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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 18

The Ballad of Dennis Hopper

If anyone contained multitudes, it was surely Dennis Hopper. Wild and crazy guy, but also a proper artist. Incarnated the simmering potential of the ’50s, the multicoloured dream of the ’60s, the long scream of the ’70s, and the all-over-the-place uncertainty of the ’80s.

All those movies: not just Rebel Without a Cause, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet but The Trip, The American Friend and Rumble Fish. And the folie de grandeur of The Last Movie. Married to Michelle Phillips for eight days and to Daria Halprin, co-star of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, for a little longer. Great photographer, too (he spent so much time with a camera around his neck that his friend nicknamed him “the tourist”). No wonder Mike Scott decided to make a Waterboys album about him.

I took Life, Death and Dennis Hopper on a road trip last weekend and it kept me entertained and fascinated all the way there and back. Its 25 tracks form a mosaic of a life that began in Dodge City, Kansas in 1936 and ended in Venice, California in 2010. “Kansas”, the opening track, is bookended by the sound of a street parade and a departing steam train: the song itself, sung and co-written by Steve Earle, with just the singer’s guitar and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica, is like something from Nebraska‘s country cousin.

Then Scott enters to sing “Hollywood ’55” — the story of Hopper’s arrival in Movieland — against a finger-snapping beatnik swing and we’re into a sequence of snapshots set to era-adjacent music. “Live in the Moment”, about making it, rolls on Mitch Ryder’s Detroit Wheels. “Andy”, referencing his friendship with Warhol, is a smooth uptown pop mix settling somewhere between Broadway and Hollywood & Vine. “The Tourist”, about Hopper and his camera documenting the short life of hippie dream, could be the Strawberry Alarm Clock or H. P. Lovecraft imitating the Jefferson Airplane. “Riding Down to Mardi Gras”, in which Hopper and Peter Fonda make Easy Rider, is a fine piece of outlaw country-rock. And so on, all the way to “Golf, They Say”, a funny song about the late-life experience of Willie Nelson teaching Hopper to swing a club.

But it’s not just a kind of jukebox musical. There are brief interludes — notably five short impressionistic instrumental pieces of contrasting styles and hues, each dedicated to one of Hopper’s five wives — and a couple of recitatives, one a description of the 1967 Monterey Festival in an English posh-hippie voice, the other a parody of an American TV news report of his death.

The two finest individual tracks are the hard-slugging, thick-textured “Ten Years Gone”, referring to Hopper’s lost decade and closing with a passage spoken by Bruce Springsteen, and “Letter From an Unknown Girlfriend”, a painfully stark voice-and-piano ballad in slow waltz time sung and played by Fiona Apple. They’re followed by a snatch of aural hallucination called “Rock Bottom”, evoking the years Hopper spent in the abyss, and then the gorgeous, achingly redemptive “I Don’t Know How I Made It”, somewhat like the Blue Nile covering Blonde on Blonde.

As Scott suggests, you can listen to the tracks indvidually or in any order, but it’s really made to be heard from start to finish, although not in any burdensome or dutiful way. Congratulations to him and his guests and his co-writers and fellow Waterboys, including Paul Brown, James Hallawell, Aongus Ralston, Ralph Salmins and Greg Morrow. It’s a brave thing, executed with flair and imagination.

* The Waterboys’ Life, Death and Dennis Hopper is out now on Sun Records.

Apr 10

The art of Peter Till

Back in 1978, when I was editing Time Out, Bob Dylan came to play at Earl’s Court, his first London concerts in 12 years. As part of a preview, Jenny Fleet, the magazine’s art director, and I commissioned several illustrations. The one above was by the great Peter Till. I had a special fondness for it and a few years later he was kind enough to offer me the original. Yesterday I collected it.

The opportunity for the handover came at a private view of Peter’s exhibition at Hornsey Library, near his North London home. It’s a selling exhibition of his brilliant work over the years for many publications, including the Guardian, The Times, the New Scientist, the Radio Times and the New York Times. The money raised will go to supporting the Shepherd Hill allotment. That seems a worthy cause and I was glad to make a donation. The show is on until April 15 (see below).

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.

Apr 5

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Stories old and new

“That was a young man’s song,” Paul Brady said as the applause began to fade at the Bush Hall last night. He’d just sung “Nothing But the Same Old Story”, written at the start of the 1980s to inhabit the world of a narrator who’d arrived in London from Ireland as a teenager looking for work and confronted by hostility in the time of the Troubles: “Living under suspicion / Putting up with the hatred and fear in their eyes…” It’s a song of resistance, one to drink and dance and cry to, and although only a few weeks from turning 78, Brady invested it with all its original innocence and rage.

This was the second of his two nights in Shepherd’s Bush, and he talked a little about how, arriving from Ireland as a member of a folk quartet called the Johnstons in 1969, they’d settled into a flat close by. He spoke fondly of how he’d learned from traditional musicians at pub sessions in west and north London.

I hadn’t seen him live since a gig at the Half Moon in Putney in 1981, when I was blown away by the material from his second solo album, Hard Station. Since then he’s had great success as a songwriter, his work recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner and others. But today you can put him on stage alone with a guitar, a mandolin and a keyboard, and it’s the same old storyteller, now with a bit more of a growl but with wit and warmth and enough edge to lift you from your seat.

Sometimes, as in the gorgeous “Wheel of Heartbreak” and “The Long Goodbye”, he seemed like the most accomplished of adult rockers. During “Mother and Son” and “Follow On” (“a dark song that ended up in a butter commercial”) I started thinking that maybe what he was was a modern chansonnier, in the mould of Léo Ferré or Julien Clerc. And then there were the traditional songs that harked back to his time with the Johnstons and Planxty: the brilliant mandolin work on “The Jolly Soldier”, the sheer historical weight beneath the lilt of “Arthur McBride”.

The shows were arranged to greet the release of Paul Brady: The Archive, a four-CD, 63-track set of demos, one-off collaborations (with Dolores O’Riordan, Cara Dillon and Carole King, for example), interesting alternative versions of most of his best-known songs, and other fascinating bits and pieces, copiously illustrated with tickets, posters, photos and newspaper cuttings.

Curiously, the first two CDs begin with two songs that he didn’t write, both from the 1960s, which express polar opposites of the spirit of the time. One is the lovely hippie anthem “Get Together”, written by the American musician best known as Dino Valenti and containing a line I’ve never wanted to get out of my head: “We are but a moment’s sunlight / Fading in the grass.” Brady recorded it in 1999 for a set of songs associated with Greenwich Village in the ’60s, and his is a beautiful version, which he reprised last night. The other is “Gimme Shelter”, a song of a very different complexion: his treatment, recorded in 2009 with Bob Thiele Jr’s Forest Rangers for a TV series, Sons of Anarchy, loses nothing by comparison with the Stones’ original.

Those are among the many treasures in the box set. I’m still absorbing it, but I can say that the version of “Paddy’s Lamentation” for voice, piano, tin whistle and military drums, recorded in Dublin in 1980 for a long-vanished compilation album, might alone be worth the 50 quid.

Brady came back for an encore last night and of course it was “The Lakes of Pontchartrain”, the song he recorded in 1978 on his first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, and which he later taught to Bob Dylan. It’s a traditional song, but it’s his really, and The Archive has a fine version in Gaelic, translated by Prionnsias O’Maonaigh: “Bruach Loch Pontchartrain”.

Last night he sang it in English and gestured to us to sing the last two lines of the final verse with him, acappella: “So fare thee well my bonny o’ girl l’ll never see no more / But I’ll ne’er forget your kindness and the cottage by the shore…” Every heart melted, all over again.

* Paul Brady: The Archive is released by The Last Music Company: http://www.lastmusic.co.uk

Apr 4

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All this beauty

So much wrong in the world, and yet so much wonderful new music. How to explain the existence, amid the trauma and violence and chaos agents and the encroachment of threat, of all this beauty? Here are five new albums I wouldn’t want to be without: Billy Hart’s Just (ECM), Yazz Ahmed’s A Paradise in the Hold (Night Time Stories), Nels Cline’s Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note), Vilhelm Bromander’s Jorden vi ärvde (Thanatosis), and — most of all — Ambrose Akinmusire’s Honey From a Winter Stone (Nonesuch). Each of them offers jazz pushing the edge of its current possibilities, moving forward as it has always done, drawing influences from wherever it sees potential, respecting the past, suggesting futures.

Hart’s album is full of beautifully balanced and flexible interplay between four masters: the drummer with Ethan Iverson (piano), Ben Street (bass) and Mark Turner (tenor saxophone). Ahmed explores her Bahraini heritage in lustrous tunes with the help of singers including Natacha Atlas and Brigitte Beraha. Cline’s quartet, completed by the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the bassist Chris Lightcap and the drummer Tom Rainey, explores the guitarist’s bracing and multi-faceted compositions which, while offering nothing specifically unfamiliar, create an original and constantly stimulating sound-world. Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra, featuring the fantastic bass clarinetist Christer Bothén, extends the vision of Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra with great success.

But for some time now Ambrose Akinmusire has moving towards a music that sounds completely new, finding ways of incorporating elements of hip-hop and contemporary classical music into his compositions. It could be gruesome. Instead, with Honey From a Winter Stone, it’s a quiet revelation.

Has anyone yet used the term Fourth Stream to describe such music? If not, its time might have come. Akinmusire takes the post-Bartókian astringency of the Mivos Quartet and brings to it an improvising musician’s fluency. He draws in a rapper, Kokayi, whose words, tone and rhythms make a flow lucid and persuasive enough to convert any sceptic. And weaving in and out is his own trumpet work, representing in its liquid grace and constant unpredictability a kind of celestial marriage of Booker Little and Don Cherry, supported by two familiar accomplices, the pianist Sam Harris and the drummer Justin Brown, plus the synthesiser and vocals of Chiquitamagic.

Akinmusire has found a way to make all this work, to create from it a coherent and entirely contemporary statement. The longest track, the 29-minute s-/Kinfolks, cycles through various dimensions, from an exploratory opening trumpet flight of sumptuous inventivness through deep grooves, a dramatic change of temperature as Kokayi freestyles, and a passage for the strings that sounds effortless but strikes deep.

As I listened, I found myself thinking back to 1969 and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s People in Sorrow. What s-/Kinfolks shares with that epic from half a century ago is a combination of rarified beauty, emotional heft (its elegantly understated play of mourning and defiance), and relevance to the present condition. Probably the album of the year already, with the others not far behind.

Mar 25

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Portrait of the artists

Bryan Ferry might have made a career for himself as a painter or ceramicist, and he had a go at both. Instead he chose music. But everything he’s done since has been about being an artist in a very particular sense. Roxy Music worked best when seen as an art project: “Re-make / Re-model”, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”. The same could be said of his solo work: the readymades of These Foolish Things, the more-than-homage of Dylanesque, the ’30s glide and swoon of As Time Goes By, the brazen charm of The Jazz Age, the wintry covers of “Back to Black” and “Johnny and Mary”.

I’ve been thinking about that while listening to his latest release, Loose Talk, created in partnership with the poet and painter Amelia Barratt, which is immediately interesting because it’s a collaboration between artists at very different stages of their careers (she is in her thirties, he will be 80 in September). It’s also the first Ferry album on which someone else is responsible for the words and their delivery.

He’s a great assembler of words himself, of course, as his collected Lyrics underlined when it was published by Chatto & Windus three years ago, but it’s often been a painful business for him. I remember stories from the ’70s of his then-manager, the department store heir Mark Fenwick, sitting in an armchair sighing and tapping his fingers like an exam invigilator while Bryan struggled to carve out the words of the final verse to the last song for a new album, its release date already postponed by a record company impatient for product.

Loose Talk is an album in which Barratt reads eleven of her poems to Ferry’s musical settings, some using material set aside from his earlier projects. It would be flippant — and wrong — to suggest that he’s solved a problem by delegating the job of providing the words to a collaborator. It’s a legitimate artistic project, from both perspectives.

Barratt is a slender young woman with the sort of looks Cecil Beaton captured in his photographs of the pre-war Bright Young Things. Her voice is quiet, reserved, unemphatic. It’s a voice you might overhear amid the gush and babble at a party — a gallery opening or a book launch, perhaps — and look around to discover its source.

Her verses are not song lyrics: they’re poems, allusive and enigmatic and unresolved, filled with fleeting exchanges that hint at narrative but yield impressions rather than stories, occasionally threaded with contemporary images: “Wasting her time / she’s flipping channels with the remote control” or “My sneakers now washed / hang by their laces.” When combined with Ferry’s music, they take us to familiar territory: “She’s one to watch” is the first line of a track called “Stand Near Me”, a prime Ferry opening if I ever heard one, while “Pictures on a Wall” provides a neon-splashed groove that might have come from any Ferry session from Horoscope/Mamouna in the early ’90s to Avonmore in 2014.

There are decayed pianos being played in abandoned ballrooms, a mood that Ferry has explored with and without Roxy Music. Often the accompanying cadences descend with slow, muted elegance: the echoing piano on “Florist”, the bass on “Orchestra”. That’s another Ferry signature.

Barratt’s poems work for me, mostly, because her delivery sounds like a modern way of speaking and sometimes she produces a sketch whose images and emotions provide a satisfying coherence. “Florist” has an intriguing arc and a moment of piercing disquiet: “Imagine one day / he comes to me and says / There is nothing more I want than this / He gestures to the tulips / that look out from a bucket, bunched / in the passenger seat of the van / To his apron / To his diary with nothing in / and I say / That’s perfectly fine / Perfectly alright / Perfectly without the need to tell me all the time.”

There are some familiar names in the credits — the guitarists Neil Hubbard and Ollie Thompson, the bassists Neil Jason and Alan Spenner, the drummers Paul Thompson and Andy Newmark — but their individual presences are never noticeable: these tracks are stripped back to form a watchful background. The most assertive music comes in the final piece, the title track, where Barratt’s economical verses are accompanied by a subdued but baleful 12-bar blues, somewhat in the manner of “Let’s Stick Together”, Ferry’s 1976 solo hit.

Ferry’s own voice is allowed to peep through two or three times as a kind of palimpsest, probably leftover guide vocals from the demos, notably on “Orchestra”, where the atmospherics are at their most languid and dream-like. But in this collaboration he’s found another way to extend his expressive reach. It’s the latest episode in a long life full of interesting creative decisions. Another twist in an artist’s career.

* Loose Talk by Amelia Barratt and Bryan Ferry is out on Dene Jesmond Records on March 28. The photograph of Ferry and Barrett was taken in Los Angeles by Albert Sanchez.

Mar 17

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Silencing the Voice of America

Time for jazz… Willis Conover speaking… This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour…

When, as a schoolboy in the late 1950s, I started to discover the music I love and write about, that process took some work. The music wasn’t easy to find, which of course added to the sense of its value. One priceless resource was the nightly Jazz Hour on the Voice of America station, beamed around the world from studios in Washington DC as a tool of the US State Department’s soft-power policy.

Willis Conover, a white man in early middle age, spoke slowly and clearly in an Eisenhower-era sort of voice, so that listeners in other countries with perhaps only a smattering of English could get his meaning. It wasn’t a voice that indulged in hip vernacular, but somehow it conveyed a love of the music, as did the fact that the show’s signature tune was Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”.

As I recall, the Jazz Hour was part of a nightly two-hour strand labelled Music USA. The first hour was devoted to the last knockings of the Swing Era. What followed, I think at 10pm UK time, was 60 minutes of what interested me. This was where, in late 1959, I first heard “All Blues”, that mesmerising track from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, igniting a relationship that would lead 50 years later to the writing of the book that gave this blog its title. I can still remember the first time I heard those little syncopated muted trumpet figures that Miles laid over the fade. A whole new world was opening up, right there on the family radio.

Similarly, I remember being hypnotised again a few months later when Gil Evans’s “La Nevada” came over the VOA airwaves. It was the lead track from Evans’s latest album, Out of the Cool, and Conover played all 15 minutes of it, complete with solos from the trumpeter Johnny Coles, the bass trombonist Tony Studd, the tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, the bassist Ron Carter and the guitarist Ray Crawford, all propelled by Charlie Persip’s restlessly propulsive snare-drum accents and Elvin Jones’s maraccas, with Evans’s piano and Crawford’s guitar and the background tapestry of semi-improvised woodwind and brass figures adding a commentary to what is still the richest and most compelling extended piece of jazz I know.

To be honest, I haven’t listened to VOA since the ’60s. I don’t even know whether it still broadcasts jazz alongside its news and other programming. But I have a lot for which to thank the Jazz Hour, even though its true intended audience during the years I listened was much further to the east, behind the Iron Curtain, where it reached people in Poland and Russia and East Germany who were even hungrier for the music and the culture for which it seemed to stand, one of freedom from repression.

I remember one particular sign of VOA’s effectiveness. On many nights the music on the Jazz Hour would obliterated by a loud and sometimes prolonged burst of static. The Soviet bloc’s jamming stations were doing their job.

This past weekend, the 1,300 employees of the Voice of America were told of an executive order signed by President Trump stripping the station of its resources. The document instructed its managers to reduce its output “to the minimum presence and function required by law” in order to “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

The knowledge that VOA was launched in 1942 to beam anti-Nazi propaganda to Germany and its occupied territories adds a layer of irony that would be funny were it not essentially tragic. Among those likely to be gratified by the decision are Elon Musk, who called for it to be shut down, and Vladimir Putin, who blocked its broadcasts to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Willis Conover died in 1996, aged 75. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I imagine he’d be glad not to be around for all this.

* The photograph of Willis Conover interviewing Louis Armstrong was taken in 1955.

Mar 14

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A change in the weather

It took a while for me to get from admiration to love for the Weather Station’s new album, Humanhood. At Islington Assembly Hall last night, Tamara Lindeman and her four musicians — Ben Boye (keyboards), Karen Ng (alto saxophone, flute, keyboards), Ben Whiteley (bass guitar) and Dom Billett (drums) — brought its songs fully to focus, in combination with several from its great 2021 predecessor, Ignorance.

This was, as Lindeman had promised, a show designed for theatres, with subtle lighting and a set consisting of three tall, pale, rough-hewn standing stones on which were projected fragments of elemental images: flickers of light from stars and fires, avalanches, drowning forests, all counterpointing the cool but never disengaged clarity of the songs.

The musicianship was exemplary. Whiteley anchored the sometimes irresistible grooves, Billett graded his volume with great care, Ng added the occasional free-jazz flurries on alto that bring the music into a different atmosphere, Boye provided synth mood-setters and lovely spare unaccompanied piano passages, Lindeman contributed economical electric lead guitar.

Together they established moods that were sustained and allowed to evolve through clusters of half a dozen songs at a time, the dynamic ranging from reflecting near-silence on “Lonely” and “Sewing” to that gentle but irresistible gallop in which Lindeman specialises on songs such as Humanhood‘s title track and “Neon Signs” and Ignorance‘s “Loss” and the sublime “Parking Lot”.

Her lyrics are extraordinary: non-repeating snatches of thought and conversation that somehow came through more clearly in live performance, along with her concern for a threat to the environment renewed by the events of the last few months. After starting out as an acoustic singer-songwriter, she has now, with her musicians’ help, developed a carefully textured, agile and quietly resilient hybrid genre that is the ideal setting for her words.

On the last night of a European tour, this was pretty much a perfect concert, one likely to live long in the memory of a warmly appreciative audience.

* The Weather Station’s Humanhood is on the Fat Possum label.

Mar 10

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The world and Don Cherry

Wherever, whenever and by whomsoever the idea of “world music” was invented, it had no finer exponent, explorer and exemplar than Don Cherry. In a few months’ time it will be 30 years since Cherry died in Malaga of liver cancer, aged 58, leaving a world in which he was, to quote Steve Lake’s happy phrase, “a trumpet-playing lyric poet of the open road, whose very life was a free-flowing improvisation.” I suppose it was fitting that he should have died in Andalucia, a region where many cultural influences met in the Middle Ages to create a foundation of song.

Cherry’s life and work demand a full-scale biography, along the lines of Robin D. G. Kelley’s standard-setting study of Thelonious Monk. In the meantime, it’s worth welcoming Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations, a new book consisting mostly of interviews conducted in various locations around the world by the author Graeme Ewens, who met the trumpeter in the 1970s and became his “confidant, travel companion, witness and friend” over the subsequent two decades. They are augmented by Ewens’ memories of their times spent together from Bristol to Bombay, by biographical notes, and by an interesting selection of photos and other visual material.

A useful addition to Blank Forms’ The Organic Music Societies, a Cherry compendium published in 2021, it’s full of worthwhile stuff. Here’s Cherry on playing with Ornette Coleman in the great quartet that changed the direction of jazz: “Ornette would never count a song off: ‘One, two, three, four, go.’ We would feel each other in the silence before playing and then we would play. And the first accent, or the first attack, would determine the tempo and temper of the composition.” And this, which goes to the heart of Cherry’s conception: “One day when Ornette was working on notation, we talked about how you couldn’t notate human feelings. For me, there was always this problem of notated music sounding like notated music. In the older days you never saw black musicians playing with music stands. They learnt it by heart, which is important. For me, when I learn a song with notes it will take time for me to really memorise it, but it’s important to learn it by heart because then you will know it.”

Cherry tells a story about Miles Davis coming to sit in with him and Billy Higgins at the Renaissance in Hollywood and borrowing his pocket trumpet. And then, later in the ’60s, Miles invites Cherry to sit in with his quintet at the Village Vanguard: “So I played something, the changes from ‘I Got Rhythm’ — AABA — and I stopped my solo right before the bridge, which is the B part, and Miles said, ‘You’re the only man I know who stops his solo at the bridge.’ Then later on I heard him doing the same thing. And the next time I saw him he said to me, ‘Hey, Cherry, I play a little like you now,’ which was a big compliment.” Particularly, one might point out, coming from a man who had initially scorned Cherry’s playing.

In an offical note telexed after a concert in Yaoundé in 1981, during a tour of Cameroon sponsored by the US State Department, a consular official writes: “Cherry and companions were real good-will ambassadors: courteous, patient, curious about country, irrepressibly friendly… (the) only problems arose in trying to move them from place to place as they kept striking up conversations in the street.” On page 132 we learn that the pocket trumpet Cherry was playing at the time of his conversation had once belonged to Boris Vian, the writer and critic, and possibly before that to Josephine Baker. On the very next page Cherry mentions an occasion in the 1950s when he and Ornette went to hear a Stockhausen performance at UCLA.

The book doesn’t duck the question of the social conditions under which the music came into being, or the heroin addiction that began for Cherry in the 1950s and continued on and off for the rest of his life. Here, as part of a lengthy disquisition on changes in the heroin trade, is an insight, from the perspective of 1981: “…you always try and keep some morals. There were certain influential white people who were messing with drugs and so I’d be copping for them, and that’s the way I’d survive. But now on the Lower East Side anybody can go and cop. Anybody. Sometimes they’ll ask you to show them your marks before they let you in the building. That world is another kind of world. You cannot compare that world with the people who just smoke grass, because you’re fighting for your life to survive.”

World music hadn’t been invented — or codified as a marketing category — when Cherry moved on from his jazz background. He’d become famous through his association with Coleman, followed by three wonderful albums of his own for Blue Note (Complete Communion, Symphony for the Improvisers and Where Is Brooklyn?), and his work with Albert Ayler, the New York Contemporary Five, the Jazz Composers Orchestra and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. His new direction denied nothing of his past but incorporated elements drawn from other cultures, exemplified by his use of bamboo flutes, gamelan and the doussn’ gouni, the six-stringed hunter’s harp from West Africa.

His concert at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1968, released by MPS under the title Eternal Rhythm, gave a clear indication of where his music was heading. Further evidence came with collaborations with the Turkish drummer Okay Temiz (Orient on BYG and Organic Music Society on Caprice), his duo albums with Ed Blackwell (Mu Pts 1 & 2 on BYG, El Corazón on ECM), his guest appearance on the Swedish drummer-composer composer Bengt Berger’s essay in African ritual modes and rhythms, Bitter Funeral Beer (also ECM), and the three ECM albums by Codona, a trio with the multi-instrumentalists Collin Walcott and Nana Vasconcelos, recorded in 1978-82 (and reissued in 2008 as The Codona Trilogy).

Elsewhere, refusing to be limited by notions of idiom and genre, he turned up on Lou Reed’s The Bells, Rip Rig & Panic’s I Am Cold and a lovely half-hour improvised duet with Terry Riley, bootlegged from a 1975 Riley concert in Cologne. In the early ’80s he toured with Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Ian Dury’s Blockheads.

I want to pass on a pithy little description of Cherry’s playing that I’ve just read in a Substack post celebrating Ornette’s 1972 album Science Fiction by the pianist Ethan Iverson: “Folk music, surrealism, the blues, the avant-garde, deep intelligence, primitive emotion.” That’s good. And, as much as I love his work with Coleman, Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri, my favourite Cherry albums are probably those that best encapsulate the full range of those qualities, and of his imagination.

They would be Eternal Rhythm, Relativity Suite from 1973 (with the JCOA, never reissued in any form since its its first appearance on vinyl), and the wonderful Modern Art: Stockholm 1977, a concert at the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which appeared on the Mellotronen label in 2014, featuring Cherry and a nine-piece band played marvellously rich acoustic versions of the material from his then-recent album Hear & Now, produced by Narada Michael Walden. It includes a spellbound duet with the Swedish guitarist Georg Wadenius on a graceful Coleman ballad called “Ornettunes” and an ecstatic transition from the gentle groove of “California” (a take on Donald Byrd’s “Cristo Redentor”, with Cherry on piano) to the miniature prayer for transcendence of “Desireless” (first composed as “Isla (The Sapphic Sleep)” for Alexander Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain and then re-recorded under its new title for Relativity Suite).

It’s easy to imagine that there probably isn’t any music ever played by anyone, anywhere, at any time, from prehistoric hunters on the Eastern Steppe to whatever Kendrick Lamar, Billie Eilish or Nils Frahm are doing next, to which Don Cherry could not have made a worthwhile contribution. And the secret to that must have been his openness.

“I’m self-taught in a way,” he says in the book, “but I’ve always been open to learn, because one lifetime I don’t feel is long enough to really learn music.”

* Graeme Ewens’ Eternal Rhythm: The Don Cherry Tapes and Travelations is published by Buku Press: bukupress@gmail.com. The photograph of Cherry on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1988 was taken by Val Wilmer and is used by her kind permission.

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