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Jun 7

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Down the Manne-Hole

Shelly ManneWhat I carried away in my head from the only time I saw Shelly Manne in person, at Ronnie Scott’s in the summer of 1970, was the sound of his ride cymbal. It was as close to perfection as you could get, the ideal balance of the dry ping produced by the stick’s tip and a discreet spread of sound that carried the momentum from one stroke to the next. It’s hard to find a cymbal like that, and I remember it as the best of its kind I’ve ever heard.

Very likely it was the same cymbal that he had been playing just under 10 years earlier on an album called Shelly Manne and His Men Play ‘Checkmate’, which I picked up second-hand the other day. I’d never heard it before, although the quintet with which he recorded it has gradually become one of my favourite small modern jazz groups of the era, quite the equal of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers or the Horace Silver Quintet, who set the standard for post-bop combos.

In 1959, when the group included the trumpeter Joe Gordon, the tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca, the pianist Victor Feldman and the bassist Monty Budwig, they were recorded over three nights at the Blackhawk club in San Francisco, leading to a series of five albums on the Contemporary label, Manne’s home for 20 years. Now out of copyright in Europe, they’re all available on a four-CD box released by the American Jazz Classics label, and they stand up very well to a direct comparison with the two LPs recorded by the Miles Davis Quintet at the same venue a year and a half later.

Manne’s group visited Europe in 1960, with Russ Freeman replacing Feldman (there’s a recording of their concert at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, called West Coast Jazz In England, on the Solar label), and by the time they made another live recording at a West Coast venue, this time at Shelly’s own Los Angeles club, the Manne-Hole, in March 1961, the line-up had undergone further changes. Gordon and Budwig were replaced by Conte Candoli and Chuck Berghofer, with absolutely no diminution of quality. In October of that year the reshaped group went into Contemporary’s little studio on Melrose Place in West Hollywood to record several themes written for a TV detective series by Johnny Williams, a pianist and composer who later became famous (and, presumably, very rich) from his soundtracks to Jaws, Star Wars and Harry Potter.

I have no idea whether or not the series was any good. Set in a San Francisco private detective agency, it ran for two years and 70 episodes, and its guest stars included Charles Laughton, Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin, Cyd Charisse and the torch singer Julie London. As far as I know, it was never shown in the UK. But Williams composed a series of carefully shaped pieces that provided Manne’s Men with the perfect material on which to exercise their brand of thoughtful, swinging, beautifully turned post-bop.

For me, the star — apart from Manne’s ride cymbal, of course — is Kamuca, who rose to a mild form of prominence in the 1950s as one of a large group of white tenorists heavily under the spell of Lester Young (others included Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Warne Marsh). He began his career with the big bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, and if you listen to the quartet and octet sides he recorded for the Mode and Hi-Fi Jazz labels in 1956 and ’57 (available on a Fresh Sounds CD called Tenor Ahead), pretty much all you hear is a diligent but unexceptional Young disciple. During his time with Manne’s group, however, he showed himself to have matured into an improviser of exceptional character and poise.

Every note he plays on the Checkmate set is worth hearing. The obvious comparison is with Hank Mobley, a sideman in the Davis group at the Blackhawk, once described as “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone”. Showing a similar tone and fluency, but with fewer bluesy inflections in his playing than Mobley, Kamuca reveals himself to be a credible contender for the title. But the tenor-player he makes me think of, more surprisingly, is Wayne Shorter: his approach is more conventional, but there’s something similar about his gorgeous, lightly grained tone and the way he flights his unpredictably shaped but invariably graceful phrases with an airy quality perfectly suited to the sumptuous, clean-lined drive provided by Manne and Berghofer. To compound the pleasure, the quality of the recording made by Howard Holzer, one of Contemporary’s house engineers, has a warmth and a transparency to beat even the great Rudy Van Gelder at his own game, even though the studio also doubled as the label’s packing and mailing room.

Having made his name in California, Kamuca moved to New York for a while in the 1960s and then returned to Los Angeles, where he worked in the studios. He made a handful of albums for the Concord label but his star never burnt as brightly as it had done with Manne, and he died of cancer in 1977, aged 46. The beauty of jazz is that it allows a player of quiet originality to make a lasting mark, and Kamuca, once he had found his own voice, became just such a figure. If you like this kind of modern jazz, then these records by Shelly Manne’s Men, and Checkmate in particular, are as good as it gets.

* The painting of Shelly Manne is from the cover of Checkmate, signed illegibly and uncredited on the CD version reissued in 2002 as part of Fantasy’s Original Jazz Classics series. According to Geoff Winston (see Comments), the credits on the original Contemporary LP jacket reveal the artist to have been one George Deel.

Jun 5

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Disco: the weight of the groove

So disco’s back, apparently by courtesy of Daft Punk, although that may have been last week and it could be all over by now. But I have to say I’ve never felt I needed the permission of the fashion police to listen to the extended mix of Evelyn “Champagne” King’s “Shame” any time I wanted over the past 30-odd years. (You don’t know it? Go there now! And join me in a prayer to be reincarnated as one of those guitarists!)

While looking for something or other to do with disco on the internet yesterday I came across an old thread containing contributions from Bobby Eli, the great session guitarist who was a member of MFSB — the Philadelphia International house band — and played on records by the O’Jays, Billy Paul, the Spinners, the Stylistics and countless others.

Here’s what Eli (posting as phillysoulman) had to say a couple of years ago in defence of disco: “People had some understandable issues with disco. But it wasn’t all the same. A lot of it was R&B with a four-on-the-floor. Songs like that put a LOT of musicians to work, and also paid for a LOT of studio time.”

Someone else on the thread chose to inform him that the soul and disco records coming out of Philly at the time tended to be characterised, in harmonic terms, by the use of the “phrygian dominant scale”. Eli’s response deserves to be preserved for posterity (and this is how he laid it out, like blank verse):

We never discussed scales.

We just played what we felt.

It’s all about the groove.

We were not technical cats.

We just vibed together and instinctively knew each other’s next move.

Scales are for weighing shit, but our grooves had their own weight.

Jun 4

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Something in the Air

Apres MaiIt wasn’t really a surprise that so many British film critics greeted Olivier Assayas’s Something in the Air with such a grudging response on its release last month (among the honourable exceptions, inevitably, was the Observer‘s Philip French). The film’s French title, Apres mai, is a reference to the disturbances of May 1968, and on this side of the Channel there is always a tendency to sneer at the youthful idealism that lay behind les evenements. Some form of cultural and/or generational jealousy at work there, I imagine.

Please take it from me that this is no two-star film, as some seemed to think. It may not be a five-star classic, either, but the director succeeds completely in achieving his aim of portraying the uncertainties of a group of young French people who were leaving school and starting a college education two or three years after the historic events in question, hoping to emulate their predecessors but discovering that the world had changed — and not in the way that such soixante-huitards as Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Jean-Jacques Lebel might have hoped.

As far as this blog is concerned, however, the point is that Assayas makes the soundtrack an integral part of his film, and he gets that right, too. For his party and bedsitter scenes (see the still above) he uses the kind of music that would have been heard at UFO or the Round House in that era: the early Soft Machine, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange, Amazing Blondel, Captain Beefheart (“Abba Zabba” from Safe as Milk) and Tangerine Dream. There is a very amusing scene in which the young protagonist flicks through his album collection: Blind Faith, Electric Ladyland etc. The Soft Machine’s “Why Are We Sleeping” makes a particularly powerful contribution to the evolving drama, and Kevin Ayers’ “Decadence” forms a resonant coda. (The song from which the film’s English title is borrowed, Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air”, doesn’t feature.)

I’m afraid, however, that in terms of sheer enduring quality one piece of music blows the rest of the soundtrack into the weeds, and it comes from almost a decade earlier: the freshness, clarity and authority of Booker T and the MGs’ “Green Onions” make this simple riff-based 12-bar-blues sound as though it was recorded last week rather than in 1962. If you were being cynical, or perhaps a British movie critic, you might argue that the post-psychedelic “progressive” music of the late Sixties and early Seventies mirrored the fumbling evanescence of the political ideas and movements to which it supplied the accompaniment. But I’m not the one to trample on all that idealism, social or musical. See the film, anyway; thanks to those discouraging reviews, it probably won’t be around much longer.

Jun 2

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Some guys (don’t) have all the luck

Jess Roden 2No one could understand why Jess Roden didn’t make it, why a man with so fine and distinctive a voice never managed to ascend to the level of fame enjoyed by other British blue-eyed soul singers of the 1960s and 70s. He had the sound and the looks, he wrote some fine songs, for a while he led a terrific little band, and he had fans in the music press and the backing of one of the most perceptive men in the record industry. What he didn’t have, perhaps, was the musical equivalent of what Graham Greene described as “the splinter of ice in the heart of a writer”: a knowledge of when to allow enthusiasm to take second place to the ambition that propelled many of his contemporaries and friends to the top.

I was reminded of that last week when we had tea together in a London hotel just across the road from the BBC’s Broadcasting House. We had met only once in almost 40 years — at Jim Capaldi’s funeral in 2005 — but it was like encountering a friend you’d seen the day before. Jess is one of the nicest men you could hope to meet. Which may, of course, have been part of the problem.

He had just been interviewed by Robert Elms for Radio London, and as we said goodbye he was off to have a chat with Bob Harris on Radio 2. This is the first time he has been visible in the music world since leaving it in the early 1980s, after concluding that it was time to stop bashing his head against a glass ceiling and look for something else to do (a little more on that subject later). The interviews had been arranged to promote a limited-edition six-CD set titled Hidden Masters: The Jess Roden Anthology, pieced together with remarkable care and attention over a period of several years by Neil Storey, a former colleague at Island Records, the label with which Jess spent the majority of his career. Consisting of 94 tracks, about half of them previously unreleased, compiled from the original multitracks or master copies and restored where necessary, the set takes us from his early days with Alan Bown through Bronco and the Butts Band to his solo career in the mid-70s and up to the later work with such short-lived projects as the Rivits and Seven Windows.

I first saw Jess at the Beachcomber Club in Nottingham. The year was, I think, 1966. He was the singer with the Alan Bown Set, having joined them after serving an apprenticeship with the Raiders and the Shakedown Sound, two bands in his native Kidderminster in the West Midlands. The Alan Bown Set were a soul band with horns and a Hammond organ, and I remember being particularly struck that night by the young singer’s convincing delivery of the Impressions’s “I Need You”, which happened to be one of my favourite Curtis Mayfield songs.

Soul music was falling out of fashion, however, and by the start of the next decade Jess had been signed to Island by Chris Blackwell and was singing with Bronco, a four-piece band consisting of hometown mates who were listening to the new country-influenced sounds coming from across the Atlantic. Bronco never had the right producer to focus their sound, or the right song to get them on the radio, but the eight tracks included in this box demonstrate their worth.

Then came the solo albums, starting in 1973, at just about exactly the same time that Robert Palmer, who had replaced him in Alan Bown’s line-up, left Vinegar Joe — another Island band — and embarked on his own solo career with the label. High hopes surrounded both of them (they were adored inside the company, where everyone from the van driver to the managing director loved their music), and they were given similar facilities: unlimited studio time in London, New Orleans, New York, Nassau or (in Robert’s case) Los Angeles with the best musicians and arrangers available. Both men, for example, recorded in New Orleans with the Meters and Allen Toussaint.

If there was a difference, apart from just over a year in age, it was that Robert really wanted to be a star. Jess wanted people to hear his music, of course, but he wasn’t the sort to really push himself or to finesse his own career. It didn’t stop him making a quantity of music that, as well as being fondly remembered, sounds terrific today. Lend an ear to an epic song recorded for his first solo album, originally called “I’m On Your Side” and now released, in a slightly different version, under the title “For Granted”: I’ve been a regular listener to the groove created by Mick Weaver’s clavinet and Richard Bailey’s crackling drums for 40 years, and it hasn’t worn out its welcome. Or the driving “Reason to Change”, cut with Toussaint and his boys and included in that debut LP. Or the elegant version of Tim Hardin’s “Misty Roses” cut in New York in 1977 for the album titled The Player Not The Game, arranged by Leon Pendarvis and produced by Joel Dorn.

There are surprises all over these CDs, some of them unearthed from unlabelled tape boxes that had lain undisturbed in obscure vaults for decades. But the heart of the anthology comes in the many tracks recorded, in clubs and concert halls as well as in the studio, by the Jess Roden Band, a seven-piece outfit (eight-piece when Billy Livesey guested on keyboards) which was in operation from 1974 to 1976 and could play that funky music as well as any white boys in the UK at the time, even the marvellous Kokomo. Steve Webb, one of the JRB’s two guitarists, and John Cartwright, the bass player, were both useful songwriters, and original compositions were mixed with occasional covers of things like Robert Parker’s “Get Ta Steppin'”, Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On”, Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand” and the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You”, all of which are included on Hidden Masters. They were a much loved live attraction, as can be heard here in recordings from Birmingham Town Hall, Leicester University, the Lyceum and the Marquee.

Robert Palmer had hits — “Johnny and Mary”, “Some Guys Have All the Luck”, and so on — but Jess didn’t; he was living in New York and struggling to complete another album when Blackwell finally pulled the plug. There was no rancour on either side. The decision to begin the process of changing his profession led Jess to evening classes in graphic design and a new career which he pursued successfully in West London until his recent retirement and move to the country. Today there are no signs of regret that, despite all those favourable signs, the highest hopes remained unfulfilled. He can look back at the music he made with affection and pride, and so, now, can we.

* The photograph is from the cover of Hidden Masters: The Jess Roden Anthology (www.hiddenmasters.net). The photographer is unknown. An extensive survey of Jess’s career can be found at http://www.jessroden.com.

May 29

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Looking at Monk

SchlippenbachThe phenomenon of piano players committing themselves to a study of Thelonious Monk’s compositions is neither new nor unusual; it probably started with Monk’s friend Bud Powell, who cut a wonderful version of “Off Minor” during his historic trio session for the Roost label in 1947 and recorded an album called A Portrait of Thelonious in Paris in 1961. Perhaps no one, however, has got so deeply under the skin of Monk’s music as the German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, who appeared at the Cafe Oto in London last night as part of an all-star free jazz quartet with the saxophonist Evan Parker, the bassist John Edwards and the drummer Eddie Prevost.

Eight years ago Schlippenbach released a three-CD set on the Intakt label called Monk’s Casino, in which he and four other musicians (including the remarkable bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall) performed all 70 of Monk’s known compositions, arranged as a sort of giant medley and recorded in three one-hour sets at the A-Trane club in Berlin, the pianist’s home town. It was, I think, one of the great achievements of modern music, a phenomenally detailed and multi-faceted exploration of a seemingly inexhaustible resource. There don’t seem to be such things as canonical works in jazz any more, but if there were, this would deserve to stand high among them.

I thought of Monk’s Casino towards the end of the first of last night’s two enthralling sets, when Parker, Edwards and Prevost fell silent and the pianist spent several minutes creating what sounded to me, at least, like a miniature distillation of that three-hour epic. All of Monk seemed to be in those few minutes — and all of the player himself, too, because there is nothing imitative about Schlippenbach, who shines the light of a piercingly original intellect upon whatever material he happens to be investigating (a couple of years ago he released two fascinating albums of serial compositions for solo piano: Twelve-Tone Tales Vols 1 and 2, also on Intakt).

Schlippenbach was 75 last month. His recent releases include Blackheath, a performance with Prevost on the drummer’s own Matchless label, recorded at Blackheath Halls in South London in 2008 and consisting of a solo improvisation by each and a 25-minute duo invention called “Skipping With Monk”. His latest solo album is called Schlippenbach Plays Monk, in which his own brief interludes are slipped between new thoughts on eight of Thelonious’s tunes. Once again you can hear his principal characteristic: the warmth beneath an apparently austere surface. I listened to it on the way home, and I know I’ll be playing it often.

It was nice to meet him again during the interval, more than 40 years since I interviewed him for the Melody Maker during the annual Anti-Festival held at Berlin’s Quartier Latin club, an event set up in opposition to the formal Berliner Jazztage at the Philharmonic Hall (he was polite enough to pretend to remember me). In the mid-60s he had founded the Globe Unity Orchestra, the first multi-national ensemble devoted to the new jazz; now, like Parker and Prevost, who are also in or approaching their eighth decade, he is an elder statesman of a movement that, on a night like this, seems capable of infinite self-renewal.

* The photograph of Alexander von Schlippenbach is by Manfred Rinderspacher and is taken from the insert to Schlippenbach Plays Monk (Intakt CD 207). Parker, Edwards and Prevost are at the Cafe Oto again tonight (May 29), with the German trombonist Christof Thewes as their guest.

May 28

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A meeting of hearts and minds

Hawkins-MoholoIt’s almost half a century since Chris McGregor’s Blue Notes arrived in London: five refugees from apartheid South Africa whose impact on the UK jazz scene was so profound that the sound and spirit of their playing continue to echo in the music of succeeding generations. Four of them — the trumpeter Mongesi Feza, the altoist Dudu Pukwana, the pianist Chris McGregor and the bassist Johnny Dyani — are no longer with us. The sole survivor of the classic Blue Notes line-up is Louis Moholo-Moholo, their firestarting drummer, who is now 73 and living back in a very different Cape Town from the one he and his comrades left in 1964.

Louis returns to Britain every now and then, reminding us that he has lost nothing of the spark that ignited a thousand sessions in those early years. One of his current projects is an occasional duo with the young English pianist Alexander Hawkins, and if you have 70 minutes to spare, and you’re in the mood to concentrate, I advise you to click on this link. You’ll find a set played during the Gateshead Jazz Festival a few weeks ago which is a fine testament to the musical relationship developing between two musicians who are four decades apart in age but soul-mates on the stage.

In October 2011 they recorded an album, Keep Your Heart Straight, which has just been released on the Ogun label. It’s a record on which Hawkins reminds his listeners that the piano, too, is a percussion instrument. He and Moholo attack the music with a brusque desire to get to the heart of the matter, even when they’re playing romantic ballads like “If I Should Lose You” and “Prelude to a Kiss”, which both get a good pummelling. It’s an exceptional document.

The Gateshead set is very different in tone: more relaxed and expansive, the 50-minute opening medley beginning with the stately, hymn-like tune of Pule Pheto’s “Dikeledi Tsa Phelo” (which reappears at the very end of the concert) and containing the same two standards, treated more tenderly this time. The medley is succeeded by a heartfelt treatment of Dudu’s “B My Dear”, a staple of the Blue Notes’ repertoire: originally titled “Marie My Dear”, it appeared under that name on Very Urgent, their wonderful 1968 album, and is one of the loveliest ballads ever written by a jazz musician, blending a dollop of Ellingtonian lyricism with a dash of Monkish astringency.

Moholo is magnificently alert and responsive throughout (and occasionally droll), while Hawkins, who continues to impress in all sorts of contexts, shows his ability to play alongside the great drummer without falling for the obvious temptation to imitate the distinctive South African piano styles of McGregor and Abdullah Ibrahim. He can absorb the sounds and syntax of the past while forging a style that is on its way to becoming distinctly his own.

* The photograph of Louis Moholo-Moholo and Alexander Hawkins is from the inner jacket of Keep Your Heart Right, and was taken by Roberto Cifarelli.

May 23

2 Comments

Empress of the supper club

Mabel MercerNow here’s a find, picked up for a tenner out of the vinyl racks at Ray’s Jazz Shop in Soho yesterday. I’m no longer a vinyl hound, but I couldn’t resist this well-preserved original US Atlantic copy of an album by a singer who influenced Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, with its elegant typography and an artfully out-of-focus photograph by Jay Maisel, who shot the cover of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

By the time I saw Mabel Mercer, she was in her early seventies and performing from an ornate armchair to audiences at the St Regis Hotel in New York City, in a room that held around 75 people. She was giving two shows a night on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and  three on Fridays and Saturdays, with Sundays and Mondays off, and she was filling the place. At each show she performed around two dozen songs with her long-time accompanist, Jimmy Lyon, at the grand piano.

She could no longer sing. Instead she more or less talked her way through her repertoire, which was based on the classic American songbook: the theatre songs of Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern and so on, sprinkled with more recherche items from the likes of Alec Wilder or Cy Coleman, sometimes written specially for her. But in the way she spoke the lyrics, in the understated dramatic precision of her phrasing, you could easily see why other singers admired her so much.

Strangely enough, the woman who came to epitomise the civilised entertainment to be found in Manhattan’s mid-century supper clubs was born in Burton upon Trent, the daughter of a white English music-hall artist and a black American who is sometimes referred to as a jazz musician — although, since we are talking about the year 1900, that description might have been slightly premature. At any rate, she never knew him, and she was still a child when her mother and stepfather left for the United States, leaving her to board at a Manchester convent, where her colouring and short, dark hair led her fellow pupils to nickname her “Golliwog”.

At 14 she left to join her aunt’s song-and-dance troupe, beginning a career in show business that took her to London in the 20s, to Paris in the 30s, to the Bahamas in the early 40s, and eventually to New York, where she settled. In each of those cities, her audiences included the A-list celebrities of the day: film and theatre people, literary stars, fellow musicians, royalty. But it was in New York that she found her niche and secured a recording contract with Atlantic Records; here’s an example of this remarkable artist in her prime, singing “Les Feuilles Mortes” on one of her earlier albums, produced by the label’s founders, Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. She usually performed solo but Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker‘s nonpareil jazz critic, saw her share the Philharmonic Hall stage with Stan Getz  during the Newport Jazz Festival in 1973 and remarked that she induced the saxophonist to play “in a hymnlike manner he hasn’t shown in years”. There’s a black and white clip of her, a year later, performing Lerner and Lane’s “Wait ‘Til We’re 65” and Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” at a benefit concert. She appeared twice at Carnegie Hall in the mid-70s with the great cabaret singer Bobby Short, a musical soul-mate, and in 1983, the year before her death, she travelled to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan.

Alec Wilder, contributing a sleeve note to The Art of Mabel Mercer, released by Atlantic in 1965, described the human variety to be found among those who came to listen to her: “From pompous executives to wild-eyed hepcats; from fragile Victorian spinsters to bumptious banner-bearing avant-gardists; from graphologists to trumpet-players; from Back Bay to Broadway; from conservative to radical — behaving with respectful quiet in the presence of Mabel’s songs.” There’s isn’t much of an audience any more for what she did. A fair proportion of those following the links above will probably find her care for diction alone hopelessly old-fashioned. They should listen to her languid, lustrous version of Cole Porter’s “So in Love”, recorded in 1954: if it was good enough for Lady Day and Ol’ Blue Eyes, it’s good enough for me.

May 21

2 Comments

The Baz Age

gatsbyI’ve a hearty liking for jazz music, especially Irving Berlin’s. It’s most artistic. One of the first principles of dancing is abandon, and this is a quality that jazz music possesses. It’s complex. It will, I believe, occupy a great place in American art.

That’s Zelda Fitzgerald speaking to a reporter from the Baltimore Sun, who paid the celebrated couple a visit in October 1923, 18 months before the publication of The Great Gatsby. The interview took place in their house in Great Neck, Long Island, which Scott Fitzgerald used as the principal setting for his most celebrated novel. Zelda’s opinion of jazz was pretty advanced for its time, even if she did nominate Irving Berlin rather than King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton to illustrate her enthusiasm. She was certainly right about its place in American art.

I wrote about her husband’s description of the quasi-jazz in Gatsby in a post on this blog a couple of weeks ago (“Yellow cocktail music”, May 5), and now I’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s film, in which music plays almost as prominent a role as the actors, the script and the locations.

There are things I dislike about it, principally Tobey Maguire’s dorky portrayal of the narrator, Nick Carraway, and the otiose framing device that involves plonking Carraway in a rehab clinic where he writes a novel called The Great Gatsby. Oh, and a one-dimensional Elizabeth Debicki, grievously miscast as Jordan Baker. But there’s a lot I enjoyed, too, particularly the wholly convincing and affecting performances of the two leads, Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, and the general exuberance of the whole thing, to which the music is crucial.

It’s sourced from all over the place and woven into Craig Armstrong’s score in such a way as to create an aural tapestry whose careful balance between light and shade is important to a film that is constantly whacking you in the eye (probably just as true for the two-dimensional version as for the 3D in which I saw it).

I was interested to note that Luhrman and Armstrong use “Rhapsody in Blue” as a stand-in for Fitzgerald’s fictional “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”. This was obviously an easier solution than getting someone to write a pastiche of such a piece, and it works well enough; there’s no point in quibbling that Gershwin didn’t write his classic piece until two years after the action described in the novel because Jay Z, will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Lana Del Ray and The xx weren’t around then either, but places are found for them in the soundtrack. Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” is a particularly good fit, and Armstrong’s orchestral fills allude to Ennio Morricone’s peerless Once Upon a Time in America score, evoking the New York underworld of the early 20th century.

Bryan Ferry, his musical director Colin Good and their Jazz Age orchestra (see my post on February 13) make a subtle but notable impact throughout the film, backdating modern songs such as “Love Is the Drug”, “Bang Bang” and “Crazy in Love” (with a vocal by Emeli Sande). In addition to the regular soundtrack CD, their versions are available on an album called The Great Gatsby: The Jazz Recordings, currently downloadable via iTunes here and soon to be released in hard-copy form. One of my favourite moments in the film arrives during the party sequence in which we hear snatches of “Back to Black” from Beyonce and Ferry: a perfect fit as the mood darkens in the mansion on Long Island Sound.

* The illustration is from the dust jacket of the 1934 Modern Library edition, the first time Gatsby had been republished in the US since the original Scribner’s edition of 1925, which sold a mere 20,000 copies and was accounted a failure. It contains a rueful introduction by the author, then living in Baltimore, Maryland, close to Zelda’s sanitarium, his career at its lowest ebb. I bought it 40 years ago for not very much money at the beloved and now defunct Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street in New York City: in the heart, appropriately enough, of the old Diamond District.

May 20

4 Comments

C’est Chic, encore

Norma JeanIt was while watching the series of YouTube mini-interviews with the collaborators on Daft Punk’s new album, Random Access Memories, that I started thinking about Nile Rodgers and found myself catching up with The Hitmaker, Martyn Stevens’s hour-long bio-documentary on the co-founder of Chic, made last year for BBC Wales. One of the people Stevens interviewed was Norma Jean Wright, Chic’s first lead singer when Rodgers and Bernard Edwards put the band together in New York in 1976. Norma Jean sang on “Dance, Dance, Dance”, their first hit, and then became the first singer to have them serve as the writers and producers on her own record, thus becoming the precursor of David Bowie, Madonna and many others.

Her first single with them, “Saturday“, became a club hit and still sounds great. It has all the Chic trademarks, including a characteristic of their earliest records: as well as Rodgers’s rhythm guitar licks, Edwards’s tentacular bass lines and Tony Thompson’s perfect four-on-the-floor drumming, there was often a distinctive keyboard or tuned percussion sound. In the case of Chic’s “I Want Your Love”, for instance, it was a set of tubular bells; with “Saturday” it was a vibraphone, played by the jazz musician Dave Friedman. On the original 12-inch disco mix, you don’t hear much of Friedman for almost four minutes: he restricts himself to sounding the chord changes, the traditional role for the vibes in Motown-and-after soul music. But then, at 3:56, he eases out of the rhythm section with a solo that adds a lovely cool new flavour to the track, a kind of mentholated sophistication. It isn’t jazz, exactly, but there’s no surprise that it comes from a guy who studied at Juilliard and recorded with Chet Baker, George Benson and others. (In the same year that he laid down his part on “Saturday”, he also recorded an album for ECM with Double Image, the band he co-led with his fellow vibist Dave Samuel.)

Nile Rodgers has done many wonderful things, but I still love that early stuff. If you haven’t already seen it, here’s the BBC documentary, in full: http://youtu.be/VVmAXWZu_PQ

May 18

16 Comments

A feudal horn

Feudal horns

They were playing Blood on the Tracks in the shop I wandered into yesterday. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” was halfway through: a song that always lightens my step. The choice of music in shops is an underrated business and although I didn’t really want to buy anything, their sound system was good enough to make me stick around to listen to some more of Bob. Two songs later it was “Shelter from the Storm”, with that quietly impassioned vocal set against the strumming acoustic guitars and the halved-time bass guitar.

An hour later I was in a restaurant, having lunch with a friend who loves Dylan as much as I do, and I mentioned that I was always amused by a line in the seventh verse: “And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a feudal horn…” No, no, she said. That’s not it. It’s funeral horn. Undertaker. Funeral horn. Get it? Well, I said, I’d always thought it might be flugelhorn, with a slightly mangled pronunciation, but “funeral horn” sounded too literal, particularly for Bob. So she got out her smartphone and went on to bobdylan.com and discovered just here that the official version is “futile horn”.

Not for me it isn’t, and nor will it ever be. Do we really imagine, I said to my friend, that Bob Dylan transcribes his own lyrics? That’s just some devoted functionary getting it wrong. In fact there’s an entire website devoted to mishearings of Dylan lyrics (find it here) and sure enough someone agrees with me on the matter of the one-eyed undertaker’s “feudal horn”. (Someone else also thinks it might be “flugelhorn”; there appears to be no recorded corroboration of my friend’s “funeral horn”. Only Dylan could be the subject of four conflicting versions of a single word.) To settle the matter, take a listen to the driving version on Hard Rain, from the Rolling Thunder tour in 1976: the vocal is very clear, and that’s a “d”, not a “t”. And I know exactly what a feudal horn sounds like, even though I’ve never heard one. So does Bob.

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