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Dec 14

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2023: The best bits

Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up. This year I caught up with my late mother’s fondness for Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel written by Willa Cather in 1927. A hardback copy had been on her bookshelves since I was old enough to notice, and she spoke often of how much she admired it. When she and my father died a few years ago, within months of each other, I took away her 1933 hardback edition as their house was cleared. And this year I finally got around to reading it.

Set in the mid-19th century, the story of two French priests sent by the Pope to New Mexico shows how Cather could paint on a vast canvas. Born in 1873, she was brought up in rural Nebraska, giving her a feeling for striking and often bleakly beautiful landscape and dramatic weather. The climate and the topography of New Mexico become an intrinsic part of her narrative, as alive as the characters. In that, and in a sudden, unexpected episode of shocking violence, I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy, who died in June, just as I was reading it.

I was reminded of him even more forcefully when I moved on straight away to Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, written between 1913 and 1918, all very different, each with its own female protagonist, each casting a spell. McCarthy, of course, wrote a celebrated Border Trilogy in the 1990s: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. None of his obituaries mentioned a possible influence, and it’s a long time since Cather (who died in 1947) was fashionable, but I’d be very surprised if he were not familiar with her work.

She could write about music and its effects, too. In The Song of the Lark her protagonist, Thea Kronborg, the young daughter of Scandinavian immigrants settled in the town of Moonstone, Colorado, and destined (although she has no idea of this yet) to become a great opera singer, is invited to a railroad workers’s ball by a character called Spanish Johnny:

The Mexican dance was soft and quiet. There was no calling, the conversation was very low, the rhythm of the music was smooth and engaging, the men were graceful and courteous. Some of them Thea had never before seen out of their working clothes, smeared with grease from the round house or clay from the brickyard. Sometimes, when the music happened to be a popular Mexican waltz song, the dancers sang it softly as they moved. There were three little girls under twelve in their first communion dresses, and one of them had an orange marigold in her black hair, just over her ear. They danced with the men and with each other. There was an atmosphere of ease and friendly pleasure in the low, dimly lit room, and Thea could not help wondering whether the Mexicans had no jealousies or neighbourly grudges as the people in Moonstone had. There was no constraint of any kind there tonight, but a kind of natural harmony about their movements, their low conversations, their smiles.

NEW ALBUMS

1 Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth (Flying Dutchman/Acid Jazz)

2 Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden (Constellation)

3 Sylvie Courvoisier: Chimaera (Intakt)

4 Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension (Nonesuch)

5 Blind Boys of Alabama: Echoes of the South (Single Lock)

6 Fire! Orchestra: Echoes (Rune Grammofon)

7 Vilhelm Bromander: In This Forever Unfolding Moment (Thanatos)

8 Steve Lehman & Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (Pi)

9 Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom (Columbia Legacy)

10 PJEV/Hayden Chisholm/Kit Downes: Medna Rosa (Red Hook)

11 Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Continuing (Pi)

12 Sebastian Rochford: A Short Diary (ECM)

13 Paul Simon: Seven Psalms (Owl)

14 The Necks: Travel (Northern Spy)

15 Ambrose Akinmusire: Beauty Is Enough (Origami Harvest)

16 Cécile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine (Nonesuch)

17 Alexander Hawkins Trio: Carnival Celestial (Intakt)

18 jaimie branch: fly or die fly or die fly or die ((world war)) (International Anthem)

19 Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite (Mack Avenue)

20 Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra: Tales from the Jacquard (Whirlwind)

REISSUE / ARCHIVE

1 John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse)

2 Mike Osborne: Starting Fires (British Progressive Jazz)

3 Miles Davis: In Concert at the Olympia Paris 1957 (Fresh Sound)

4 Bruce Springsteen: The Live Series: Songs on Keys (nugs.net)

5 Chris Cutler: Compositions and Collaborations 1972-2022 (ReR Megacorp)

6 Evan Parker: NYC 1978 (Relative Pitch)

7 Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah (Luaka Bop)

8 Derek Bailey & Paul Motian: Duo in Concert (Frozen Reeds)

9 Jon Hassell: Further Fictions (Ndeya)

10 Joy: Joy (Cadillac)

LIVE PERFORMANCE

1 Northern Soul Prom (Royal Albert Hall, July)

2 Mette Henriette + Charles Lloyd trios (Barbican, November)

3 Rickie Lee Jones (Jazz Café, June)

4 Kronos Quartet (Barbican, October)

5 Tyshawn Sorey / Pat Thomas (Café Oto, November)

6 Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (Ronnie Scott’s Club, August)

7 Ethan Iverson: Ellington: Stride to Strings (Grange Festival, June)

8 Empirical (Vortex, May)

9 Decoy + Joe McPhee (Café Oto, July)

10 Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands (Pizza Express, September)

MUSIC BOOKS

1 Henry Threadgill: Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Alfred A. Knopf)

2 Laura Flam & Emily Sieu Liebowitz: But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (Hachette)

3 Richard Morton Jack: Nick Drake: The Life (John Murray)

4 Peter Watts: Denmark Street (Paradise Road)

5 Ray Padgett: Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members (EWP Press)

FICTION

1 Rose Tremain: Absolutely & Forever (Chatto & Windus)

2 Jon Fosse (tr. Damion Searls): A Shining (Fitzcarraldo)

3 Michael Bracewell: Unfinished Business (White Rabbit)

NON-FICTION

1 Laura Cumming: Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death (Vintage)

2 Ned Boulting: 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession (Bloomsbury)

3 Marc Kristal: Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister (Frances Lincoln)

FILMS

1 Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)

2 One Fine Morning (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve)

3 Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)

EXHIBITIONS

1 Nicolas de Staël (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris)

2 Impressionists on Paper (Royal Academy, London)

3 Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (Pallant House, Chichester)

Dec 7

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Goodbye, Denny Laine

Denny Laine, who has died at his home in Florida, aged 79, was the best thing about the Moody Blues, even though he was only in the band for a couple of years, from its foundation in Birmingham to his departure two years later. It was his voice that made “Go Now”, their No 1 hit, more than just another British beat group’s cover of an American soul record.

The original of “Go Now”, by Bessie Banks, released in January 1964, was itself a classic. Produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, arranged by Garry Sherman, written by Larry Banks (Bessie’s husband) and Milton Bennett, it was first released in the US on the Tiger label. “It shines,” wrote the great enthusiast Dave Godin, who released it in the UK on his Soul City label before including in the second volume of his Deep Soul Treasures series, “like an epic beacon in the history of soul music.”

Alex Murray, a young Decca A&R man, produced the Moody Blues’ version at the label’s West Hampstead studios. Denny Laine said the song had come to them via the journalist James Hamilton, a soul music fan who wrote for Record Mirror and received regular shipments of new records from the New York radio disc jockey B. Mitchel Reed. They speeded it up very slightly and took some of the gospel feel out of the 3/4 rhythm but, crucially, they kept Bessie’s unaccompanied opening vocal line, giving Laine the chance to seize listeners by the lapels: “We’ve already said goodbye…”

“Go Now” was still slipping down the charts when the band I was in supported the Moody Blues at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham in March 1965. No doubt the booking had been made before they hit No 1. In front of an audience of a couple of hundred kids in the basement premises, the Moodies were wearing their early uniform of dark blue Regency-collared double-breasted suits. As they went through their repertoire of covers, including James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy”, they were impressively powerful and professional. By the end of the year they were supporting the Beatles on their final UK tour. Two degrees of separation, eh?