The Pop Story

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

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

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 have Parker, Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charlie Mingus and Max Roach all together doing their thing. In pop terms this is like Lennon, Jagger, Ginger Baker and Noel Redding playing in the same band. Hot stuff, and to these untrained ears it sounds joyously melodic and free - although I continue to feel like I’m trapped in a never-ending episode of Mad Men.

Jazz at Massey Hall on Spotify

Stan Kenton - New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm (1952)

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 road with the Kenton Krew:

“Bart was a sex freak, and he had an enormous joint, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. Occasionally on the road he’d invite some of the guys down to his room, where he’d have some real tall showgirl-hustler. He’d haul out his joint and slam it on the table top, and then he’d have the chick do a backbend or something and give her head while we smoked pot and drank and watched.”

Oh you crazy jazz guys.

New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm on Spotify

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - Bird & Diz (1952)

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 at once. The flurry of notes seems to be an attempt to make music 3D. As Peter Conrad points out in his history of modernism, Modern Times, Modern Places, “The nineteenth century’s faith in progress was replaced by [jazz in] the twentieth century’s awareness of simultaneity”.

All very compelling daddio! But do I actually want to listen to this album more than once? Right now I’m not sure. At the very least, it sounds amazing. A lot of it’s to do with the fantastic old mics they were using, the room they were in - but mostly, it’s obvious these guys (including Mr Monk on piano) were just incredible at what they did. Again, very thrilling for the brain, possibly even for the soul… just not sure my heart’s in it.

Bird & Diz on Spotify

Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2 (1951)

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 (drawing on my deep knowledge of jazz here): he didn’t have a hat and groovy facial hair.

Seriously, jazz fans might think their heroes were above the kind of gimmicks we usually associate with desperate pop wannabes, but it’s a truism throughout all popular music that - ignoring the actual music they make - you can usually boil a bona fide star down to one thing, e.g. Dylan (shades), Bowie (dress), Jagger (lips), Rotten (swearing), Winehouse (beehive - or drugs, I guess). Like Badly Drawn Boy, Thelonious Monk was all about the hat. What did Tristano have? Blindness, you say? Okay, that worked for Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, but come on - Monk had a weird hat!

Or maybe Monk was just better, I don’t know. It’s difficult to tell from this album because, as I’ve stated, and will no doubt reiterate again and again over the coming weeks, I know bugger all about jazz.

Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2 on Spotify