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Jun 30

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Listening to Lucio Battisti

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For no particular reason that I can pin down, I’ve spent a lot of this lockdown listening to the Italian singer Lucio Battisti. Well, maybe I just wanted music to remind me of being on holiday in Italy. The taste of a decent espresso. Traffic chaos in Naples. Olive groves on a Sicilian hillside. All of the stuff that seems so unreachable at the moment. Anyway, he’s been providing good company, as he has since I stumbled across his music almost 45 years ago. By that time he was already established as one of Italy’s biggest stars, with many hit singles and albums behind him.

The thing that first caught my ear in 1976 was a song called “Ancora tu”, on which he veered away from the singer-songwriter mode into an engagement with disco music. It’s an infernally catchy piece of music, but what also struck me were the words. Even with my rudimentary Italian, it was obvious that he was using dance music as a setting for one side of a conversation between two former lovers who’ve just bumped into each other again: “You again! How are you? Pointless question. You’re like me.” “Have you eaten, or not? Yes, I’m hungry, too.” “You look lovely. Younger than ever. Or maybe just nicer.” He tells her he’s given up smoking. At some point in your life, you may have had that kind of conversation. I liked the way the singer’s tone, conveying a mixture of fondness and concealed wounds, worked beautifully over the lightly pumping rhythm.

I was doing A&R at Island back then, so I called up some of Battisti’s earlier work and lost myself for a while in albums like Il mio canto libero, Il nostro caro angelo and Anima latina, each of which showed a willingness to absorb and adapt a variety of approaches, from English progressive rock to Brazilian new samba. “Ancora tu” was the lead track of an album whose title — Lucio Battisti, la batteria, il contrabasso, eccetera — itself highlighted his new interest in disco. I also found out that while Battisti was responsible for the music, he hadn’t written those interesting words. The lyrics to all his songs were by a man named Giulio Rapetti, who called himself Mogol.

The more I listened, the more I liked the way Battisti made records that sounded thoroughly modern while retaining some quality of traditional Italian pop music. He’d got his start through things like the San Remo Song Festival, and just enough of that flavour survived in his music to set it apart from his Anglo-American influences.

What I didn’t know was his string of hit singles — like Mi ritorni in mente (1969) and I giardini di marzo (1972) — had persuaded a generation of Italian kids that, as well as worshipping the Beatles and the Stones, they could have a pop music of their very own, speaking in their voice. It secured him a special and enduring place in their hearts. “He has been a sort of musical background to our lives,” the writer Giorgio Terruzzi told me the other day, “when we were passing between childhood and adolescence.” But that wasn’t what I heard, because I was listening to it in a different place at a different time. And by then he was becoming something different, too.

At some point, somewhere or other, I met both him and Mogol. Then in London I took Battisti to lunch at the Trattoo, a very nice Italian restaurant just off Kensington High Street. I wanted to try and work out a way to get his records — none of which had been released in the UK or the US — to an Anglophone audience. I liked him: he was a reserved but thoughtful person, and he was very happy discuss the fortunes of his football team, Juventus. Sadly, the idea didn’t come to anything. (The following year, in Los Angeles, he did make an album for RCA called Io tu noi tutti, with Hollywood session men, which gave him a couple more hits at home, although an English-language version titled Images didn’t work at all.) So, as a fan, I just carried on buying his Italian albums.

By the end of the ’70s he’d acquired the habit  of recording in London, with English producers, arrangers and musicians. For a while the records got lusher and more dependent on electric keyboards and synths, as you can hear in “Donna selvaggia donna” from the album Una donna per amico (1978) and “Il monolocale” from Una giornata uggiosa (1980), both produced by Geoff Westley with musicians like the guitarists Pip Williams, Phil Palmer and Ray Russell, the bassists Paul Westwood and John Giblin and the drummers Gerry Conway and Stuart Elliott.

Then it all changed. After so many years of success, Battisti and Mogol parted company, for reasons that have never really been explained. On the singer’s next album, E già (1982), the lyrics were credited to his wife, Grazia Letizia Veronese, and the music was stripped right back to a sound bed of electronics, created in the studio by Battisti and his new producer, Greg Walsh. I found it very adventurous and striking, and a track called “Straniero” made a deep and lasting impression. Then, four years later, came an album called Don Giovanni: more conventional in its arrangements, richer in texture, with words by the poet Pasquale Panella, and featuring several classics, like the irresistible “Fatti un pianto”, with its beautiful tenor saxophone work by Phil Todd on the intro and coda.

By this time Battisti had removed himself from the public eye. He stopped giving interviews and simply released an album every couple of years, all on the Numero Uno label, which he and Mogol had founded in the early ’70s after Ricordi had been reluctant to release their extraordinary concept album, Amore non amore. Each of these new albums had a standard look — very minimal white covers featuring simple black line drawings and no photographs — and each, sadly, was increasingly unsuccessful with the public.

L’apparenza (1988), La sposa occidentale (1990), Cosa succederà alla ragazza (1992) and Hegel (1994) had different producers — Robyn Smith, Greg Walsh, and, for the last two, Andy Duncan — but I think of them as a continuous work: an extended suite of electro-dance music made by a singer-songwriter, the innate vulnerability of Battisti’s voice ensuring that it never lost its human warmth. Sometimes, at their most driving and joyous, as in “Cosa succederà alla ragazza” or “La voce del viso”, these late tracks make me think of the Pet Shop Boys holidaying on that stretch of the Tyrrhenian coast around Viareggio, warmed by the Tuscan sun. But it’s all pure Battisti, really.

Hegel turned out to be his last word. Four years after its release, in 1998, he died in a Milan hospital, apparently of cancer, aged 55. Although in recent years there has been some controversy over the ferocity with which his widow guards his legacy, his music is available to be discovered by anyone who, like me, came to it a little late and found a friend.

* Many of Lucio Battisti’s recordings, including the final quartet of “white albums”, were reissued two years ago by Sony Legacy / Numero Uno in limited editions of CDs replicating the original album artwork. They seem to be still available.

Jun 22

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Uptown soul masters

Gene Burks

If you’ve been reading these pieces for a while, you’ll know that I have a soft spot for heavily orchestrated male soul balladeers from the first half of the 1960s. Much of this kind of music came out of the Brill Building in New York, but as Ady Croasdell points out in his notes to an excellent new compilation called Soul Voices: 60s Big Ballads, it was a style that migrated to Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis and elsewhere.

Its great producers and songwriters included Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jerry Ragovoy, Bert Berns, Teddy Randazzo and Van McCoy. Among the most expressive voices were numbered Chuck Jackson, Garnet Mimms and Ben E. King, who were big names back then, and such cult favourites as Lou Johnson, Jimmy Radcliffe, Walter Jackson, Tommy Hunt and Tony Mason. All those luminaries are to be found among these tracks, together with such lesser known singers (to me, anyway) as Clarence Pinckney, Garrett Saunders, Gene Burks and Brooks O’Dell. Be assured of this: they all have something to say, and something worth listening to.

One way of looking at this album, admittedly in a slightly reductive way, is to see it as a 24-track publishers’ demo for the next Walker Brothers album in, say, 1966. It’s possible to imagine Scott Walker recording almost any of these songs with Ivor Raymonde arrangements in the old Philips studios on the Bayswater Road near Marble Arch, as he did with “Make It Easy on Yourself”, “My Ship Is Coming In”, “Stand By Me” and “Stay With Me Baby”.

But the results wouldn’t have been as good. Apart from the great songwriting, arrangements and production, what makes these sides so powerful is the quality shared by all the singers: a certain dignified ardour, usually resigned, occasionally optimistic, generally suave, always grown-up. A compilation that chooses to start with Walter Jackson’s sombre “Forget the Girl”, a wonderful Chicago record with marvellous Floyd Morris piano octaves tinkling through the Riley Hampton arrangement, is setting itself a challenge, but the standard never drops.

Sometimes it reaches the heights. Those moments certainly include Chuck Jackson’s “I Can’t Stand to See You Cry”, a Van McCoy masterpiece worth listening to all the way through again, once you’ve had your heart satisfactorily torn apart by Jackson’s lead vocal, just for the quality of Gary Chester’s drumming. Equally magnificent is Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Through a Long and Sleepless Night”, a classic Bert Berns production arranged for Spanish guitar, double bass and, I’d guess, the Greek chorus of Cissy Houston and Dee Dee Warwick.

Sometimes the individual components of the style make themselves obvious, like the gospel influence on Garnet Mimms’ “Anytime You Want Me”, produced by Jerry Ragovoy, or the Latin tinge of James Carr’s “Lover’s Competition”, or the southern soul of Gene Burks’s “Can’t Stand Your Fooling Around” or the Spectorish sweep of Jimmy Beaumont’s “You Got Too Much Going For You”. Elsewhere there’s the mellifluous strength of Roy Hamilton on “Heartache (Hurry on By)”, the striking tuba intro to Kenny Carter’s “Like a Big Bad Rain”, Al Hibbler’s gentle crooning on Randazzo’s “Good For a Lifetime”, the ice-rink Wurlitzer intro to Junior Lewis’s unreleased “I Love You So Much”, and a lot more besides, including two slices of prime Bacharach: Lou Johnson’s original version of “Reach Out For Me” and Tommy Hunt’s unreleased remake of “Don’t Make Me Over”, which uses the Dionne Warwick backing track.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to slip a gaberdine raincoat over a navy mohair suit and go out and walk the tear-stained streets. This isn’t the weather for it, but the soundtrack never gets old.

* The photograph above is of Gene Burks. Soul Voices: 60s Big Ballads is on Ace Records.

Jun 12

35 Comments

‘Echo in the Canyon’

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There’s a lot to like about Echo in the Canyon, a new 90-minute documentary about the Laurel Canyon music scene in the mid- to late-’60s, directed by Andrew Slater. One asset is the constant presence of Jakob Dylan, who has been silent as a recording artist for several years but here proves to be a sensitive interviewer and performer. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who’s grown up as the son of Bob Dylan isn’t sycophantic towards his celebrated interviewees, but his thoughtful silences are often expressive — they give us, too, the chance to think.

It’s an unusual film in that its framing device is the assembling of a group of musicians, led by Dylan, to perform in concert the songs of the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, and Buffalo Springfield. Dylan’s on-stage guests include Regina Spektor, Beck and Fiona Apple — and, I guess, the members of his band, the Wallflowers. Those he interviews include Roger McGuinn, Brian Wilson, Michelle Phillips, Lou Adler, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, John Sebastian, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. There are lots of archive clips, many of them cherishable.

The real focus is very specific. It’s the moment folk music and rock music merged in the Byrds’ version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr Tambourine Man”. Specifically, it’s the moment Roger (then known as Jim) McGuinn got hold of a 12-string Rickenbacker — the second to be produced, we learn — and constructed that famous introduction, which echoed the “jingle-jangle” of the lyric and became a genre in itself, working its way through Tom Petty and ending up as power-pop.

A lot is made of the influence of the Beatles on this movement, quite correctly, and also of the way the Byrds’ early records influenced George Harrison to write “If I Needed Someone”. Personally I think they should have given considerable credit to the Searchers’ versions of Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono’s “Needles and Pins” and Jackie DeShannon’s “When You Walk in the Room”, which came out in 1964 and predicted the jingle-jangle sound with great precision. Also, given Nash’s presence, some mention should have been made of the Hollies’ influence.

But then David Crosby doesn’t think much of the pop music that came before… well, before David Crosby. It was, he says, all “moon-and-june and baby-I-love-you”. Oh, right. “I close my eyes for a second and pretend it’s me you want / Meanwhile I try to act so nonchalant.” That’s not poetry, huh? Sure, “To dance beneath the diamond sky / With one hand waving free / Silhouetted by the sea” is poetry, too. Ah well. Tutto fa brodo, as they say.

Having read two biographies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young for a Guardian review last year, my appetite for stories of internecine warfare in the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield is pretty well sated, and nothing uttered here adds interesting detail or insight. It’s nice to see Brian Wilson and to hear Michelle Phillips, and Petty’s conversation with Dylan in a guitar shop is apparently the last interview he gave before his death in 2017. But anyone expecting this to be the story of the Laurel Canyon of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor will be disappointed, which makes the presence of Jackson Browne puzzling: he talks well, of course, but really had nothing to do with what the film is talking about.

Apparently Slater was inspired to make the documentary by seeing Jacques Demy’s 1968 film Model Shop, set in Hollywood and starring Anouk Aimée and Gary Lockwood, with a soundtrack by Spirit (who, like Love and the Doors, are never mentioned). I’ve never seen it, but the clips we’re shown certainly make me want to rectify that omission. The director tries to recreate that lost vibe as Dylan cruises the boulevards and wanders from one legendary studio to another: United and Western (now merged), Capitol… not Gold Star, of course, demolished many years ago. The use of Laurel Canyon itself is disappointing: I wanted get more of a sense of the topography and to see the houses where these people lived and (in every sense) played.

Some of the newly performed music is enjoyable, although the chopped-up editing can be frustrating, and having Stills and Clapton perform a guitar duel in studios on different continents wasn’t really a very good idea at all. The best comes at the end: a sensitive version of “Expecting to Fly” is the finale, preceded by Dylan and Beck duetting quite beautifully in front of their band on the Byrds’ arrangement of Goffin and King’s “Goin’ Back”. “A little bit of courage is all we lack / So catch me if you can / …” It made me stand up, grab the nearest air guitar, and find a harmony to sing. And that doesn’t happen every day, I can tell you.

* Echo in the Canyon is on Amazon Prime. The photograph is taken from the Laurel Canyon Radio website: http://www.laurelcanyonradio.com/view-from-laurel-canyon/

Jun 10

6 Comments

Measuring the heart

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The great figures of jazz are the people who, as the decades pass, you can set your compass by. For me, in my generation, that meant Miles, Coltrane, Ornette. It’s always tempting to think that they don’t make people like that any more, but it’s not true. And I’m thinking that the trumpeter, composer and bandleader Ambrose Akinmusire might be one of them.

Akinmusire’s music has a moral heft that makes it a good place to turn to in times like these. Not many artists can so successfully maintain a commitment to beauty while bringing  intellect and rigour to bear on the issues of the day, never letting us forget what got him (and us) here: the history of African Americans.

In 2014, on The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, the second of his five Blue Note albums, Akinmusire included a piece called “Rollcall for Those Absent”, in which a small child recites the names of black victims of police homicide, including Amadou Diallo and Trayvon Martin. It still rings in my head every time a new atrocity occurs. Throughout that and his other albums, even when there is no explicit text, a sense of mourning is mixed with the celebration.

On his new one, called On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment, that underlying emotion is redoubled. Even when this music is at its most complex, rippling and sparkling with detail, it moves on an undertow of the blues. The album begins with Akinmusire’s beautifully pure natural trumpet sound, all alone, introducing a track called “Tide of Hyacinth” which moves through dazzling interplay with the members of his regular quartet — Sam Harris (piano), Harish Raghavan (bass) and Justin Brown (drums) — and incorporates a recitation in Yoruba by the Cuban-born singer and percussionist Jesús Díaz. That’s a taste of the various approaches explored here, which range from a lovely little song pairing the voice of Genevieve Artadi (the singer with the LA electro-funk duo Knower) with Akinmusire’s Fender Rhodes piano, through the Monkish angularity of “Mr Roscoe” and the tender balladry of “Reset (Quiet Victories & Celebrated Defeats)” to a sombre, hymn-like dedication to the late Roy Hargrove, whose work with D’Angelo and others paved the way for Akinmusire’s appearance on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

One track, only half a minute long, is for unaccompanied trumpet, the squeezed half-valve sounds reminiscent of Rex Stewart. Akinmusire goes that far back, and all the way forward. I don’t know of a trumpeter from the generations after Don Cherry who uses vocalised effects so brilliantly. He does it again on the penultimate track, “Blues (We Measure the Heart With a Fist)”, where the notes are compressed so tightly that they can barely escape over Harris’s damped notes before the mood switches into a passage of fantastic trumpet/bass/drums improvisation that seems to explore a new way of swinging.

The album ends with the ringing, carefully-spaced chords of the Fender Rhodes, bringing the album to a close with a short piece titled “Hooded Procession (Read the Names Aloud)”, the latest in Akinmusire’s series of threnodies for the victims of police violence. The timeliness of this does not require emphasis. Once again, he has created a soundtrack for our time that will live long beyond its moment.

* On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment is released on the Blue Note label.

Jun 8

2 Comments

Misha Mullov-Abbado’s ‘Dream Circus’

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In normal times, I’d be keenly anticipating a live launch of Misha Mullov-Abbado’s Dream Circus, the third album by the London-based composer and bassist who won the Kenny Wheeler Prize in 2014, his final year as a student at the Royal Academy of Music. Instead I’ll have to stay at home and enjoy the music on record, which is no hardship at all.

His first album, New Ansonia (2015), was by a quintet. His second, Cross-Platform Interchange (2017), was by a septet. Dream Circus is by a sextet: James Davison (trumpet and flugelhorn), Matthew Herd (alto), Sam Rapley (tenor), Liam Dunachie (piano), and Scott Chapman (drums). It gives evidence of an increasing maturity: the writing, the playing and the recording are of such high quality that once you’ve put the record on, you need a very good reason to take it off.

This is modern jazz with a powerful imagination and a sense of variety that never compromises its integrity. It’s a music with roots in hard bop but a strong commitment to melody. If I had to identify Mullov-Abbado’s spiritual predecessor as a composer, it would probably be Benny Golson. Some of the things I was reminded of while listening to it were Oliver Nelson’s original “Stolen Moments”, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, and Manu Katché’s ECM albums. It stands quite distinct from the new London jazz movement associated with Trinity Laban and Tomorrow’s Warriors. There are no attempts to incorporate influences from outside the mainstream jazz tradition, but it still sounds contemporary. It’s not particularly on-trend, but it really doesn’t need to be.

Individually, the musicians are remarkable. The leader’s introduction to the opening track, “Some Things Are Just So Simple”, establishes the presence and flexibility of his playing. Davison is one of the finest young trumpeters around, with the bright, broad sound and confident projection of Freddie Hubbard, and Herd and Rapley are ideal foils, each with a tone full of human warmth. The passages in which they work together, either as separate contrapuntal voices in the poised “Equinox” or in the full-on free blowing of the exhilarating “The Infamous Grouse”, are outstanding. The subtle dovetailing of the three horns on the opening of “Stillness”, a luminous ballad, is very beautiful, opening out into a tenor solo of which Wayne Shorter would be proud.

The album’s moment of humour is the playful Fats Wallerish theme of “Little Astronaut”, which precedes the absolute highlight: a composition called “The Bear” in which, over a loose but sombre ostinato, the written horn lines are allowed to braid and fray and change weight, giving the feeling of improvisation. It’s interesting to think of these strategies as techniques absorbed (via Mingus and the Blue Notes) from black church music and metabolised into something quite different. The closing “Blue Deer” opens with a lovely pastoral theme that emphasises the gorgeous blend of the three horns before intensifying through an out-of-tempo passage in which the alto rises sweetly to become the lead voice in a moment of absolute radiance. Here is where the importance of Dunachie and Chapman is most evident as the rhythm section switches from time to no-time to complex written passages with a grace that makes everything sound completely natural.

It seems likely that the contribution of the producer, Jasper Høiby, best known as the bassist with Phronesis, has much to do with the project’s success. Captured over a week in Copenhagen’s Village studios last September, the musicians sound relaxed but completely alert, and the tone and balance of the recording are perfect for this music. You can’t play like this unless you’re at ease. And that quality communicates itself to the grateful listener.

* Dream Circus is released by Edition Records on June 12 and is available via Bandcamp: https://mishamullov-abbado.bandcamp.com/. The photograph of the sextet is by Aga Tomaszek.