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Posts from the ‘Jazz’ Category

Aug 21

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Major dudes, minor ninths

The implied flavour of much of the music made by Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker might be read as that of hard bop as played on the West Coast: laconic, brainy, slyly coded, but also somehow sunlit. By contrast with the jazz musicians they admired, the Steely Dan duo were afforded the sort of time and effort needed to make their records as immaculate as possible, successfully substituting wit and taste for spontaneity. The result, almost airtight in its perfection, would seem to render any attempt at recreation by third parties not just superfluous but doomed from the outset.

There are, nevertheless, several Steely Dan tribute outfits of high repute, existing to satisfy the appetite in particular of those never fortunate enough to hear the original band in person. I haven’t seen any of them, although I was sorry to miss the 14-piece Royal Scammers when they played the 606 Club in Chelsea last year, having heard good reports from reliable sources.

But if tribute bands live are one thing, offering at least a partial guarantee of satisfaction, an album of reinterpretations is a great deal riskier. The British singer and pianist Chris Ingham brings it off with Walter / Donald, his rearrangements of 13 songs performed by a quintet in which he’s joined by the trumpeter Paul Higgs, the saxophonist Harry Greene, the double bassist Geoff Gascoyne and the drummer George Double.

Ingham is a former music journalist (for Mojo, mostly) and author of books on the Beatles, Billie Holiday and others. Now he writes TV soundtracks and leads a band that has also recorded and toured its surveys the music of Hoagy Carmichael, Dudley Moore and Stan Getz. A fine pianist, he has a light, pleasant singing voice, totally lacking in affectation but not in character, wisely avoiding attempts to imitate Fagen’s distinctive sardonic croon. It’s a little like listening to Georgie Fame singing Mose Allison’s songs: a intelligent take, full of the sort of implicit affection and respect which, along with the musicianship involved, make it stand up as a valid adjunct to the originals.

There are some fine moments, many of which bring the latent jazz to the surface. “Your Gold Teeth II” has a lovely two-horn unison intro, a little like a gentler Horace Silver arrangement, and “I Got the News” finds a hint of Monk in the melody’s staccato phrases. The choice of material also veers into less obvious areas, as with “The Last Mall”, a warped blues-with-a-bridge from Everything Must Go, the last Dan album, released in 2003, which has its chords straightened out and is enlivened by the smart addition of the irresistible horn riff from Fagen’s cover of “Ruby Baby”, from The Nightfly. And I think I might even prefer Ingham’s reading of the quietly heartbreaking “Paging Audrey” to that on Becker’s second solo album, Circus Money (2008).

There are fine horn solos throughout, Higgs displaying an almost cornet-like brightness and an adroit use of cup or plunger mute on the brief coda to “Your Gold Teeth II” and the intro and solos on “Haitian Divorce”, while Greene’s tenor has a fluent mobility reminiscent (to me, anyway) of Hank Mobley, excelling on “What a Shame About Me”, a really great song — a John Cheever short story in five verses.

Honestly, if you walked into a club and found yourself listening to this band playing this material, you’d be extremely happy. It might not be a revelation but you’d be hearing wonderful songs carefully turned so as to catch the light from a different angle, in the process drawing out their humanity.

* The Chris Ingham Quintet plays a launch gig for Walter / Donald at the Pizza Express in Soho on September 17. The album is out now on Downhome Records, available from https://www.chrisingham.co.uk/shop

Jul 29

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The return of Larry Stabbins

Not often does a jazz club dedicate an evening to the memory of a regular customer. Last night’s show at the Vortex was dedicated to Shirley Thompson, who died earlier this year, aged 87. For many years Shirley and her partner, John Jack, the founder of Cadillac Records, were fixtures at a table for two alongside the left-hand wall; the seating arrangements have recently changed, but a photograph of the couple and a bottle of wine were placed on a table in their old location.

As it happens, a lot of emotions were floating around the Vortex last night. The event also commemorated the late Louis Moholo-Moholo by functioning as the launch of a new CD, recorded live in Foggia during a short Italian tour 40 years ago, by a special trio: Louis on drums, Keith Tippett on piano, and Larry Stabbins on tenor and soprano saxophones and flute.

Stabbins was the featured attraction last night, leading a trio completed by the most suitable replacements possible: Alexander Hawkins on piano and Mark Sanders on drums. Having made his reputation alongside Tippett, his fellow Bristolian and mentor, in Centipede and Ark, and confirmed it with the the SME, the LJCO and others, as well the band Working Week, the saxophonist left music for 20 years. His return to activity is greatly to be applauded.

Last night he led off with “Ismite Is Might”, a beautiful Chris McGregor composition that he remembered from his experience of depping for Alan Skidmore in the Brotherhood of Breath. A sober, hymn-like piece, it displayed the strength of his tenor tone and the sharp focus of his phrasing: stronger and sharper than I remembered, indeed. There were other evocations of the South African influence throughout the set I heard, most obviously in a marvellously powerful Hawkins solo. Sanders kept the pots boiling throughout in a way that Louis would have admired. This was life-enhancing music.

* Live in Foggia is out now on the Ogun label (Ogunrecording.co.uk). There will be a full-scale tribute to Louis Moholo-Moholo at the 100 Club on August 27, featuring many musicians with whom he worked, including Claude Deppa, Evan Parker and Shabaka Hutchings, and members of his band Four Blokes (tickets: https://wegottickets.com/event/669285).

Jul 19

Olie Brice at the Vortex

Almost a year ago I wrote warmly about the debut of the bassist and composer Olie Brice’s new quartet at Cafe Oto, noting that they’d be going into a studio the following day to record an album. That album — titled All It Was — is now out, its release celebrated at the Vortex last night with an evening of powerfully emotional music.

The tenor saxophonist Rachel Musson, the pianist Alexander Hawkins and the drummer Will Glaser are Brice’s accomplices in a project that takes all the lessons the four of them have ever learnt about how to play this music and puts the result at the service of a set of distinctive and memorable compositions.

Brice tends to lead off in the way Charles Mingus used to, with solo bass statements of attention-grabbing clarity and strength before the others dive into the structures of pieces such as “Listening Interntly to Raptors” (which began the set with a Monkish prowl), the soaring, hard-swinging “Happy Song for Joni”, the hypnotic “And We Dance on Firm Earth”, and the pointilliste “After a Break”.

A couple of of the pieces referred to recent losses. “Morning Mourning” was an elegy for Brice’s father, while Don Cherry’s “Awake Nu” was included as a tribute to Louis Moholo-Moholo, who died in South Africa last month. Fittingly, Glaser’s playing throughout the evening was lit by Louis’s fire: dense but never oppressive, building to ecstatic climaxes, particularly in several duet passages with Hawkins, who occasionally infiltrated almost subliminal elements of barrelhouse and boogie-woogie into his strongly percussive inventions.

Once again Musson impressed as one of the most creative saxophonists on the UK scene, employing a striking variety of tone and trajectory, from jagged outbursts at full throttle to the delicate altissimo phrases with which she brought one piece to its final rest.

That combination of grace and strength typified the assimilation of individual assets into the work of a truly extraordinary quartet. All It Was will be one of the records of the year, and this was a gig to match its excellence.

* The Olie Brice Quartet’s All It Was is on West Hill Records and available via Bandcamp: https://westhill.bandcamp.com/

Jul 15

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Café Society in wartime

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I imagine I picked up a copy of Life magazine’s edition of October 16, 1944 from a flea market many years ago because its cover featured the 20-year-old Lauren Bacall, making her screen debut in To Have and Have Not opposite Humphrey Bogart: “Midway through the first reel the sulky-looking girl shown on the cover saunters with catlike grace into camera range and in an insolent, sultry voice says, ‘Anybody got a match?'”

But along with that, I got something that now seems much more interesting.

Between full-page ads for Packard and Pontiac cars, Texaco oil, Budweiser beer, National Dairy, Stromberg-Carlson radios and Chesterfield cigarettes, all using the military as a motif and/or urging citizens to buy war bonds, there’s a story describing how, in New York, “hotels are booked solid for weeks in advance and guests spend more money” and “the boom reaches a peak in the sale of luxury goods at department stores.” In a month when Allied troops are fighting their way into Germany, this is part of report on the vigorous economic upsurge created by the US participation in the Second World War.

To illustrate the upbeat mood, the editors present a double-page spread on a flourishing nightclub, Café Society Uptown. Located on East 58th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenues, it’s an adjunct to the original Café Society on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Both were run by Barney Josephson, who booked Billie Holiday for opening night in 1938 at the Village establishment, where she would sing “Strange Fruit” for the first time a year later. The second club opened in 1940. Both were notable for the welcome they extended to all races.

The current attractions at the East 58th Street joint in the autumn of 1944 were the fine jazz pianist Hazel Scott, the folk singer Burl Ives and the comedian Jimmy Savo, who can be seen at the microphone. Higher wartime wages meant that business was up 25 per cent on the previous year, so Josephson told the magazine, and patrons were spending an average of $10 a head.

I could spend hours scanning the faces looking up at the lens deployed at a high angle by Herbert Gehr, a German-Jewish photographer who had escaped Nazism and photographed the Spanish Civil War before arriving in the US, where he joined the staff of Life. I wish there were a key giving the details of each individual in the teeming frame. But the magazine’s caption writers do their best in giving us an anonymised but still vivid snapshot of the diversity of the evening’s audience:

“Included in this picture are an executive from the Bass Pecan Company in Mississippi, a dentist from Locust, N. J., a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, a high-school athletics teacher, a Nigerian lecturer on Africa, a statistician for a credit house, an editor of Tomorrow magazine, a du Pont chemist now in the Navy, a veterinarian, an American Airlines stewardess, a Negro carpenter, a machinist at Brewster Aeronautical Corp., a beauty consultant at Oppenheim Collins store, a watchmaker from Brazil, a broker, a star in the musical comedy Mexican Hayride, a buyer of drugs for Bloomingdale’s department store, a corporal from an evacuation hospital, a sailor on an aircraft carrier, a clerk in the Elastic Stop Nut Corp., a researcher for Friends of Democracy, Inc., a Conover model, an assistant buyer at Lord & Taylor, a student at Smith College, a writer for R. K. O., a Czech refugee, a library assistant at Columbia University, an Army anti-aircraft colonel, a salesgirl in Macy’s and a sheet-metal manufacturer.”

I’ve been trying to spot the “Conover model”, who would have been someone on the books of the agent Harry Conover. His roster included Eugenia “Jinx” Falkenburg, a former Hollywood High School student who posed for Edward Steichen, was named “Miss Rheingold” in a series of beer ads, and by 1944 had became famous enough to play herself alongside Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly in Charles Vidor’s romantic comedy Cover Girl, with songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. Four years later her younger brother Bob would win the Wimbledon men’s singles title. Maybe Jinx is there in the crowd.

But the conclusion reached by the caption writers, pursuing the theme of a wartime boom, is this: “Many of them three or four years ago would not have been able to afford Café Society. Even today few are rich. But with extra money in their pockets they can do what they have always wanted to do — go to a night club, buy a few drinks, see a show. And by their spending money they contribute to the prosperity of the night-club owner, the waiters, the entertainers, the cooks, the florists who supplied the flowers, the grocers who sold the food — thus giving one more spin to the wheel of prosperity. How long it would last or to what heights it would go, whether the inevitable transition period to come would be followed by depression, normalcy or another boom, nobody could tell.”

Jul 1

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Under the same sky

In the 55 years since the discreet arrival of the first ECM album, Mal Waldron’s Free At Last, Manfred Eicher’s label has released somewhere north of a thousand albums. Contrary to a cynical early view, they don’t all sound the same. They are, however, distinguished by the presence of set of qualities — musical, aesthetic and philosophical — that appear, in varying proportions, in just about every one of them. You can detect those qualities in four of their recent releases, each of which exemplifies a certain characteristic taken to the very highest level.

1 Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith: Defiant Life

American jazz from the tradition continues to make its presence central to ECM’s output. Smith’s trumpet and Iyer’s keyboards and electronics weave their way through spellbinding duets subtextually infused with a sense of history. Smith’s “Floating River Requiem” is a dedication to Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader murdered by colonial forces in 1961, while Iyer’s “Kite” acknowledges Refaat Alareer, a leading Palestinian poet killed along with two siblings and four nephews during an Israel air strike on Gaza in late 2023. Sorrow and outrage are present in this music, but it also serves, in Iyer’s words, as a statement of “faith in human possibility.”

2 Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky

Modes from all over the world find their way into the ECM matrix. The Tunisian oud player and composer Anouar Brahem first recorded for the label 35 years ago. On his latest album he is in the company of three of the company’s regulars: the cellist Anja Lechner, the pianist Django Bates and the bassist Dave Holland. Taking its title from a book by the late Edward Said, this album, too, is driven by reflections on the suffering, recent and historic, of the people of Gaza, as outlined in Adam Shatz’s fine sleeve essay. Unfolding with patience and elegance, metabolising elements from Arabic maqam, jazz and European classical music, these quartet pieces ache with grief.

3 Alexander Knaifel: Chapter Eight

By cultivating a widespread audience for the work of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt via its New Series offshoot, ECM helped create the genre known as “holy minimalism”. Alexander Knaifel (1943-2024), born in Tashkent, studied cello with Rostropovich in Moscow in the 1960s before making a reputation writing operas and film music. A kind of an Uzbek version of Anthony Braxton, he also wrote an extended piece for 17 double basses and another for 35 Javanese gongs. But the pieces on this album, performed by an ensemble of three Latvian choirs and the Swiss cellist Patrick Demenga, are settings of verses from the Song of Solomon. Proceeding with great deliberation under the baton of Andres Mustonen, they achieve the required meditative glow to very satisfying effect, fully exploiting the acoustic resonance of the Jesuit church in Lucerne, where they were recorded in 2009.

4 Arve Henriksen / Trygve Seim / Anders Jormin / Markku Ounaskari: Arcanum

The crucial role played by ECM in the emergence of Nordic jazz needs no acknowledgement. Here are four leading players — the trumpeter Henriksen and the saxophonist Seim from Norway*, the bassist Anders Jormin from Sweden, and the Finnish drummer Ouaskari — at the height of their powers, taking memories of Ornette Coleman’s quartet as a starting point from which to develop conversations of great beauty and originality. All four of these albums are outstanding, but this is the one that sounds to me like a future classic.

* Due to a moment of brain-fade, this piece originally claimed that Henriksen and Seim are Finnish. My thanks to those who noticed and gently pointed out the error.

Jun 14

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The last of the Blue Notes

Louis Moholo-Moholo died on Thursday at his home in Cape Town, aged 85. He was the last survivor of the Blue Notes, the group — also including the trumpeter Mongezi Feza, the alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, the pianist Chris McGregor and the bassist Johnny Dyani — who arrived in Europe in 1964, fleeing South Africa’s apartheid regime. Once settled in London, they infused the British jazz scene with the warmth and directness of their playing, leaving an impression that continues to be heard in the music of later generations. Now they’re all gone.

Nobody cracked the whip from the drum stool like Louis, with the most benign of intentions. Until you saw him live, you could have only the haziest impression of his invigorating and sometimes electrifying effect on those around him — whether the other member of a duo (perhaps the pianists Keith Tippett, Livio Minafra or Alexander Hawkins) or the massed ranks of McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath or Pino Minafra’s Canto Generàl. I treasure memories of Mike Osborne’s incendiary trio with Louis and the bassist Harry Miller, another of the South African emigré cadre. Miller’s sextet, Elton Dean’s Ninesense and later on, the extraordinary quartet Foxes Fox were other bands whose fires he stoked.

And, of course, there was Four Blokes, his own final band, with Hawkins, Jason Yarde on saxophones and the bassist John Edwards. I had the thrill, when presenting the quartet at JazzFest Berlin in 2015, of hearing them start a fire the instant Louis was settled behind his kit. The effect, as always, was indescribably exhilarating. Because that’s what Louis did: he showed you what this music could do, where it could go, how it could touch your soul. Now may he rest in peace.

* The photograph of Louis Moholo-Moholo was taken at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in 2015 by Camille Blake.

Jun 10

A point of stillness

There is a balm in Gilead, according to an African American spiritual whose lines were borrowed from the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah, and there is a profound sense of healing in Solace of the Mind, the new solo album by the pianist and organist Amina Claudine Myers.

Born 83 years ago in Blackwell, Arkansas, Myers moved to Chicago after graduating from music college and became a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1966. Ten years later she moved to New York. Before this new album, her last one was as a duo with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, a dedication to Central Park, released a year ago. Her early albums for the Leo label, Song for Mother E and a tribute to Bessie Smith, recorded in 1979 and 1980 respectively, were recently made available on Bandcamp.

She is a musician of great sophistication, rich in imagination and technical resources, but in this recital she pares everything back to the essence and what we hear is her soul. Like Abdullah Ibrahim, she can take an ancient structures and allow it to glow from somewhere deep within. The simpler the hymn and the more straightforwardly it’s played, the great the inner strength it exudes. As long, of course, as the playing is done by an Ibrahim or a Myers.

There are nine original pieces here, starting with a delicately surging reinterpretation of “Song for Mother E”. Others include the brief and stately “Hymn for John Lee Hooker” — more hymn than Hooker — and the rhapsodic “Twilight”. On “Ode to My Ancestors”, recorded at her home, she moves to her Hammond B3 and recites a poem over sustained organ notes which, thanks to a phasing effect, seem to be fluttering in a breeze. The only non-original is the lovely spiritual “Steal Away”, which gently summons a whole world of African American culture; the whole recital seems to pivot around it. The closing benediction is a study in patience and exquisite phrasing titled “Beneath the Sun”.

What you won’t find here is anything remotely resembling a display of virtuosity. What you might discover, amid an increasingly maddened world, is a welcome point of stillness. Highly recommended.

* Amina Claudine Myers’ Solace of the Mind is released on June 20 on the Red Hook label (redhookrecords.com). The uncredited photograph is borrowed from Myers’ website.

May 12

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Meet the house band

Before the evening show on the first of their two days at Cafe Oto on Saturday, the Necks were announced to the audience as “the house band”. We laughed, and so did they. But it seemed to fit. The Australian improvising trio have played in many London venues, but the little space on Ashwin Street in Dalston seems to suit them best.

Once the house was quiet, they began with Chris Abrahams picking out short melodic phrases in the piano, lightly hammering each note with the two fingers: the index finger of each hand. It was a lovely effect, almost like a santur or cimbalom. The phrases sounded vaguely Moorish, which might seem a bit vague and superficial as a description but is intended to suggest that they felt like fragments of ancient wisdom, conveyed without adornment.

Tony Buck was rubbing two old cymbals on the heads of his snare drum and floor tom-tom. They he began playing a medium fast 1-1-1-1 rhythm with his left hand on the top cymbal of his hi-hat, using a long slender stick. That cymbal stroke formed the basis of his contribution over the next 40 minutes, building in volume and density but retaining a silvery delicacy.

Meanwhile Lloyd Swanton plucked the open D string on his bass with emphasis, letting it ring. That became the tonal centre of the entire collective improvisation, the only fixed point as each of the three explored his own avenue of rhythmic and melodic creation, the symbiosis built up over 30 years enabling them to operate in seeming independence of each other and yet in complete communion. It takes the idea of listening to each other to a different place: listening without listening.

As is usual, but not inevitable, the music gathered power and volume until, by some unspoken intuition, the musicians broke it down, stripping back all the chosen materials until we were returned to the silence.

It’s always tempting to search for analogies and metaphors. Tempting, but unnecessary. Still, on Saturday I thought of the sea breaking on a shore, composed of countless waves and wavelets, all surging and cresting according to their own individual strengths and sub-trajectories, yet responding to a single tidal pulse. It’s an amazing thing to witness in person, when you see how these musicians never even look at each other in performance (Abrahams actually sits side-on, facing offstage) but are linked by something unique.

* The Necks are at Band on the Wall in Manchester tomorrow night (May 13), the Empire, Belfast (14), the Sugar Club, Dublin (15), and thereafter in Switzerland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Croatia, Greece, Poland, Spain, Italy and Belgium: https://shop.thenecks.com/tour-dates

Apr 24

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Everybody Loves a Train

About twenty years ago, my friend Charlie Gillett was compiling a series of themed CDs for a Polygram label called Debutante, under the aegis of the former Island A&R head Nick Stewart. Charlie asked me if I’d like to put one together, and if so, what the theme might be. “Trains,” I said, after about ten seconds’ thought, and then I went away to assemble a running order. It took a while, because I enjoyed the process so much.

Sadly, the series came to a sudden end before my contribution could see the light of day. But I’d edited together a disc of how I wanted it to go. I called it Everybody Loves a Train, after the song by Los Lobos. It has all sorts of songs, some of which speak to each other in ways that are obvious and not. I avoided the most obvious candidates, even when they perfectly expressed the feeling I was after (James Brown’s “Night Train” and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia”) and instrumentals, too (see the footnote).

Every now and then I take it out and play it, as I did this week, with a sense of regret that it never reached fulfilment. Here it is, with a gentle warning: not all these trains are bound for glory. Remember, as Paul Simon observes, “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance / Everybody thinks it’s true.”

  1. Unknown: “Calling Trains” (From Railroad Songs and Ballads, Rounder 1997) Forty-odd seconds of an unidentified former New Orleans station announcer, recorded at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary, in 1936, calling from memory the itinerary of the Illinois Central’s “Panama Limited” from New Orleans to Chicago: “…Ponchatoula, Hammond, Amite, Independence… Sardis, Memphis, Dyersburg, Fulton, Cairo, Carbondale…” American poetry.
  2. Rufus Thomas: “The Memphis Train” (Stax single, 1968) Co-written by Rufus with Mack Rice and Willie Sparks. Produced by Steve Cropper. Firebox stoked by Al Jackson Jr.
  3. Los Lobos: “Everybody Loves a Train” (from Colossal Head, 1996) “Steel whistle blowin’ a crazy sound / Jump on a car when she comes around.” Steve Berlin on baritone saxophone.
  4. Bob Dylan: “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (from Highway 61 Revisited, 1965) “Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flaggin’ down the Double E?”
  5. Joe Ely: “Boxcars” (from Honky Tonk Masquerade, 1978) A Butch Hancock song. Ponty Bone on accordion, Lloyd Maines on steel guitar.
  6. Counting Crows: “Ghost Train” (from August and Everything After, 1993) “She buys a ticket ’cause it’s cold where she comes from / She climbs aboard because she’s scared of getting older in the snow…”
  7. Rickie Lee Jones: “Night Train” (from Rickie Lee Jones, 1979) It was a plane she took from Chicago to LA to begin her new life in 1969, and an old yellow Chevy Vega she was driving before she cashed the 50K advance from Warner Bros ten years later. But, you know, trains.
  8. The Count Bishops: “Train, Train” (Chiswick 45, 1976) London rockabilly/pub rock/proto-punk. Written by guitarist/singer Xenon De Fleur, who died a couple of years later in a car crash, aged 28, on his way home from a gig at the Nashville Rooms. Note that comma. I like a punctuated title.
  9. Julien Clerc: “Le prochain train” (from Julien, 1997) My favourite modern chansonnier. Lyric by Laurent Chalumeau.
  10. Blind Willie McTell: “Broke Down Engine Blues” (Vocalion 78, 1931) Born blind in one eye, lost the sight in the other in childhood. Maybe he saw trains in time to carry their image with him as he travelled around Georgia with his 12-string guitar.
  11. Laura Nyro: “Been on a Train” (from Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, 1970) One song she didn’t do live, as far as I can tell. Too raw, probably.
  12. Chuck Berry: “The Downbound Train” (Chess B-side, 1956) When George Thorogood covered this song, he renamed it “Hellbound Train”. He didn’t need to do that. Chuck had already got there.
  13. Bruce Springsteen: “Downbound Train” (from Born in the USA, 1984) “The room was dark, the bed was empty / Then I heard that long whistle whine…”
  14. Dillard & Clark: “Train Leaves Here This Morning” (from The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, 1968) Written by Gene Clark and Bernie Leadon: “1320 North Columbus was the address that I’d written on my sleeve / I don’t know just what she wanted, might have been that it was getting time to leave…”
  15. Little Feat: “Two Trains” (from Dixie Chicken, 1973) In which Lowell George extends the metaphor of Muddy Waters’ “Still a Fool (Two Trains Running)”: “Two trains runnin’ on that line / One train’s for me and the other’s a friend of mine…”
  16. B. B. King: “Hold That Train” (45, 1961) “Oh don’t stop this train, conductor, ’til Mississippi is out of sight / Well, I’m going to California, where I know my baby will treat me right”
  17. Paul Simon: “Train in the Distance” (from Hearts and Bones, 1983) Richard Tee on Fender Rhodes. “What is the point of this story? / What information pertains? / The thought that life could be better / Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.”
  18. Vince Gill: “Jenny Dreams of Trains” (from High Lonesome Sound, 1996) Written by Gill with Guy Clark. Fiddle solo by Jeff Guernsey. Find me something more beautiful than this, if you can.
  19. Muddy Waters: “All Aboard” (Chess B-side, 1956) Duelling harmonicas: James Cotton on train whistle effects, Little Walter on chromatic.
  20. Darden Smith: “Midnight Train” (from Trouble No More, 1990) “And the years go by like the smoke and cinders, disappear from where they came…”
  21. The Blue Nile: “From a Late Night Train” (from Hats, 1989) For Paul Buchanan, the compartment becomes a confessional.
  22. Tom Waits: “Downtown Train” (from Rain Dogs, 1985) “All my dreams, they fall like rain / Oh baby, on a downtown train.” A New York song.

Closing music: Pat Metheny’s “Last Train Home” (from Still Life (Talking), 1987) to accompany the photo of the Birmingham Special crossing Bridge No 201 near Radford, Virginia in 1957 — taken, of course, by the great O. Winston Link. Other appropriate instrumentals: Booker T & the MGs’ “Big Train” (from Soul Dressing, 1962, a barely rewritten “My Babe”) and Big John Patton’s “The Silver Meter Pts 1 & 2” (Blue Note 45, 1963, a tune by the drummer Ben Dixon whose title is a misspelling of the Silver Meteor, a sleeper service running from New York to Miami).

Apr 8

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The music of Gatsby

The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

Coinciding with the first publication of The Great Gatsby a hundred years ago (April 10, 1925), a new musical version of F. Scott Fizgerald’s masterpiece opens shortly in the West End of London. The trailer for this latest iteration of Gatsby makes it look like an all-singing, all-dancing, good-time entertainment. It would be unfair to prejudge, but the songs by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen certainly sound as though they adhere to the Rice/Lloyd-Webber template for modern musical theatre.

Not much room there, one imagines, for the darker undertones beneath the careless rapture, for the portrayal of the corruption of extreme wealth (and the swipe at racism) that gave Fitzgerald’s narrative a resonance which has kept it alive in the minds of its readers for a hundred years.

The musical aspect of the original novel is hardly its most significant feature, but it does provide the story with an intermittently intriguing soundtrack. Early on, for instance, there’s a band at Jay Gatsby’s house playing something he describes as “yellow cocktail music” — and even though you may not be able to define it, you know exactly how it might sound. And that “stiff, tinny drip”: I can’t hear a banjo in a band playing early jazz without those words — as good as Whitney Balliett or Philip Larkin — coming to mind.

At another of Gatsby’s summer parties on his estate, where “in his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” is something titled “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. A composition on a grand scale, we’re told that it was first performed at Carnegie Hall, where it created a sensation. Now it’s delivered on the lawn to Gatsby’s guests by an orchestra that was “no five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.”

Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, doesn’t tell us what Mr Tostoff’s work actually sounds like, at least not in the final published version. In a passage Fitzgerald deleted from a draft manuscript, Nick describes it as “starting with a weird spinning sound, mostly from the cornets. Then there would be a series of interruptive notes which coloured everything that came after them, until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed outside. But just as you’d get used to the new discord one of the old themes would drop back in, this time as a discord, until you’d get a weird sense that it was a preposterous cycle, after all. Long after the piece was over it went on and on in my head — whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.”

The year before the book appeared, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” had received its première at the Aeolian Hall in New York, performed by the 23-piece Paul Whiteman Orchestra, with the composer at the piano. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were living in Great Neck, Long Island at the time. Whiteman had commissioned the piece, orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, for a concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music”. It’s what I imagine Tostoff’s music must have resembled.

A few chapters later there’s also young Ewing Klipspringer, Gatsby’s house guest, roused from his sleep one afternoon and reluctantly acceding to his host’s request to play the piano, despite claiming to be out of practice. He responds with “The Love Nest”, a song by Louis A. Hirsch and Otto Harbach from a 1920 George M. Cohan musical titled Mary, while thunder rumbles and summer rain falls outside on Long Island Sound.

Three years after The Great Gatsby‘s publication, Paul Whiteman would assemble his orchestra in New York to record an arrangement of “The Love Nest”. It’s nothing special until, just before the end, Bix Beiderbecke steps forward for a sublime eight-bar cornet solo that perfectly evokes what we imagine to be the spirit of the Jazz Age.

Finally, when Daisy Fay is enjoying the social life of Louisville, Kentucky while Gatsby, her besotted swain, is making his way back from army service in the Great War, she is “young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dusk.” Written by W. C. Handy in 1917, the song was a hit in 1921 for Marion Harris, who recorded many blues songs and was perhaps the first white female vocalist to achieve success by imitating (rather than caricaturing) the style of black singers.

In a wonderful piece for the FT at the weekend, seeking Gatsby‘s echoes in our present condition, the author Sarah Churchwell concluded that the book “anticipates precisely the kind of society that would find Trumpism appealing: a culture losing its imaginative capacity, surrendering its ideals… The Great Gatsby captures a truth that repeats across generations: the powerful consolidate their control even as the dream of something better gleams ahead. Again and again, those with wealth and privilege fortify themselves against the possibility of a more just or democratic world, transforming progress into another cycle of entrenched power.”

Oh, well. Roll over, Vladmir Tostoff, and tell George Gershwin the news.

* The passage of musical description deleted from a draft of Gatsby is quoted from Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s biography of Fitzgerald, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1981.

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