October 2009
2 posts
4 tags
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...
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.
August 2009
7 posts
3 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
4 tags
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,...
4 tags
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...
1 tag
Art Blakey Quintet - A Night at Birdland Vol. 1...
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...
4 tags
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...
3 tags
Louis Armstrong - Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy...
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...
July 2009
9 posts
2 tags
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...
4 tags
The Quintet - Jazz at Massey Hall (1953)
Charlie Parker via last.fm
This is subtitled ‘The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever’. These jazz dudes go in for this sort of thing a lot. It’s all ‘The Most Wow Sound in Town’ and ‘The Solo That Changed the World’. It’s admirable - imagine any bands today having the balls (‘The Maccabees: The Indie Sound from Just Over There’).
So here we...
4 tags
Stan Kenton - New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm...
Fantastically groovy title aside, Stan Kenton’s New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm (certainly beats ‘Razorlight’) seems to be fairly standard big band jazz. This album is of note, however, because Kenton’s band featured Art Pepper, who wrote one of the great ‘my crazy drug-fuelled life in music’ autobiographies, Straight Life. Here’s Pepper on life on the...
6 tags
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - Bird & Diz...
Dizzy Gillespie via last.fm
The pastiche Picasso on the cover of Bird & Diz suggests that modern jazz of this era was attempting a kind of sonic Cubism. And this is one of the problems, as a jazz naif, that I have with this music. Conceptually it’s thrilling: Parker and Gillespie, like the modernist painters that preceded them, are getting to the point here from every conceivable angle...
Bud Powell - The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1 (1951)
With this album I begin to understand what catalyses an interest in jazz. You find something that appeals, seek similar shades in other artists, ingest and move on, until you’re immersed in the stuff.
So on The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1, I’m hearing some interesting things in ‘Autumn in New York’ - I don’t know exactly what, but it’s a start. The journey...
5 tags
Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2...
Thelonious Monk via last.fm
So in between the last album and this I was supposed to write about Lenne Tristano’s ‘Crosscurrents’, but it wasn’t available to stream anywhere online. Plus - who the hell is Lenne Tristano? Well, he’s very respected in ‘jazz circles’, something of an unsung hero in fact. Why is he so underrated? I’ll tell you why...
3 tags
Benny Goodman - The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz...
Benny Goodman via last.fm
I’m singularly unqualified to talk about jazz - which is a bit of a bugger, as there is a lot of it coming up. What is self-evident, though, listening to music from this era - Benny Goodman being a prime example - is how much pop has lost in terms of swing and dynamics, especially in the last 10 years. This being a recording of a live concert, it is - obviously -...
2 tags
The Original Broadway Cast - Kiss Me Kate (1949)
Ok, so the ’40s wasn’t a great decade for music if Kiss Me Kate is the best they could do. The problem I have with musicals is that everyone sounds like they’re having a jolly time, but you’re not included. This is the reason why rock’n’roll sounded the death knell for musicals as a cultural phenomenon: once Elvis arrived, howling directly at you, for you,...
3 tags
Woody Guthrie - Dustbowl Ballads (1940)
Woody Guthrie via last.fm
No finer place to start in my opinion, as this man exerted the greatest influence on Bob Dylan, a man who has exerted the greatest influence on me. What’s immediately obvious from the first strummed chords of ‘The Great Dust Storm’ is that nothing about this music sounds out of date in 2009: it’s crackly, it’s basic, it’s quite...