do live shows and he couldn’t do media appearances, and so people started to get a bit antsy. This is a guy who was arguably more about the image than the music, after all. And then throughout there was the deep curiosity as to whether, when he finally did get back from Germany, Elvis would still have “it” (whatever the hell “it” is).

The short answer is, yes, although “it” may in fact be at least a couple of years out of date. While there’s nothing really wrong with Elvis is Back, it’s not the most instantly exciting stuff. It’s just a solidly enjoyable slab of turn-of-the-60s pop rock, with no real highs or lows. If that’s enough for you, then great! Although personally I’d sort of hoped, given his reputation, that Elvis might deliver something a little more exciting given all his years of experience.

Still, it’s a qualitive leap of considerable proportions from the rather scatter-shot realm of his debut. Which is only to be expected - by this point they’d been putting out his albums for several years, and had a very clear idea of both who Elvis was and how he (or his creative team) should be presenting himself. So this is a very polished effort. The songs are all catchy, immediately likeable and well-performed. Personally I’m not all that taken with Elvis rather muddled attempt at “Fever”, but considering the Peggy Lee version is one of my absolute favourite songs that’s only to be expected. I mean, it started-out as a rock tune so maybe, when compared to the original, this is a dazzling work of genius. Maybe. To my ears it just sounds poorly mixed and Elvis is a little off the beat. Those finger-snaps are just ill-advised.

But hey, there’s a lot of other stuff that’s actually pretty good. A few songs even manage to step beyond being “pretty good” and into the realm of genuine, rocky greatness! “The Girl Next Door Went Walking” is just such fun. I am a fan of any song built around a double entendre, it’s true. It’s better than “Dirty, Dirty Feeling”, anyway, which has great rhythm but features a rather bizarre and perhaps ill-advised “minstrelesque” vocal. Still, that’s immediately followed by “Thrill of Your Love”, which is a gorgeous piano-led ballad with very clear R&B influences but without the silly voice, so it all balances out. Ah, and there is a much bigger emphasis on balladeering by this point, which is good, since Elvis really does excel at ballads. “Soldier Boy” is just lovely, and has obvious resonance (however manufactured) with Elvis’ own recent past. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to get the bobby-soxers swooning. Oh god! And the break-out chorus on “Such A Night”. Heh, and then all the little orgasmic moans. For a guy who reportedly had so much trouble with women, Elvis sure could be a sexy devil. I suppose the Jordanaires help more than a little. Actually scratch that the Jordanaires help a whole lot. The see-sawing backing vocals on “Like A Baby” are just amazing.

Anyway, this broader variety is what really makes the album work. It’s short, and it changes it up a bit, and the result is something that’s constantly entertaining even if it’s not especially deep. The lyrics are decent, the songs are fun, and Elvis throws himself into the performances without ever lapsing into the twitchy lunacy that marred his earlier performances (although doing a sub-par Ray Charles impression on “Reconsider Baby” may be just as great a crime – the song works, but not till he drops the mimicry and goes his own way). The songs have a focused, restrained compositional approach that lets them rock-out without ever becoming annoying. So, it’s not as raw and dirty as a lot of black music Elvis is drawing on, but if I wanted that I would just go and listen to Howlin’ Wolf or something. By this point in his career, Elvis seems to have a much surer sense of himself as a "pop" rather than a "rock" musician, and his music is nothing if not the better for it.

So, this is one of those albums where I start writing the review with one opinion and by the end of it I’ve done a complete 180. Elvis delivers a solidly enjoyable rock album that ticks all the boxes for what I’d want from something of this period, and frequently manages to veer into something like greatness. I never really bought the Elvis myth, and even if I still haven't changed my mind, albums like this are enough to make me understand where all the obsessive whack-jobs are coming from. Hell, if it weren't for "Fever" I might even give this album a 9.

Anyway, pretty darn good.

8/10

Download: Elvis Presley - The Girl Next Door Went a-Walking Mp3
Download - Elvis Presley - The Thrill of Your Love Mp3

Joan Baez – Joan Baez (1960)

2008-11-19T00:53:00.000-08:00

Tracks: Silver Dagger//East Virginia//Fare Thee Well//House of the Rising Sun//All My Trials//Wildwood Flower//Donna Donna//John Riley//Rake & Rambling Boy//Little Moses//Mary Hamilton//Henry Martin//El Preso Numero Uno

We’ll never get anywhere at this rate...

Well, here’s the 60s, and we open with one of the most iconic styles of the decade – folk – and one of its most iconic figures – Joan Baez, naturally.

It’s difficult to say all that much about Joan Baez as a musician. Yes, she was seemingly everywhere when it came to activism and hobnobbing. She introduced the world to Bob Dylan! She developed a specialised form of yoga which allowed her to splinter into several thousand simulacra of herself, thus explaining her ability to appear in footage of seemingly every major political event of the early to mid 60s. She and her friends got together at a concert once and pestered Tom Waits off the stage. All fascinating and admirable of course, but leaving that aside is there really all that much to say about a young woman crooning along to a guitar?

Well, to Baez credit she did do it first. The album was recorded live with her sitting down on the floor in a hall somewhere or other – as Baez put it, at the time it was probably all she knew how to do. Well, thankfully she did it well. Not only does she possess a truly extraordinary voice, with a steady vibrato and near-inhuman control, but she was also a pretty good guitarist, and for some reason no matter how tired I sometimes get of rock music, I can always stomach a lightly handled acoustic guitar. Although putting good points aside, Christ but she doesn’t half belt at times. The high notes are enough to level a bunker.

Lyrically, we get the standard selection of songs from the folk repertoire, most of them kind of depressing. There’s even an alternative version of “Silver Dagger”, which we last heard on the Louvin Brothers album. Hey, that’s kind of neat. This seems to have been before the song-writing trend really took off in folk, back when it was all about being an interpretive artist and being “authentic” and such nonsense. All well and good but somewhat limiting. Then again, can Joan Baez even write? I don’t know – but she does fine singing these tunes and it’d probably be best if I focused on that a bit more. And hey, she slips in a few Spanish-American ditties too, which is only appropriate given her last name and gives the album a little something to make it stand-out amidst all the more resolutely blues-oriented stuff. The fact that "El Preso Numero Nueve" is actually pretty great is just the icing on the cake. Honestly, she gets angry and I fall in love a little.

But, like I said, there’s not much to say. On the one hand, this is groundbreaking stuff – it doesn’t sound like the 50s at all. Baez puts her stamp across everything, thoroughly updating some rather elderly tunes. “The 60s” have definitely arrived. Clear, clean production and a dynamic approach which is just sort of.. different. The results are, quite frankly, fucking amazing. I mean, look at a song like "The House of Rising Sun", which by a simple switch of gender pronouns turns from being a poor me story about debauching into a harrowing tale of girls trapped in prostitution. That's impressive And yet through the whole album we are mercifully spared overt politicising, with Baez instead couching her criticisms within the simple humanistic stories of the folk tradition. That's one of the things I've always like about folk and gospel music. But on the other hand, so many people have followed in her footsteps that close analysis seems almost irrelevant. Although having said that, as much as Sandy Denny owes to Joan Baez the two don’t really sound much alike.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m even talking about anymore. This is a very good, very beautiful album. As an interpreter of songs, you’d be hard-pressed to find many better. At turns eerie, funny, sad and just sort of there (in a good way). And then you have haunting and delicate tunes like "Mary Hamilton". Oh god, and the part where she sings "HE shall turn robber" in "Henry Martin". It's a song to send chills down your spine, her voice doing little tumbles like a trapeze artist.

Oh great now I have a crush on Joan Baez.

8.5

Download: Joan Baez - Silver Dagger MP3

Download: Joan Baez - Henry Martin MP3
Download: Joan Baez - El Preso Numero Neueve MP3

23. The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out (1959)

2008-11-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Blue Rondo A La Turk//Strange Meadow Lark//Three to Get Ready//Kathy's Waltz//Everybody's Jumpin'//Pick Up Sticks

I'm back! Assuming anyone realised I was gone. My excuse? Well, I guess I like the Fifties so much I just never wanted it to end. But, end it must. Doff your slacks and clear-out your bomb shelters, the Fifties are out of time. So here's Time Out.

There are so many strange things about this album. Strangest of all is that it reached number 2 in the charts. Listening to the dizzying, jagged rhythms that open "Blue Rondo A La Turk", it's fair to say that it doesn't seem like the likeliest of pop hits. I mean, look at the cover - it's a piece of thoroughly modern art. The music, meanwhile, consists of a range of carefully studied fusions of contemporary classical music with Eastern traditional music and jazz, most of it in funny time signatures.

The time signatures are, of course, the point of the album (yet another pun - what is with jazz albums and puns?), although the greater bulk of the music is in 4/4 or waltz time, which makes it slightly less impressive. Still, consider - up until around this time, damned near every single jazz tune had been in 4/4 or waltz time. The most adventurous time signature we've had till now was double waltz on Kind of Blue. "Blue Rondo A La Turk" opens in 9/8 and sounds like a thunderstorm in a glass factory. "Take Five" is in 5/4 (yet somehow managed to be a top ten single). The reason for this is that apparently the Quartet went on a military tour of the Middle East, where they were exposed to Levantine dance rhythms. They thought to themselves "Hey, if the Turks can swing to this then why can't we", and of course the rest is history.

People were angry with Dave Brubeck about this. They told him he'd gone to far in mucking about with the 4/4 foundations of jazz. And then they went and said that a lot of the music on this album wasn't even jazz to begin with. And to be fair, a lot of the music here is not always especially jazzy - but if it's not jazz, then we'd have to invent a new category of music for it, so let's just call a spade a spade and head for the club. Really, Dave Brubeck's piano sounds like a Picasso painting more than anything (he owes a debt to Monk - that much is obvious). I really hate these wags who go about trying to declare something "jazz" or "not jazz". Most of the time they're just fusty old jerks who want to sit alone at home doing possibly illegal things to their Duke Ellington collections. Things evolve! Everything evolves! It's like those punk rock guys who think that keyboards are the tool of the devil and it's wrong of you to ever use more than four chords in a song. This album was integral in opening jazz up to a whole host of "Bach to Jazz" and treacly semi-classical albums. To my mind, jazz is just putting the blues on classical or the classical in blues, and if that's not good enough for you then go back to Dixie and have a lot of fun with your marching bands.

In the spirit of this album's spirit, I've decided to break with convention myself and present my notes for each of the individual tracks:

Blue Rondo A La Turk – Truly amazing composition that regrettably lapses into what is actually a pretty solid bit of bop. I say “regrettably” because, firstly, it doesn’t really fit the strange nature of the rest of the piece. This is nightclub jazz that suddenly appears out of nowhere halfway through an elaborate bit of dazzling minimalism-meets-jagged, see-sawing Eastern folk. Still, the fact that they tie such disparate elements is what ultimately makes this song so impressive – this is basically a full-on classical suite in the jazz idiom.

Strange Meadow Lark – A very pretty piece. Opens with an pretty, angular extended solo piano introduction in a semi-classical mode . There is very little, if any, blues on the intro. It’s tied to the blues in the same way one of the Beatles’ chamber-pop tunes is. This is a large part of what got Brubeck dismissed by some folks – he wasn’t bluesy or traditional enough. The main body of the song is much more “jazz” and “blues”, and sounds oddly like “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans”. The sound of the clarinet does a lot to make this album, but then the harmonic innovations are also quite impressive. Jazz should evolve, or it’ll become a museum piece. The solo piano outro is also gorgeous. The solo piano here really makes this piece, and I wish they’d focused more on that than on a pleasant but ultimately inconsequential jam.

Take Five – This song still sounds quite like nothing else. Like Brubeck and Co inventing Krautrock and funk ten years early. That jerky little piano riff is utterly captivating, and the drumming is truly exceptional. The drum solo taken here is astonishing, like cannon fire. My favourite quote regarding this album is clarinettist Paul Desmond’s remark that “Take Five” wasn’t written to be a pop hit, it was written to be a drum solo for Joe Morello. The funny thing is, however, that Brubeck and Co are at their best performing things that soundly like fully-composed songs. But the thing that really sells this is the supremely melodic clarinet playing. Who doesn’t know that melody? It’s astonishing. One of the finest melody lines ever produced and single-handedly responsible for the mega-selling status of what is actually a pretty weird album, when you think about it. This song doesn’t sound like music created by humans.

Three to Get Ready – This has a lovely little rising piano melody that can only be called “charming”.

Kathy’s Waltz – Lovely little clarinet bit here, swinging around like a circus melody and utterly gorgeous. There’s a piano transition that sounds exactly like “All My Loving” by the Beatles. Utterly gorgeous crashing solo piano closer that brings back the “All My Loving” melody but buries it under lots of water chords.

Everybody’s Jumpin’ – this is one of those instrumental songs where you can actually hear the clarinet and piano cry “Everybody’s Jumpin!”. It doesn’t need words. And then Brubeck goes off on these utterly astonishing, chiming piano chords that just repeat and repeat like a jack hammer, faster than I’d thought possible. Amazing.

Pick Up Sticks – Most straightforward here. Nice cymbal clatter. Plenty of jaunty piano comping. Lovely clarinet solo. Very “Kind of Blue”. Certainly the most succesful bit of straight-up jazz on display. Brubeck’s trademark jerky piano is all over the place with some love chords doing utterly wonderful, clattering things. This is Brubeck’s chance to shine and he does some astonishing things with chords. And then Morello comes in to close the track out on beats that sound like wood being chopped.

And there you have it. Is this a great album? It's a pretty good one. Unfortunately the experimentation which makes it so unique and compelling also undercuts the strengths of some of the songs In the end, however, this is a remarkable piece of work - it's not just "Take Five" with a few extra tracks tacked on, no sir it isn't. It's not the best jazz album we've had so far, either, though it's certainly interesting and unique, and it certainly managed to do its job in breaking new ground as to what you could get away with in jazz while still being popular.

So basically I guess the lesson we learned today is that people will let anything slide if you've got a way with melody.

8.5/10

Download: The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Blue Rondo A La Turk MP3

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

2008-10-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-24T18:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-08T06:42:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-07T06:54:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-05T00:49:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-03T19:32:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

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)

2008-10-01T03:34:00.000-07:00

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

6. Duke Ellington - Duke Ellington at Newport (1956)

2008-09-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

CD 1: Star-Spangled Banner//Farmer Norman O'Connor introduces the Duke & Orchestra; Duke introduces Tune and Anderson, Jackson & Procope//Black and Tan Fantasy//Duke Introduces Cook & Tune//Tea for Two//Duke & Band leave stage; Father Norman O'Connor talks about the festival//Take the 'A' Train//Duke announces Strayhorn's & Nance; Duke introduces Festival Suite, Part I & Hamilton//Part I - Festival Junction (Live)//Duke announces soloists; introduces Part II (Live)//Part II - Blues to Be There (Live)// Duke announces Nance and Procope; introduces Part III (Live)//Part III - Newport Up (Live)//Duke announces Hamilton, Gonsalves, & Terry; Duke introduces Carny & Tune (Live)//Sophisticated Lady (Live)//Duke announces Grissom & Tune (Live)//Day In, Day Out (Live)//Duke introduces Tunes and Paul Gonsalves Interludes (Live)//Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue (Live)//Announcements, Pandemonium (Live)//Pause

CD 2: Duke Introduces Johnny Hodges//I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)//Jeep's Blues//Duke calms crowd; introduces Nance and Tune//Tulip or Turnip//Riot Prevention//Skin Deep//Mood Indigo//Studio Concert//Father Norman O'Connor introduces Ellington; Ellington introduces New Work Part I//Part I - Festival Junction//Duke announces soloists; introduces Part II//Part II - Blues to Be There//Duke announces Nance and Procope; introduces Part III//Part III - Newport Up//Duke announces Hamilton, Gonsalves & Terry; Pause; Duke introduces Johnny Hodges; I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)// Jeep's Blues//Pause

Ellington’s career was more or less on the out in 1956. He was still good, and his band was still good – the new material debuted on this album shows that - but public interest simply wasn’t there. Two reasons are usually cited for this. On the one hand, big bands had been losing ground to individual singers since the 40s, until the point where they were more or less restricted to novelty acts. On the other, be-bop had hit, and jazz fans were being polarised to the point where the genre was becoming an intellectual rather than a popular pursuit. Complex, befuddling art may be great and all, but it seldom makes enough money to keep a touring unit of over twenty musicians in bread and board. Furthermore, Ellington was, let’s face it, a little out of his depth. His style of elaborately orchestrated, poppy composition had been groundbreaking and influential in its day, wasn’t the sort of thing that could be easily reconfigured into an Ornette Coleman track. His rhythm section couldn’t touch the fiery afro-Cuban grooves of Dizzy Gillespie. And after thirty years in the business, he maybe just didn’t have it in him to change it up. Isn't that the case? Obviously! Or:

The first half of this set doesn’t sound like a career-saving performance. It sounds like a very good performance by a band in top form, but not earth shattering. “Star Spangled Banner” is eerie and vaguely out of tune, and it’s the better for it. “Tea for Two” is modest but charming. After only two short tracks (one a rather unimpressive vocal) the band had to leave the stage due to missing personnel, but they came back later that night with a solid rendition if “Take the ‘A’ Train”, Duke’s signature tune as written by right-hand man Billy Strayhorn, who had returned to the fold after a brief stint as a solo artist and composer. Duke’s piano’s pretty decent here, I’ll admit, but the wonderful parping chorus is what really sells it.

“‘A’ Train” is followed by a wonderful three-part suite written especially for the festival. Ellington jokingly christens it “Festival Junction” on the spot. The first part is rather driving, opening with a strong theme pounded-out in chords on the piano. Then it swings into a lengthy, meandering section that eventually builds along some able support soloing up to a wonderful mournful solo on trumpet. This is thoroughly old-fashioned stuff, obviously – for a few moments at the start it looks like Duke is hinting at something more modern behind his piano, but then it slams straight into an old-time swing groove. The song closes out on a great trumpet solo right up into the mic as the backing drops-out, climbing up on a few ludicrous squeals to impressive heights.

The second part is far more subdued, coasting on a ride cymbal and some delicate syncopated piano work from Duke. “Blues to Be There” is appropriately almost more blues than jazz (again, incredibly old-fashioned) and it highlights the truth in Ellington’s reputation for refinement and sophistication. All in all, it’s very pretty, though more mood-oriented at first than immediately engaging. The clarinet work here is gorgeous. The backing drops out halfway for a brief scale, and then bam, back into the main theme on piano and some more New Orleans-style wah-wah trumpet, swaying into a beautiful swing section on the horns, consisting of little more than a few rising and falling notes. It’s at this point the band starts coming into its own, swinging into the rousing, up-tempo “Newport Up”, obviously geared with its brisk four-four towards a festival crowd. The trumpet tone here is very warm and tight, and quite lovely, but there’s not much to say aside from it being a very nicely done dance piece. The crowd reaction is enthusiastic, but modest.

“Sophisticated Lady” is all delicate reds and oranges and some lovely piano work – I do like the way Ellington cops so much from Debussy. It’s a charming rendition, complete with little stuttering horn riffs through the verse and a gently slide-out on the ride cymbal. Another vocal number follows, and it’s another modest success.

I suppose, if there’s been one problem up to this point it’s anyone who knows what’s coming. Up to this point, Ellington at Newport has been a very fine live document, easily up to many bands’ studio standards. With “Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue” however, it leaps across to another level entirely. This is the famous bit – the solo by Paul Gonsalves that lasts a dizzying 27 choruses. Apparently they’d been experimenting with this for a while – the two halves of the song were always linked by a solo by Gonsalves, and the general idea was that he would just go out there and see what happened. This is the point where the night caught fire. The song dropped down to nothing but piano, bass and drums while Gonsalves carried the tune with his fine, simple soloing, until eventually everybody was crying out for him to keep it going like lunatics. It’s a strange moment that sort of creeps up on you. The solo starts, and it goes on for a bit, and then it just keeps on going, and the song become one long groove. The drums get heavier, accenting the rhythm with heavy crashes, and the piano starts pounding out a rudimentary groove before the song erupts into the brassy “Crescendo” (and Gonsalves presumably collapses of exhaustion). It’s a great deal of fun listening in on this moment. It’s a hell of a performance and enough alone to warrant getting this. The band put in everything they’ve got. Hell! It supposedly pulled a hot blonde in a cocktail dress from the crowd to start dancing, at a wimpy jazz concert in 1956. Listen to it loud.

Next up is “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)”, a fine number that Charles Mingus ripped-off for the “Alice” track from Mingus in Wonderland. It’s a showcase for Johnny Hodges on sax, and he does a great job. ‘Jeep’s Blues” is a big, brassy, swinging number with a great clarinet part. But even after this, the crowd didn’t want the set to end, and so we get “Tulip or Turnip”, which is a strong blues number and inarguably the best vocal performance on the album. The crowd hoot and holler through the whole thing, of course. They pile horns on horns and it’s a wonderful track. At this point they’ve largely ditched refinement and are going for the gut.

When this ended, the festival managers tried to shut the gig down. Ellington had Sam Woodyard play “Skin Deep”. This is, I’d argue, the absolute best track on here, and one of the most amazing drum tracks I’ve heard. It starts-out insane exotic horn stings and then turns into a thunderstorm of drums. Almost nothing but drums! Beautiful, amazing drums! If you know me, you know I love rhythm, and the one problem I have with Ellington on this album is his rather anaemic (at times) rhythm section. The moment where Woodyard’s double basses burst out from a series of random afro-Cuban patterings into an utterly heavenly syncopated groove is utterly breathtaking. And then it builds, at the end, to a crushing crescendo. It’s god damn beautiful.

I feel a little bad, on an album by such a man who was such a consummate composer and a generous band-leader, praising above all a really good drum solo. But, hey, that’s just how I roll. This whole album is damn solid, ranging from good to excellent. It’s damned long, but it never really feels it. When Ellington says goodbye, you’ll be howling no allowing with the folks in the audience on tape.

Of course, I haven’t even talked about the second disc. You see, having praised this album, there are now some rather knotty problems to untangle. Back in 1956, Ellington recorded this concert and then decided to release it as a live album, fair enough. But the recording quality wasn’t up to scratch. As a consequence, the band went into the studio following the festival and rerecorded sections of their performance to patch-up the holes. In the original recording, for example, you can’t even hear Gonsalves’ solo, since he played his trumpet into the wrong microphone. Well, that’s a problem, but only because a few years ago the folks at Columbia found a better quality recording of the night, one in which you can actually hear Gonsalves, and spliced it digitally with the original masters. As a consequence, we have here before us an excellent quality, stereo recording of the night – from a couple of years before stereo even debuted!.

The question is, which version do I review? I’ve already covered the live version, so that obviously predisposes my decision, but I will say a few words on the 1956 re-recording just to make sure that my reviews remain impossibly, tediously long.

We get a few pretty runs at “Festival Junction”, all of them greatly aided by being in the studio, and then we get the album proper, which consists of overdubbing audience noise and recreated stage banter onto the rerecorded set. The banter seems painfully stilted, and the album sounds like it was recorded in a concert hall rather than on a festival stage – although in the days before high fidelity stereo this may not have been a problem. We also lose “Diminuendo & Crescendo”, “Skin Deep” and “Tulip or Turnip” due to poor audio quality and the time constraints of the LP format. Other than that, though, it’s mostly the same album. It’s the same songs, anyway, and it’s still very fine. Large parts of the Festival suit have been re-done, but while the live versions are more energetic, the delicacy of “Blues to Be There”, for example, really shines on the studio cut. It’s easy to see why this, combined with the buzz generated by headlines regarding the ruckus at Newport, would reinvigorate interest in Ellington. This studio re-recording is an absolute gem – the performances argubaly better than the live version, if only because it captures approximately similar performances, but with far better recording quality and the tightness allowed by the studio environment. It’s wonderful! Christ, the soprano sax on “Newport Up”! The trumpet. You can harp about being genuine all you like – fraudulence gets results. The man was looking to salvage a career – would you risk a raw live cut or put everything you had into making yourself look like slickest bastard who ever tinkled an ivory? Everything hits harder! It just, you know, sounds better. As a studio recording should. And anyway, this is the album that’s been dazzling people for forty years.

So, it’s very hard to pick a favourite of the two, but in the end I’d argue that the original cut has the edge in polish, but the live recording matches it with energy, fascinating on-the-spot embellishments, and with the wider song selection, principally “America the Beautiful” and the two longer cuts missing from the LP. No matter how much nicer the studio versions sound, they can’t invalidate that drum solo and that amazing trumpet marathon. In any event, no matter how you cut it this is one of the best jazz albums I’ve ever heard. It was enough to bring a man back from the dead.

9/10

Download: Duke Ellington - Skin Deep.mp3

5. Fats Domino - This Is Fats (1956)

2008-09-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Blueberry Hill//Honey Chile//What's the Reason//Blue Monday//So Long//La-La//Troubles of My Own//You Done Me Wrong//Reeling & Rocking//The Fat Man's Hop//Poor Me//Trust In Me

It’s a rock and roll album, but you wouldn’t really describe it as rockin'. This is a very laid-back and soulful affair. It’s more... cheery, than anything. The Barry White to Little Richard's Funkadelic. Fats Domino was one of the earlier pioneers of rock music, and it seems like by this album he still hadn’t got around to updating his style from the late 40s. This album is tacked together from singles recorded across the fifties, but remains stylistically extremely coherent nonetheless. All but one of the tracks is piano-led, most of them have a saxophone take the chorus. Honestly, it’s difficult to pick which tracks would have been recorded when just by listening.

So. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Fats is doing something interesting here, and he does it well. He has a simple, relaxed style built-up around blues and pop with very strong gospel influences, and he marries that to a steady, gently swinging rock beat and lets the song carry itself on his pleasant crooning and distinctive, pulsing piano playing. “Blueberry Hill” is a fine example of this, very nice crooning R&B - an utterly lovelyl song, almost lighter than air. A few peppier numbers emerge to shake things up a bit, and he gets the horns out regularly to crank up the soul (although I suppose soul music as such didn’t really exist at this point – Fats and his ilk were busy creating it). Having said this, he does manage to work quite a bit of variety into what is a relatively restrictive format. “Reelin’ & Rockin’” stands-out the most from the crowd. The layers of horns and piano are stripped off and it rides a steady swinging beat, a proto-surf guitar and a tambourine that just won’t stop. It’s completely non-threatening, but it’s danceable and a lot of fun – I get the impression that a live show with Fats would have been pretty wild, but the records are for better part a family affair.

“The Fat Man’s Hop” is another stand-out – a straight-up blues instrumental, with the melody carried on the saxophone. “Trust In Me”, conversely, is a full-blown, honest to god rock & roll song. It’s got a repeating horn groove over which Fats croons, and an amazing display of folk-influenced electric guitar bubbling away like something from a Django Rheinhardt song over the top. It’s probably the only song that comes close to dropping the “restrained” qualifier from it, although to be fair standards were different back then and audio recording was not always at a great level. “What’s The Reason (I’m Not Pleasing You)” has an infectious little groove carried by slowly rising horn bends, and some funny little lyrics. In fact the lyrics on this album are all quite nice – there’s nothing earth shattering about them, but they’re often fairly funny. The choruses on “Blue Monday” build up to a modest crescendo on the strength of some nice stuttering drum breaks. It’s a pretty simple song about Mondayitis, but it’s not half bad. “So Long” is in a similar vein, but has a more delicate bridge carried by some beautiful saxophone playing.

There’s not much point going into depth with this album. You’d probably got a fair idea of what it sounds like. This is, blessedly, far more the antecedent of something like Stevie Wonder than Steven Tyler, you might say. Fats Domino was massively successful in his time, and there’s something so darn fun about the pleasant, positive music on this album that makes you see exactly why. Most of the songs aren’t immediately mind-blowing, but it has understated charm and a suitable danceability. The mix of R&B and rock is also a wonderful sign of things to come in the next decade - everything from the Shangri-Las to Sam Cooke to Curtis Mayfield and Nancy Sinatra. It's a goddamn blueprint for soul and R&B. And it’s great! Kids can make-out to it and grandparents can drink tea and talk about the war. Fun for the whole family.

I really like this. It’s... graceful.

8/10

Download: Fats Domino - Blueberry Hill.mp3

4. Louis Prima - The Wildest (1957)

2008-09-29T05:25:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Just a Gigolo; I Ain't Got Nobody (Medley)//(Nothing's Too Good) For My Baby//The Lip//Body and Soul//Oh Marie//Basin Street Blues; When It's Sleepy Time Down South (Medley)//Jump, Jive an' Wail//Buona Sera//Night Train//(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You

Well this is a fun album! It’s all very silly of course, but it’s a catchy mix of early rock with good old fashion swing and New Orleans jazz. And it makes sense, doesn’t it – I mean, at this point all three of those things sounded suspiciously similar anyway, so hey, why not mix them up?

Louis Prima is comparable on all fronts to Louis Armstrong, right down to the name. His voice is obviously modelled very heavily on Armstrong, including the deep gravely quality and his frequent explosions into bursts of scat singing and silly repartee with the sidemen. He’s even from New Orleans! Which perhaps validates his style at least a little – although, Armstrong developed a lot of his signature stuff working the clubs in Chicago.

So, is this particularly mind-blowing? No, not really. But it is a great deal of fun, with marvellously polished performances and the rock influences integrated very nicely. Despite being the sort of cheesy old-fashioned swinger’s album that people love to dismiss, it’s actually relatively tasteful in trying to stay relevant. This is something to be thankful for, since it means that this album is fun to laugh along with, instead of at. Most of the songs are as much comedy routine as actual musical piece. “The Lip”, for example, sees songstress Keely Smith tell the story of the world’s greatest trumpeter (they call him the Lip) while each of the band mates pipes in with a guess about his identity, and Prima shares a recipe for a patented lip loosener made out of steam and fried eggs.

Elsewhere, you get the sort of sung verse/chorus/chorus compositions that are the bread and butter of this sort of blues-based stuff. It makes sense, of course, when your trumpeter is also you lead singer. The mid-way medley has some quite fine playing, for example. And then you have “Jump, Jive an’ Wail!” which is a full-on rock/r&b number that wouldn’t be at all out of place on a Ray Charles album. The horn stabs and a strong backing chorus really sell this. One great thing about Louis Prima is that, given that he’s a jazz performer, he has a much, much stronger understanding of rhythm than a lot of the guys coming out of a country background, and a technical and production sheen that Elvis’ debut, for example, could never have hoped to match – although many would argue that such very rawness and imperfection was Elvis’ chief virtue. In any event, as a consequence of his background we have an excellent dance album here, one that would have worked ten years earlier and is still fun today.

So, you can’t really deny that this was an incredibly cheesy album even when it first came out. A lot of people see the fifties as a mystical wonderland where Rock rose up and banish the horrible spectre of crap old people’s music, as of course nothing other than rock music is worth listening to. Those people, mostly teenagers, shit me. This is a big-slice of self-consciously goofy nonsense. It plays very heavily to the Italian crowd with songs like “Just a Gigolo” and “Buena Sera”, but hey, it’s Louis Prima. This is the sort of stuff that you’d expect to hear in a party scene in Goodfellas or The Godfather, after all. But, nonetheless, it’s really good. There’s nothing ironic in my enjoyment of this. It’s a big, joyous lump of corny fun.

In comparison to the previous two albums this is positively lavish sounding, although it’s still just a band in a recording studio with a very “live” feel. The personnel is obvious rather small (only 8 people – no Ellingtonian excesses here), but the sound is full and everything is nicely miked. Keely Smith has a wonderful, rich voice, although unfortunately she only sings lead on “The Lip”. She sings lead on “The Lip” and it’s arguably the best song! Why no more lead vocals for Ms. Smith, Mr. Prima? Well, that’s ok – you’ve got a fine voice too.

Anyway, the album closes with the one-two punch of the blues standard “Night Train” (fine, but not about to knock James Brown’s version off the top) and “(I’ll Be Glad When Your Dead) You Rascal”, which incorporates “When the Saints Come Marching In” into the solos on the chorus. And then the trumpet and sax start doing long siren calls! It’s quite neat. There’s a very even mix of rock, jazz and pop here, with a decent level of energy sustained throughout. You could dance to it, but you could also sit around talking and drinking.

And in the end, isn’t that what this is about? I may seem like an idiot for thinking that Louis Prima made a better rock album than Elvis Presley, but come-on, man! This is fine cocktail stuff! Prima claims to have wanted to capture the feel of 3 AM at the Sands, and damn it he did it! I wish there were more of this on this list. Can you believe, not a single proper exotica album? Ritual of the Savage came out in 1951! That’s a fully-realised concept album a whole four years before Sinatra! Hypnotique is utterly gorgeous and influenced the entire 90s post-rock scene. And where the hell is my Julie London? Maybe she’s no Ella Fitzgerald, but she cut albums at least as good as Prima. I guess maybe this list needs a little more novelty? Sabu doesn’t count – that’s at least vaguely authentic.

Anyway, I really like this. It’s fun and unassuming and I feel absolutely no shame in embracing it. You can see its fingerprints on everything from the 90s zoot suit revival to early Serge Gainsbourg-penned ye-ye numbers. It’s not cheesy! It’s cool. And next time I’m in Lygon Street I can strike-up a conversation with one of the mob bosses about good old Louis. I can never hope to be a made man, but I might get to see a man made-a-dade-a-doodooz-oodle zappity zippity boo.

7.5/10

Louis Prima - The Lip.mp3

3. The Louvin Brothers - Tragic Songs of Life (1956)

2008-09-29T05:17:00.000-07:00

Tracks: Kentucky//I'll Be All Smiles Tonight//Let her Go, God Bless Her//What is Home Without Love?//A Tiny Broken Heart//In the Pines//Alabama//Katie Dear//My Brother's Will//Knoxville Girl//Take the News to Mother//Mary of the Wild Moor

A plain-speaking title for a plain-speaking album – and it’s this very matter-of-factness that gives it strength. The performances on this album are immaculate – Ira and Charley Louvin possess two of the finest voices I’ve heard in a long time, and they bring this considerable prowess to bear on the “close-harmony” style of bluegrass they’re working in here. The mono mix twists their voices together until they almost sound like one person, the lines of melody folding over one another beautifully. It sounds like nothing so much as a piano accordion, actually – but that’s hardly a bad thing.

Add to this the understated but highly capable mandolin and guitar work of the duo, laid over a bare framework of bass fiddle and snare drum, and it’s all very simple but very beautiful. None of the songs hurry – they’re all in the same time, at roughly the same BPM. In fact, this is virtually archetypal country music – a bluegrass blueprint, right down to the amazingly depressing lyrics. I mentioned plain-speaking? Well, imagine how positively chilling this album becomes when “Knoxville Girl” appears. The ballad of a man who meets a girl and beats her to death to halt her “dark roving eyes”, it’s very creepy stuff. Or the cover of the Carter Family’s “I’ll Be All Smiles Tonight”, a song originally written from the perspective of a young woman which the Louvins don’t even change the gender pronouns in. It gives everything an oddness – this is, I suppose the core of old folk music. The song tells a story, and it’s the story that evokes the emotions. It’s simply the Louvins’ job to document it all with their astonishing voices.

It’s the technical prowess and the strong song selections that really sell this album to modern ears. “Let Her Go” is a sad reflection on lost love that cops the “Sometimes I get a strange notion/to jump in the river and drown” from “Goodnight Irene”. “In the Pines” is a more expansive version of the song familiar to most as “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, and while it might not match the Ledbelly version it’s a very haunting presentation in its own right, with some absolutely beautiful wordless harmonising between the verses that drags pictures of the mountains right up before your eyes.

However, given all the spookery and macabre goings-ons, it’s perhaps somewhat surprising that the most affecting song on the album is actually a rather sweet and innocent little song. “A Tiny Broken Heart” takes the form of a monologue from a six year old boy begging his father to do something to stop the family of itinerants working at the next door farm from moving away and taking their little daughter with them. It’s stuff like this that encapsulates the album – on the one hand, it’s utter cornball, but on the other it’s genuinely and deeply affecting. Another fine song is “Katie Dear”, telling the surreal story of two kids whose parents each keep a knife by them to murder anyone they should happen to fall in love with. It’s very twisted.

I suppose, however, that no album is perfect. If there’s one real complaint it’s that the vocals often lack the sort of heavily invested emotion that we tend to expect from pop music. This is an extremely rigid, formal album. Its restraint gives it great tightness and unity, but on the same hand it does leave a want of breathing space in the music, and can the tracks can bleed together a little.

Still, very fine. I can’t think of much else to say about this. If you strip the rock out of Patsy Cline or polish-up an old Carter Family record you’ll get a pretty good impression of what’s on offer, but it’s all done so damned well. It’s a very strange and touching album.

8 /10

The Louvin Brothers - Knoxville Girl.mp3

2. Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley (1956)

2008-09-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

A: Blue Suede Shoes//I'm Counting on You//I Got A Woman//One-Sided Love Affair//I Love You Because//Just Because

B: Tutti Frutti//Trying to Get to You//I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry//I'll Never Let You Go (Li' Darlin')//Blue Moon//Money Honey

Well, this is something of a contrast. Where Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours constitutes a coherent, polished statement drawn from a single, focused recording period, Elvis Presley shows more or less the exact opposite trend – a mish-mash of left-over country recordings from Elvis’ days at Sun with a selection of harder-driving R&B numbers recorded with his new pals at RCA the following year. This is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there’s a great breadth of material here – from straight-up country, to rockabilly to R&B, to pop – but on the other, not all the material is up to the standards set by the best tracks. Nothing here is really bad, per se – but the haphazard nature of the album’s construction shows. “I’m Counting on You” displays astonishing vocal control, but Elvis’ soaring and twisting vocals ultimately sound a little foolish over the modest country backing – he’s got an incredible voice, with one hell of a range, but doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with it here. “I Love You Just Because” is a much more successful attempt at the same thing, with some very soulful crooning in the upper register, even if he sounds almost unrecognisable.

Perhaps his finest vocal performances appear on two of the ballads at the end of the album. “I’ll Never Let You Go” and “Blue Moon” both feature a subdued backing of little more than bass and guitar. The former soars along with a beautiful, feminine R&B vocal in the Inkspots vein that suddenly erupts into a chugging bit of rock. “Blue Moon” is arguably the best song on the album. The bass is a primitive “walking” rhythm and the guitar clops like horse hooves in a simple repeating figure. There’s almost nothing there, and it gives a chance for Elvis to deliver an utterly arresting performance (courtesy, partly, of what sounds like a very fine echo chamber, I will grant). His falsetto vocalese across the bridge is beautiful – a trumpet couldn’t have done it better (and why is it that I keep praising so many Hart/Rodgers tunes?). Despite the fact that Elvis is remembered primarily as a rocker, I’d argue his true strength always rested in his crooning. I mean, the guy was a gospel singer for Pete’s sake! He knew crooning! Although, regrettably, no gospel appears on this album – Elvis was, at this time, the King of Rock and Roll, yet to crawl from the schoolgirl’s bed and endear himself to the housewife – and Gospel at the time actually being religious music, it wasn’t exactly sexual dynamite. It’s a pity – his driving approach to Gospel and R&B in the 60s is what really endears him to me.

“But Thomas!” you cry. “What about the Rock & Roll! Nobody cares about mellow pop music, man – this guy broke rock and changed the world! Talk about that!”. Well, okay then. I guess the reason I focus upon Elvis’ voice is because that’s where his true strength lies. He didn’t write, and he wasn’t much of a guitar player (there is some very able assistance on this album from no less a man than Chet Atkins). The rock here, is, however, pretty damn good. Did you need me to tell you that? Well, a song’s spending fifty years at the core of the pop canon may tend to colour people’s perceptions of it. The principal charm in the music is how feral it is. The version here of Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” lacks the heavy, measured thuds of the original, but makes-up for it with being a pure explosion of energy. It’s the whole punk rock thing – Elvis was pure youth distilled, shooting out of the speakers like white hot ejaculate to impregnate the teens of the world with rebellion. Or something. You don’t need me to tell you that the fifties were a pretty buttoned-down time, and that all the bored, middle class kids needed something wild and freaky to shake them up. Elvis, all his musical merits aside, had the image. He freaked-out the squares. He may not have been as good a rock & roller as, say, Little Richard – especially not judging by his cover of “Tutti Frutti”, which is rather anaemic compare to the original, salvaged by a marvellous guitar solo compensating for Elvis’ little boy vocals – but, if you want to get down to it and say what we’ve all been thinking, he had the one thing that mattered: he was hot he was white.

This isn’t to discredit the guy. He’s done a great album here. But rock music had been around a fair while before Elvis and he doesn’t do much that’s new or particularly accomplished. His main importance in the history of music comes from his popularisation of rock in white, middle class homes. If you do want to give credit, however, then even though Elvis may not have produced many innovations here, he did present one important formal shift. Elvis Presley is an enormously cosmopolitan album – Ray Charles covers sitting right beside Appalachian balladeering and the old-fashion rattle-and-hum Blues of “Just Because”. That Elvis Presley manages to push forward so many different styles on one album, and sometimes within one song, and do it for the better part quite well, is something of an achievement in shaking-up what was, at the time, a very carefully segregated pop-music landscape. And, considering that so many of the rockers to come after him took Elvis as a direct model, that seems pretty damned important.

Now, you could argue that Elvis “stole” “black” music. Maybe he did. I don’t know. Maybe New Orleans jazz stole French marching music. Granted, I don’t know if the New Orleans jazz movement ever set about systematically exploiting a host of white marching bands in the aftermath of their discovery, but anyway. You can’t really argue that the musical landscape isn’t much richer as a consequence of all this sort of thing. “Heartbreak Hotel” opened a floodgate (well, Little Richard and Fats Domino may have been important too). Black dudes got played on the radio! Is that a bad thing? Maybe I could do without all the people who insist that the Beatles and their imitators are the be-all and end-all of pop music, but oh well. At least we got Elvis’ killer phrasing on the chorus of “Sit Right Down and Cry” in compensation – it’s probably the one moment where his rock vocals really kick in, arguably the sound of the guy finding his rough edge, which would work so well later on in instances such as, say, the King Creole soundtrack.

Anyway, to further digress (and I suppose, given the importance of Elvis, I might as well), it does make a fair bit of sense. People these days tend to fall into one of two camps – those who, for some reason, think that Elvis just sort of sat down one day and invented rock music, and those who on the other hand argue that a bunch of white guys showed-up and simply lifted it from the black scene wholesale. Both of these are inaccurate, although the latter has far more truth than the former. Basically, trad rock is a hybridisation of “white” country & western and hillbilly music - originating in a complex mixture of Eastern European, Spanish and British folk styles - and rhythm & blues. The restructuring of country around a blues back-beat, coupled with adoption of the 12-bar structure, led to the “rockabilly” style that lead more or less into conventional rock a-la Buddy Holly (see also: Chubby Checker). At least, I think that’s how it went. Obviously, the styles that developed more directly out of R&B have a very different origin, but if you want to look at Elvis as the prototypical rocker – and given that he probably had the most defining influence on the direction of early rock, it seems fair – then this album is actually a very honest mixture of the various elements that would lead to, say, The Beatles, I suppose.

Of course most musicians, Elvis included, simply plucked willy-nilly from the Blues tradition, thus shooting my theory to shit. But hey!

Anyway. So, this is a very promising debut. The sound of the recordings is very raw, and cheap, but it works. Everything is sort of up in the air – Elvis was a live performer, after all, and this captures that live feel quite nicely. There’s an invigorating energy and a certain panache that glosses over the album’s numerous flaws like a solid local act playing on the marquis at a street festival. It’s all fine stuff, and it lead to one of the most bizarre and fruitful careers in pop music. Elvis would remain hit-and-miss for the rest of his career, but the hits were usually worth it.

7/10

Elvis Presley - I'll Never Let You Go.mp3

1. Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours (1955)

2008-09-29T04:39:00.000-07:00

A: In the Wee Small Hours//Mood Indigo//Glad to be Unhappy//I Get Along Without You Very Well//Deep in a Dream//I See Your Face Before Me//Can't We Be Friends?//When Your Lover Has Gone

B: What is this Thing Called Love?//Last Night When We Were Young//I'll Be Around//Ill Wind//It Never Entered My Mind//Dancing on the Ceiling//I'll Never Be The Same//This Love of Mine

As well as being a beautiful accomplishment in its own right, In the Wee Small Hours represents on a formal level the “arrival”, as it were, of the album as album. In 1955, the LP format was still relatively new – Columbia had debuted the 33 1/3 RPM long-player in 1948, appropriately reissuing Sinatra’s own The Voice as their first pop 10”. But for most people, this was just a more convenient way of packaging their songs. Artists and record companies didn’t tend to consider their albums as cohesive wholes or unified artistic statements where the songs fir together to tell a story or sustain a mood. This was understandable, given that the preceding format (which continued well into the fifties) had been, quite literally, albums. Bundles of 78s, at first, and then 33 1/3 and 45 RPM extended-players, packing a whopping two songs a side as opposed to the 78’s one, and collected into packets like a photo album. A somewhat fragmentary approach is therefore understandable – almost everyone was in the habit of thinking of the song as more or less stand-alone.

Now, Sinatra may not have invented the concept album (So and So Sings the Works Of packages had been around a while), but he did pioneer it as a form, and In the Wee Small Hours constitutes the first perfect crystallisation of his approach. It was the first 12” he recorded, and he decided to do things a bit differently. He’d been working on this whole “album as a cohesive whole” thing for a while, and this gave him a nice opportunity to do things right. As a consequence, this isn’t just a collection of songs – it’s almost a suite.

Taking the recently-completed title track as his starting point, Sinatra worked closely with the arranger Nelson Riddle in building-up a song selection that followed-on from the melancholy attitude of “In the Wee Small Hours”. The album was supposedly structured around Sinatra’s recent break-up with Ava Gardner (and honestly, if you’d lost Ava Gardner you’d be pretty bummed too), with the consequent thread being one of near-suicidal depression and longing. Sinatra and co also took pains to include only songs recorded specifically for this LP, and as a consequence the sound of the album is perfectly consistent.

And what a sound! I have this on vinyl, and the deep, slightly murky quality is a perfect complement to the lush orchestral backings. Despite normally preferring the clarity of a CD, I must bow here to vinyl nuts. The depth of the bass, near-inaudible cello and the sparkling piano all blends together as though it were underwater. It forms a deep red backdrop out of which Frank emerges, sounding almost more like one of the woodwinds he’s sharing space with than a human voice. And the arrangements! For the most part, Riddle doesn’t grand-stand – this is Frank’s show the whole way through, and the music sticks to serving the vocals in a beautiful way. But now and then, something with leap out and drop you. The clarinet opening side-two on “What is the Thing Called Love” leaps out with a gorgeous, hypnotic blues figure that’s doubled throughout the song by a lush set of violins. Elsewhere, bursts of beautiful saxophone soloing appear out of nowhere on *. The last track, “This Love of Mine” closes out on utterly gorgeous banks of strings fading away into a melancholy ocean. It’s reminiscent at times of Gershwin and Ellington (whose “Mood Indigo” is featured), but I don’t see how anyone could call that a bad thing.

Frank’s in fine voice here – he’s never indulgent, delivering his lines with a plain-speaking sincerity, putting just the right amount of emotion into a line without ever dipping over into the sort of over-the-top schmaltz which colours most people’s impressions of the Lounge Singer. Compare the deep, slow delivery on “Mood Indigo” with the snappy, almost conversational “Dancing on the Ceiling”. It’s the sort of song you’d expect Julie London to croon out, but Sinatra rises-up to a restrained yet “big” climax she could never match. And then there’s the gently self-mocking Hart/Rodgers number “It Never Entered My Mind”, where Sinatra delivers a full depth of emotion to the soaring line “And now I even have to scratch my back myself”.

It’s stuff like this that stops In the Wee Small Hours from becoming self-absorbed and tedious. It’s heartfelt, and maybe a little indulgent, but self-aware enough to combat this without losing that genuine quality – it’s often pretty funny, or at least wry. The song selections are top-notch – there isn’t a track worth dropping, and a great deal of variety is present within the self-imposed limitation of all the tracks being ballads (the rambling “Glad to be Unhappy” is a personal favourite of mine, with a gorgeous spoken/sung introduction). The team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenzo Hart get the most tracks, with one on side one and two on side two, “Glad to be Unhappy” and “It Never Entered My Mind” being two of the strongest on the album.

The music on this album is less of a development than the manner in which it has been selected and arranged, but that’s not to say that Riddle’s complex, subtle arrangements aren’t superb. This particular style of lushly-orchestrated jazz pop, married so closely to blues, had been chugging along fine for years with relatively small changes, but would be more or less obsolete by the end of the sixties. Orchestral pop did get by, mostly by more funky) realms, but these sorts of standards-collections have unfortunately at this point in time reached a nadir (Rod Stewart, anyone?). And this collection itself isn’t flawless – as restrained as Frank is his voice does sometimes get a little bigger than the music he’s singing over can support, and while none of the songs are bad, his cover of “Mood Indigo” is a little weak, with the same to be said of “Dancing on the Ceiling”. There’s also the problem that this album is, as much as anything, a mood piece, and so some of the songs can fade into the background if you let them.

In any event, this marks an important moment in the history of popular music. The cohesiveness of the album is almost taken for granted these days, so much so that it’s one of the first things people look for when sitting down to criticise a piece of work. While the actual “concept album” in the prog-rock sense may be something of a mixed blessing, the album as artistic statement has led to some of the most amazing developments around. Could Sgt. Pepper’s exist without this (and would it be a bad thing if it didn’t)? I don’t know, maybe. Who does? More interestingly, could Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson? Would anyone want to live in such a world? Arguably more important is the matter of actually re-recording every single song for this LP specifically – it’s a level of forced dedication that is comparable in importance to the Beatles’ decision to only record songs they’d written themselves.

Thankfully, however, Frank just sings. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. People often look down on people who just sing other people’s songs. But I don’t see why. Frank Sinatra had an amazing voice and a keen artistic sense. Why the hell did he need to write his own songs? He made them his own through the power of his pipes, and the incredibly charisma he put across.

This is a gorgeous piece of work. It’s a masterpiece of understatement and the honest to god sound of a broken heart.

9/10

Mission Statement.

2008-09-29T04:31:00.000-07:00

I have never read the popular reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I've read 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die, but that is not quite the same thing. This isn't to say that I won't read the former some day, but in the end it doesn't really matter. Inspired by the heroic lunacy of Francisco Silva and his 1001 Albums blog, I have decided to more or less copy his idea entirely, premising my endeavour on the fact that this is the Internet. There are no rules here. I can do Anythn/

I should also admit, at this point, that while I have listened to an awful lot of music I know very little about most of it. So, this will be a learning experience for the both of us - one in which I try and fail to give informed assessments of these albums, and you learn things which are patently false and which will get you laughed at by your more knowledgeable friends and university professors.

I have a bit of a backlog at the moment, so posting may race ahead a bit at first, but after that it'll be one review every day or two. I may post songs with some of the albums, but then who knows?

Well... Go too!