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Dec 23

16 Comments

A Christmas song

The last time I did a Christmas post on this blog, in which I listed my seasonal favourites, William Brown wrote in to mention his choice, which comes from a live radio concert by Laura Nyro in 1990. I’ve been listening to Laura for 50 years, since the release of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession in 1968, and she’s more important to me with each passing year. Since I’ve written about her before, at some length, I won’t repeat my thoughts. I’ll just let her wish everybody reading this, on my behalf, a merry Christmas — and, although she doesn’t mention it, a happy new year.

Dec 16

4 Comments

Joe Osborn 1937-2018

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As a first-call bass guitarist in Los Angeles in the second half of the 1960s, Joe Osborn played on some of the era’s most memorable hits, including “California Dreamin'”, “Windy” and “MacArthur Park”. Osborn, who died at his home in Lousiana on December 14, aged 81, formed a particularly strong partnership in the Hollywood studios with the pianist Larry Knechtel and the drummer Hal Blaine.

Born in Mound, Louisiana, Osborn started life as a guitarist and spent two years playing with Bob Luman in Las Vegas before joining Ricky Nelson’s band in 1960 and moving to LA. Since the guitarist was James Burton, Osborn switched to bass and played on such Nelson hits as “Travellin’ Man”. In 1964 his studio career had already begun when he became part of the minimalist rhythm section on the Lou Adler-produced Johnny Rivers at the Whisky A Go Go, whose party vibe, captured by the engineer Bones Howe, made it — and the single taken from it, Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” — a giant hit. Osborn went on to play on many more of Rivers’ (now underrated) albums, right up to LA Reggae and Blue Suede Shoes in the early ’70s, and on many of Howe’s subsequent productions, usually alongside Blaine. “Hal and Joe had the lock and the feel,” Howe said in Harvey Kubernik’s book Turn Up the Radio!

He played a Fender Jazz Bass, whose narrow neck suited his fingers, mostly with a pick. Apparently he didn’t change his flat-wound strings for 20 years. There was plenty of competition on his instrument in the Hollywood studios — from Carol Kaye, Ray Pohlman, Lyle Ritz, the multi-talented Knechtel and others, some of them with jazz training — but he was valued for his southern rock ‘n’ roll chops. His later work included Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (with Knechtel on piano) and all the 5th Dimension’s hits, including “Wedding Bell Blues”, “Let the Sunshine In/Aquarius” and the sublime “One Less Bell to Answer”.

Here is a very nice little two-minute tribute, and here is a short interview. As with a lot of great session musicians, the true extent of his contribution will probably never be adequately measured.

Dec 13

11 Comments

2018: the best bits

Girl from the North Country 2

Sheila Atim (photograph: Manuel Harlan)

Girl from the North Country

Outside of the Rogers-and-Astaire films and Jersey Boys — and Broadway’s contribution to the American songbook, of course — musicals have never played much of a part in my life. I went to the opening night of Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country at the Old Vic in January only because I was asked to write a piece about how the playwright had responded to the invitation to build an evening around Bob Dylan’s songs. I got a pleasant surprise. The play was a little predictable and sometimes melodramatic. But Alan Berry, the musical director, and Simon Hale, the orchestrator, arranger and musical supervisor, had taken McPherson’s pleasingly eccentric selection and recreated them as something standing apart from a story set in Duluth, Minnesota – Dylan’s birthplace – around the time of the Depression, but entirely of a piece with the atmosphere. A little band played beautifully behind the singing of the cast, which was uniformly excellent – and in the case of Sheila Atim, delivering “Tight Connection to My Heart”, something rather more than that. I enjoyed it so much that when it transferred to the West End, I went back and was not inclined to change my view.

Here are the other things I particularly enjoyed this year:

Live performances

1 Ry Cooder (Cadogan Hall, October)

2 Mavis Staples (Union Chapel, July)

3 Ingrid Laubrock’s Anti-House (Cafe Oto, May)

4 Amir ElSaffar + Rivers of Sound (Kings Place, November)

5 Louis Moholo-Moholo Quartet (Cafe Oto, October)

6 Mary Halvorson Octet (Haus der Berliner Festspiele, November))

7 Nérija (Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall, March)

8 Nels Cline 4 (Vortex, April)

9 Richard Thompson (Richmond Theatre, August)

10 Anthony Braxton’s ZIM Music (Cafe Oto, May)

11 Bill Frisell (Cadogan Hall, November)

12 Irreversible Entanglements (Haus der Berliner Festspiele, November)

13 Tony Malaby (Vortex, May)

14 Elaine Michener’s Sweet Tooth (St George’s, Bloomsbury, February)

15 Peter Hammill (Queen Elizabeth Hall, April)

16 The Necks (Cafe Oto, October)

17 Hamid Drake / Yuko Oshima (Haus der Berliner Festspiele, November)

18 Kit Downes / Tre Voci / Southbank Gamelan (Union Chapel, February)

19 Jamie Branch’s Fly or Die (Cafe Oto, November)

20 Martin Speake Quartet (Vortex, April)

New albums

1 Ambrose Akinmusire: Origami Harvest (Blue Note)

2 Moses Boyd Exodus: Displaced Diaspora (Exodus)

3 Arve Henriksen: The Height of the Reeds (Rune Grammofon)

4 Betty LaVette: Things Have Changed (Verve)

5 Tyshawn Sorey: Pillars (Firehouse 12)

6 Marc Ribot: Songs of Resistance 1942-2018 (Anti-)

7 Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Five Blokes: Uplift the People (Ogun)

8 Swing Out Sister: Almost Persuaded (SOS)

9 Mary Halvorson: The Maid with the Flaxen Hair (Tzadik)

10 The Necks: Body (ReR)

11 Barre Phillips: End to End (ECM)

12 Mike Westbrook: Starcross Bridge (hatOLOGY)

13 Michael Mantler: Comment c’est (ECM)

14 Geir Sundstøl: Brødløs (Hubro)

15 Lio: Lio Canta Caymmi (Crammed Discs)

16= Brian Eno: Music for Installations (Opal)

16= Bryan Ferry: Bitter-Sweet (BMG)

18 Jon Hassell: Listening to Pictures (Ndeya)

19 Peter Hammill: From the Trees (Fie)

20 Lewis Wright: Duets (Signum Classics)

Archive / reissue albums

1 Negro Church Music (Man in the Moon)

2 Charles Mingus: Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery/ 46 Selden (BBE)

3 André Hodeir: Essais (Fresh Sound)

4 Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet (Resonance)

5 John Coltrane: Both Directions at Once (Impulse)

6 Mike Westbrook: In Memory of Lou Gare (Westbrook)

7 Chuck Jackson: The Best of the Wand Years (Ace)

8 Don Cherry: Studio 105, Paris 1967 (Hi-Hat)

9 Shirley Ellis: Three Six Nine (Ace)

10 Keith Jarrett / Gary Peacock / Jack DeJohnette: After the Fall (ECM)

Feature films

1 A Woman’s Life (Une Vie) (dir. Stéphane Brizé)

2 Shoplifters (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)

3 Cold War (dir. Pawel Pawlokovski)

4 The Guardians (Les Gardiennes) (dir. Xavier Beauvois)

5 Loveless (dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev)

6 Jeune Femme (dir. Léonor Serraille)

Books: non-fiction

1 Berlin 1936 by Oliver Hilmes (The Bodley Head)

2 Left Bank by Agnès Poirier (Bloomsbury)

3. Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (Profile)

Books: fiction

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape)

Books: poetry

The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Picador Poetry)

Books: photography

New York Scenes by Fred W. McDarrah (Abrams)

Exhibitions

1 Ilse D’Hollander (Victoria Miro Mayfair)

2 Jean-Michel Basquiat: Boom for Real (Barbican)

3 The Age of Jazz in Britain (Two Temple Place)

4 London 1938 (Max Liebermann Villa, Wannsee)

5 Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ (Turner, Margate)

YouTube

Childish Gambino: “This is America”

Lana Del Rey: “Venice Bitch”

Dec 11

11 Comments

Poem: Listening to Miss Peggy Lee

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When Peggy Lee recorded “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” in 1957, the song — with music by Jerome Kern and words by Oscar Hammerstein II — was already 20 years old. Arranged by Nelson Riddle, conducted by Frank Sinatra, the recording became a Lee classic. I saw her perform it on The Perry Como Show, broadcast weekly by the BBC in the days when there were only two TV channels. On the surface, Lee and Riddle turned the song into a reassuring vision of the white-picket-fence America of the Eisenhower era. I heard that, too, but I found myself, young as I was then, responding to something deeper, more ambiguous, containing both optimism for adulthood and a hint of anxieties to come. The poet Roy Kelly seems to have experienced a similar reaction. Roy writes for The Bridge, the Bob Dylan magazine; his long piece on the ‘Mondo Scripto’ exhibition is in the next issue. His book Bob Dylan Dream: My Life with Bob was published in 2015. I’m grateful for his permission to publish this new poem, and I hope you like it as much as I do. RW

 

ON LISTENING TO MISS PEGGY LEE SING

THE FOLKS WHO LIVE ON THE HILL

 

By Roy Kelly

 

The song I heard as a child

and ever since, beautiful Fifties America

art song, popular and commonplace

in anyone’s Sunday kitchen,

coming out of radios as if it never

could end, that time, that childhood.

An arranged figure lifting

and repeating, horns and strings

in melancholy grandeur;

not the tune but inextricable

precursor to its unfolding,

to the appearance of her voice,

small and clear, steadfast, intimate,

 

close as a whisper rising into

the narrative of melody,

the story of a union to come,

Darby and Joan who used to be

Jack and Jill, woven and layered

in the resonance of words and music,

the grief at the core of happiness,

tears in the heart of all things,

so that for years I never hear it

but my eyes brim, my throat swells to closing.

Genius art song of Fifties America

informing me of a life that might have been

and the future I have now,

 

the family I am blessed with now,

in a story we need to tell each other

of how it is loving and being loved,

as she loved and was loved, wishing

on a world that lives in songs,

memory and imagination a focused vision,

childhood and old age meeting

in her voice, her eternal clarity,

the unison that moved me to tears

and will again though I forget she is dead,

the uplifting splendour of the everyday

coming alive on anyone’s radio

as if these moments never will end.

Dec 5

5 Comments

Eric Dolphy, still out there

Eric Dolphy - Photo by © Hans Harzheim

When I think about Eric Dolphy, I wonder what he would be doing now, had he not died of undiagnosed diabetes in a Berlin hospital in 1964, aged 36. Quite a lot of the more adventurously astringent music to be heard today at Cafe Oto in London, The Stone in New York or Sowieso in Berlin could be described as Dolphyesque, in that it launches itself from a jazz platform in search of a relationship with other idioms, in particular the techniques of various forms of modern classical music.

He would have turned 90 this year, and there’s no doubt that he would have used those lost years productively, extending his already formidable vocabulary on alto saxophone, bass clarinet and flute, continuing to develop a personal improvising voice that — like his great contemporary Ornette Coleman, but in a very different way — moved beyond the influence of Charlie Parker, and exploring the possibilities of new instrumental groupings and compositional techniques. Just imagine a Dolphy quintet album with Ambrose Akinmusire, Alexander Hawkins, Thomas Morgan and Tyshawn Sorey!

A new release from Resonance Records provides a fine illustration of the things he was up to in the couple of years before he died, and of how modern he still sounds. After an apprenticeship with Chico Hamilton, Dolphy came to the attention of the jazz world primarily through his work with John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, but he found a path to his own music, to be heard on such albums as Out There (Prestige, 1960), the marvellous series of quintet recordings at the Five Spot with Booker Little from 1961 (also Prestige), and the celebrated Out to Lunch! (Blue Note, 1964).

The Resonance collection, called Musical Prophet and currently available as a triple vinyl set, is based on two days of studio sessions supervised by the producer Alan Douglas for his own label in New York over two days in July 1963. The sessions featured various instrumental combinations from a pool of mostly young players: Woody Shaw (trumpet), Sonny Simmons (alto), Prince Lawsha (flute), Clifford Jordan (tenor), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Richard Davis or Eddie Kahn (bass), J. C. Moses or Charles Moffett (drums), and the veteran Garvin Bushell on bassoon. It seems to have been typical of Dolphy’s generosity of spirit that he made solo space for other musicians who played his instruments (Simmons in particular), and featured compositions other than his own.

Two albums, Conversations and Iron Man, were issued from these sessions, but the new set also contains outtakes of all the original tracks, and more besides. Given the relatively small size of Dolphy’s output during his short recording career, anything new is particularly welcome, and it’s a treat to hear — for instance — a pithier version of Lawsha’s Caribbean-inflected “Music Matador”, two extra takes of the solo alto treatment of the standard “Love Me”, and the astonishingly inventive solos by Dolphy and the 18-year-old Shaw on an alternate take of “Mandrake” that is stronger than the one originally selected.

There’s also a bonus track from another session: a 15-minute piece called “A Personal Statement”, originally included under the title “Jim Crow” on an album culled from random tapes left by Dolphy with some friends and released by Blue Note in 1987 under the title Other Aspects. It now transpires that this striking piece was written by the pianist Bob James for his own trio, plus Dolphy and a counter-tenor, David Schwarz, and recorded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in March 1964, shortly before Dolphy left for what turned out to be his final trip to Europe. The fact that Dolphy didn’t write it, and that James would soon (after recording a trio album for ESP) turn away from the avant-garde towards an engagement with the more commercial form of jazz that made him famous, doesn’t make it any less interesting; it also means that Dolphy recognised the promise in these young musicians, who were students at the time.

For me, however, the heart of this set is the second of its six sides, entirely devoted to duets between Dolphy’s bass clarinet and the bass of Richard Davis: two virtuosi in conversation. The first of the three tracks, the originally released 13-minute take of “Alone Together”, is a known masterpiece (and there is another take, previously unreleased, on the final disc). The second and the third pieces, two takes of a composition by the pianist Roland Hanna called “Muses for Richard Davis”, slowly explore the timbral relationship between the two instruments with enormous care, subtlety and beauty. You can ignore the track breaks and treat the side as one half-hour piece: half an hour of genius.

* Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 Studio Session is out now as a vinyl limited edition and will be released on CD on January 25. The photograph above, by the German jazz photographer Hans Harzheim, appears in the lavish booklet, along with the work of Francis Wolff, Val Wilmer and other photographers, and many essays and interviews with musicians whose lives Eric Dolphy touched.