The Pop Story

Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley (1956)

I can’t be alone, as someone born in Britain in the late ’70s, in being first exposed to the sound of rock’n’roll and rockabilly via those twin, distinctly English, cyphers of ersatz ’50s nostalgia: Shakin’ Stevens and the Hi-De-Hi theme tune. For some time, the influence of both (and make no mistake, I was a massive Shakin’ Stevens fan aged 6) coloured my response to this music. It was for kids, right?

This can’t be the only reason I’ve been generally unfascinated by Elvis all my life, but the fact remains that this is the first time I’ve actually listened to Elvis Presley’s debut all the way through. As a pop bore, I know the back story, I’m aware of the cultural relevance, I appreciate the sheer seismic importance of this record. But listening with fresh ears, it sounds like a total car crash.

A generally thrilling car crash, obviously, but wow - who on earth is this Elvis guy trying to be? He shifts from the visceral to the lachrymose to the (no other way of putting it) mental, quite often in the same song. This is obviously the point: his vocal stylings are so distinctive, the echo piled on so thick, he literally sounds like an hysterical alien. God only knows how he sounded to the Don Drapers of 1956, sitting safe in their Sinatra world.

His vocals on I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’) and Blue Moon (have you actually listened to the latter lately? Insane) are bizarre by any standards, even in 2009. From thinking this was music for kids, I’ve become convinced this is the oddest sound I’ve ever heard. (For now).

Listen to Elvis Presley on Spotify

An apology

This blog has been on hiatus because, quite frankly, I couldn’t face listening to any more jazz. So I had to make a decision - plough through it all joylessly, and with nothing of interest to say about it; or bend the rules slightly and, er, skip most of it.

Guess which one I chose?

So. Onwards.

Modern Jazz Quartet - Fontessa/Django (1956)

The vibraphone. Oh God, the vibraphone… The vibraphone is up there with scat singing as one of those jazz things I just do not understand. It’s like an instrument for people who don’t take music seriously (see also: the xylophone). I can think of only a few examples of music where vibes don’t make me want to stick spikes in my ears, e.g. Tim Buckley’s ‘Strange Feeling’, but even then it’s touch-and-go.

As such it’s very difficult to get a critical distance on these albums by the Modern Jazz Quartet, which I’m sure are seminal works, but sound like… well I don’t know what they sound like, all I can hear is the bloody vibraphone binging and bonging and dinging and donging (daddio).

If I try to be a bit objective I can say that ‘Fontessa’ is awful - plinky plonky cocktail jazz of the blandest kind. ‘Django’ is better, in that the vibraphone is backgrounded some of the time, and the other guys get to play their proper instruments, which they do pretty well I guess. I think we should move on from this eh?

Listen to Fontessa and Django on Spotify

Harry Belafonte - Calypso (1956)

Harry Belafonte via last.fm

This is the album that contains ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O)’, a pastiche of which was part of an album of children’s songs (alongside ‘Ernie, The Fastest Milkman in the West’, ‘Right Said Fred’ and Rolf’s peerless ‘Two Little Boys’) that I used to listen to as a kid.

It marks you out as a true, era-straddling superstar when a song you popularise becomes such a part of the culture that it enters the children’s song canon. I remember the other key post-toddler, pre-teen musical touchstones for me were ‘Barbara Anne’ and (of course) ‘Yellow Submarine’. The Beach Boys and the Beatles, all those ’60s pop bands, effectively put an end to Harry Belafonte’s singing career, but he was really bigger than all of them combined - his impact on culture in general is more than just that the ‘Banana Boat Song’ remains a vital part of the pop fabric, but my 7 year old self would probably leave it at that, and so I shall.

Listen to Calypso on Spotify

Frank Sinatra - In the Wee Small Hours (1955)

Image via Wikipedia

It always seemed odd to me that the Method as an acting technique took until the late ’50s to take hold in Hollywood, when pop consumers had been embracing the communication of realistic emotions for years through what we now call the Great American Songbook. Hollywood has always been many steps behind the general mood of the times; the best pop music, on the other hand, is always right there on the pulse. In the prewar years, and then again in the ’50s, it was catering to a grown-up audience in a way it arguably never would again once the teen became the pre-eminent cultural arbiter. And that audience was savvy - way savvier than MGM or Disney were willing (or able, thanks to the Hays Code) to admit.

Sinatra’s ‘In The Wee Small Hours’ represents probably the last - and greatest - product of the age of the Great American Songbook, before rock’n’roll swept it to the margins of popular culture. While Brando was bringing ‘reality’ to the silver screen, Frank Sinatra was with this album drawing on years of experience singing the great sophisticated standards of Arlen, Berlin, Mercer et al, (as well as drawing on his own heartbreak after splitting from Ava Gardner) to bring his adult audience performances of unmatched maturity and insight.

Listen to the controlled intensity of Sinatra’s performance of ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ and consider how far ahead of every other artform pop music was back then. Whether they knew it or not, the next generation of pop stars, from Elvis to the Beatles, was able to innovate freely because they had this foundation beneath their feet.

In the Wee Small Hours on Spotify

Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool (1954)

‘Birth of the Cool’. There’s another one of those jazz titles, all knowing hyperbole. And so for the first time in this little musical adventure, though not the last I’m sure, we come to the question of ‘cool’. Is it born here, in the modern sense, with Miles Davis?

I contemplate this question as many contemporary writers announce the death of cool - or at least, the death of that embodiment of a certain type of cool: the hipster (Time magazine has a round-up of the main, erm, ‘arguments’). The hipster, I suppose, was originally an acolyte of this man playing on my stereo now, a man who never contemplated his own coolness (which is cool), yet nonetheless released an album entitled ‘Birth of the Cool’ (not cool… but then maybe the record company named it and Davis didn’t care because he’d already moved on to a new sound - which is cool… right?)

The thing about cool, the thing about hipsters, is that our culture is built on the foundations laid down by people who worry about the width of their collar, the number of buttons on their suit, the skinniness of their jeans, the particular make of their sunglasses. These people - and many of them, let’s be clear, are hugely annoying individuals in the flesh - curate the niche, worry about the stuff that no one in the wider world gives two hoots about, and turn ostensibly worthless artworks into badges of outsider hipness, to be worn with pride (knowingly, but hopefully never ironically), until they eventually get subsumed into the mainstream by copyists and rip-off merchants - at which point the hipsters have already moved on. Just like Miles Davis always moved on: he was gone before the rest of us even noticed what he was doing in the first place.

If you want to see this process in action, I point you to this fantastic documentary about Rough Trade records.

Birth of the Cool on Spotify

Art Blakey Quintet - A Night at Birdland Vol. 1 (1954)

Art Blakey via last.fm

The live album is a much sneered-at format in modern pop. These days, the live album is, at best, viewed as nothing more than a memento for those who may have been present at the gig; at worst, it’s another marketing sideline for the record label, designed to squeeze more cash from die-hard fans who already have the studio recordings, the T-shirt, the promotional mug.

It’s obviously a different thing in jazz, as so many of the classic albums I’m ploughing through from this era are live recordings. As I’ve said before, jazz seems to be all about the immediacy of a group of musicians in a room playing together, not relying on studio tricks but communicating directly to an audience right there in front of them. And obviously, to do that as a musician, you have to be very good at what you do.

Somewhere along the line (and let’s blame the Beatles, as everyone always does), the studio album became the key artifact of pop, it asserted primacy over any other kind of sonic document of a band’s true worth. We are now programmed as music fans, after decades of this being gospel, to view the live album as a second class citizen. Critics will include a few in their ‘best albums ever’ lists, but mostly they’re relegated to the bottom of the dustbin of pop history. And if that’s how music fans and critics feel, why would any new band work hard to create something like ‘A Night At Birdland’, knowing it’ll be dismissed?

It’s a shame, because before that attitude became prevalent, pop was throwing up some live gems, like Dylan’s ‘66 ‘Albert Hall’ concert - a sonic experience easily the equal of this one from Art Blakey’s crew.

A Night at Birdland Vol. 1 on Spotify

June Christy - Something Cool (1954)

This is what is technically known, I believe, as ‘Parky music’. It’s notable that June Christy sang with Stan Kenton’s band, which meant she hung around with Art Pepper and his aforementioned hard-drinkin’, showgirl-bangin’, heroin-sniffin’ crew.

It’s intriguing, the crazy-life-on-the-road back story behind seemingly saccharine ’50s jazz singers like this. It’s probably what contributes to the fact that Christy - ‘cool jazz’-bland though her sound may be - is ultimately a more emotional singer than the gutsy-on-the-surface, clean-living-dull-on-the-inside contemporary likes of Beyonce. This ‘jazz’ side of things has been almost completely excised from the make-up of modern singers, to be replaced with ersatz notions of ‘soul’ or ‘blues’.

Not sure if that’s a bad thing in the end (Christy’s material is so distant from my conception of pop it’s almost like listening to medieval madrigals), but it certainly makes obvious the distinction between what Christy’s doing (singing) compared to what our ‘soulful’, ‘bluesy’ pop divas are doing (bellowing).

Something Cool on Spotify

Louis Armstrong - Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954)

Louis Armstrong via last.fm

“Technology and economics must always be combined with life-enhancing charm.” I read that phrase in a review of Juhani Pallasmaa’s ‘The Thinking Hand’, a book about architecture, while I was listening to this album. What we build (or compose or paint or perform) should be “a direct expression of the senses and the intellect, the hand and the mind”. Later on the review states that Pallasmaa “is saddened that we have turned our back on our hands, as it were, and imagined that we can create modern cities and buildings without their mark.”

Life-enhancing charm, and the mark of human hands - both these things seem relevant here. At the end of the version of ‘Louis Armstrong Plays…’ on Spotify, there are a number of rehearsal out-takes. What’s obvious is how much fun everyone is having, and how so much of that fun emanates from Armstrong, who seems to exude an (obviously much-remarked upon) ability to charm his fellow musicians, and also charm performances from them that are once virtuoso and knockabout - quite a feat.

And the mark of human hands? Well, it’s everywhere in the jazz I’m listening to, but more evident here than elsewhere. Whether you like this music or not (and, to be honest, I’m indifferent), it roars from the speakers with intent, the sound flowing direct from Armstrong’s mind and out of his mouth or trumpet at purely instinctual speeds. Hearing the rehearsal out-takes seems strange in that sense, because you can’t imagine this music, on first listen, being practiced and refined when it sounds so intuitive and instant.

Well, this has all been highly pretentious (I’m beginning to learn that’s a risk you run when writing about jazz), so I will finish by saying: be warned - this also contains scat singing, a style about which it’s impossible to write anything positive, let alone meaningful.

Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy on Spotify

Frank Sinatra - Songs for Young Lovers (1954)

Frank Sinatra via last.fm

This is by no means my favourite Sinatra album, but good God, it’s like manna from heaven after all that jazz. Actually, I do Dizzy et al a massive disservice since, if listening to all the previous albums has revealed one very obvious thing to me, it’s how much Frankie boy modeled his singing on the great jazz soloists. His crooning swoops, slides and sustains like a sax throughout Songs For Young Lovers, and it’s dazzling when he’s got the right song - ‘Violets For Your Furs’, or ‘My Funny Valentine’ for example.

Anyway, enough Sinatra - I’ll be writing more about him undoubtedly, as I can’t imagine the intense genius of In The Wee Small Hours isn’t included on this list. Let’s talk about Nelson Riddle! This was the first album on which Sinatra worked with Riddle, an arranger who came to define what we think of as the ‘Sinatra sound’. He gave Sinatra a backing that, much like his singing, was complex and effortless at the same time, adding subtle shading to the story Frank’s telling (listen to the strings on ‘Like Someone In Love’, shifting beautifully from hesitant tremolos to ecstatic crescendos to match the mood) without ever getting too syrupy or showy.

It’s arguable that Sinatra would still be regarded as an iconic singer had he not hooked up with Riddle, but I doubt this music would still resonate - still be taken seriously - all these years later with modern audiences if it wasn’t for Nelson’s sweet, sharp soundtracks.

Songs for Young Lovers on Spotify