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May 6

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Abba: my part in their rise to world domination

Agnetha 1A new museum dedicated to Abba is opening this week in Stockholm, in the presence of 75 per cent of the group: Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. I have three things to say about this.

1.

Here’s a memory from one day in 1980, when a review copy of their new single, “The Winner Takes It All”, arrived at the Melody Maker office, then located in a Nissen hut just south of Blackfriars Bridge in London. This was long before Abba acquired any sort of hipster credibility, or even the respect due to people who make great pop records, but I’d loved “Dancing Queen”, “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and “The Name of the Game” and I wanted to hear this one. So I dashed towards the listening room and opened the door. Already in there was Ian Birch, one of the paper’s writers, sitting with a couple of people whose backs were towards me. I couldn’t see  who they were.

“Sorry, Ian,” I said, “but I really have to listen to this — it’s the new Abba single.” A look of horror crossed his face. The two people with him swung round in amazement. They were Phil Oakey and Joanne Catherall from the Human League, then at the very beginning of their journey to pop stardom. With Ian, they were doing something called Blind Date: a weekly feature in which a pop star was played a bunch of new records without being told what they were, and was invited to comment. I’d interrupted their seance, and they clearly thought they were in the presence of a madman. I couldn’t have seemed more utterly uncool had I said I wanted to listen to a klezmer remake of “We’ll Gather Lilacs”. I made my excuses and left.

2.

We all want to leave a footprint on history, and here is mine, as recorded in Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Real Story of Abba, by Carl Magnus Palm, published by Omnibus Press in 2001. Palm tells the story of how Michael Tretow, then a young studio engineer, was working with Bjorn and Benny, and wanted to make their records sound better. No one in Sweden, however, understood the techniques used by American and British record producers. There was no literature available. Then, one day…

One of the more open-minded booksellers was located in central Stockholm, he writes. Michael would pop in every now and then to see if any interesting titles were available. One day in the autumn of 1972 he finally found the book he’d been dreaming about. It was called Out of His Head: The Sound of Phil Spector. The author was Richard Williams, the assistant editor of Britain’s Melody Maker magazine, and the volume had just recently been published. Michael didn’t hesitate, and headed straight for the cashier with this find before anyone else snapped it up.

Bjorn, Benny and Michael were all roughly the same age, and like most of their generation had discovered rock through Elvis Presley. They were also big fans of the records made by the producer Phil Spector in the early Sixties. His “wall of sound” had been the foundation for dozens of legendary recordings he had produced for several American girl groups, as well as artists like the Righteous Brothers and Ike and Tina Turner.

What Michael wanted to know was how Spector achieved that enormous sound. Although he was not entirely sure, he thought he had a hunch — and now Out of His Head revealed all the secrets. “Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals used “a whole gang of guitars”, the book established. On the following pages, a section about the Ronettes’ classic “Be My Baby” went into even greater detail. “The orchestra, outrageously gigantic, had pianos and basses arrayed in ranks in the studio,” wrote Williams, “and everyone joining in to play the percussion which Spector had arranged with almost militaristic precision.”

Michael nodded to himself. “That explained why it sounded like five guitars,” he recalled. “It was because Spector really did use five guitars.” But having several guitarists, pianists, bassists and so on in the studio at the same time would have been far too expensive for comparatively low key Swedish productions. If a similar effect was to be achieved, they would have to do several overdubs of each of the instruments instead. Michael knew he simply had to try it sometime. 

The opportunity arrived soon enough, for the Metronome studio had been booked for Wednesday, January 10, 1973. That was when Bjorn and Benny were going to record “Ring Ring”, their new song for the Eurovision Song Contest. The night before the session, the three friends met at Michael’s place, discussing the best way of recording the song. Michael told them what he’d read about Phil Spector’s recording techniques. Wouldn’t that be a good thing to try on this new song, to record the backing track at least twice? Bjorn and Benny enthusiastically agreed.

And the rest is history, as Palm goes on to describe. “Ring Ring” gave them their breakthrough hit in several countries. It didn’t win the Eurovision Song Contest, but in terms of shaping their sound it served as a template for the one that did, “Waterloo”, and for the hits that followed.

So there it is. I didn’t make this up. And I’m sorry, but I’ve been dying to tell someone about it. You know: 310 million albums and singles, all those sold-out concerts, 42 million tickets for Mamma Mia!, an official museum in Stockholm — it might never have happened.

3.

Agnetha Faltskog won’t be at the opening the museum because she’s out of the country, promoting her new solo album. It’s her first since 2004, when she released My Colouring Book, consisting of cover versions of songs that meant a lot to her, particularly when she was a young girl. I liked it straight away for its wistfulness and its authenticity: this really does sound like a woman of a certain age recalling the important feelings of her youth and honouring the records that reflected her adolescent emotions. All her versions are excellent, and some are exceptional, beginning with the title track, which she first heard in Dusty Springfield’s version. On Jackie De Shannon’s “When You Walk in the Room” she outdoes every previous version, including those by the composer, the Searchers and Bruce Springsteen (who performed it at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975). “What Now My Love” has the epic quality of a Spector classic, but with modern textures. It was brave of her to accept the challenge of reinterpreting the Shangri-Las’ “Past, Present and Future”, and she does justice to a masterpiece. Over the years My Colouring Book has become nothing less than one of my favourite pop albums.

* The photograph of Agnetha Faltskog is taken from the cover of My Colouring Book, and is by Jimmy Backius.

* It’s been pointed out to me that the incident at the Melody Maker can’t have taken place in 1979, as I originally wrote, since “The Winner Takes It All” was released in 1980. So I’ve made the correction. I’m delighted that the blog is attracting such eagle-eyed readers as @marcellocarlin.

May 5

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Yellow cocktail music

Paul WhitemanWith a handful of phrases in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lets us know that he missed his vocation: he would have made a first-class jazz critic. Consider, for example, his description of the music played by the band during the first of Jay Gatsby’s parties at the mansion on Long Island Sound attended by Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator: “The moon had risen a little 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.” Wow. How many opponents of trad jazz must have wished they’d come up with the lethal precision of that “stiff, tinny drip”?

Even better is this, a couple of pages earlier: “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music…” Yellow cocktail music! Who could not read those words and imagine exactly the sound the author had in mind, or at least its effect?

In Carraway’s words, the orchestra hired to entertain Gatsby’s guests is “no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and high and low drums.” Not the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, then, but a more lavish ensemble very much along the lines of the outfit led in the early 1920s by Paul Whiteman, the pioneer of “symphonic jazz”.

The resemblance becomes even more marked when the orchestra leader announces: “Ladies and gentlemen, at the request of Mr Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much admiration at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” The piece, he continued, was known as “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”.

If we are searching for a real-life inspiration for the fictitious Mr Tostoff, we might alight upon the figure Ferdy Grofé, a pianist and composer who met Whiteman in California in 1919 and worked closely with him until 1933. It was he who orchestrated George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, commissioned by Whiteman, for its concert debut at New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1924, with Gershwin himself at the piano. I still have my mother’s two-sided 12-inch 78 of their studio recording for the Victor label, released in the UK on His Master’s Voice; you can hear and see a later (and rather differently staged) performance here in an extract from the 1930 film King of Jazz.

Fitzgerald began work on Gatsby in 1922 — the year of Gershwin’s one-act opera Blue Monday, which inspired Whiteman to invite him to write a longer work — and made his final revisions in 1925, by which time “symphonic jazz” had become a part of the American music scene. Meanwhile there had been the premiere of Darius Milhaud’s much discussed La Création du Monde, another work which attempted to blend jazz and European classical music. (Milhaud, a French composer who had heard jazz during a visit to Harlem in 1922, later taught at Mills College in Oakland, California, where his pupils included Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach.) Grofé’s Mississippi Suite would come along in 1927, part of a phenomenon that withered in the face of critical disdain but provided a pre-echo of the Third Stream movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Great Gatsby always reminds me of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue: no amount of mishandling can tarnish the essence of a work of 20th century art that comes as close to perfection as makes no difference. So I’m looking forward to Baz Luhrmann’s new film version, released in the UK later this month, with Leonardo di Caprio as Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire as Carraway, and with music by Jay Z, Beyonce, Bryan Ferry and others. After all, Shakespeare survived Luhrmann’s marvellously inventive 1996 version of Romeo & Juliet, with its gun-toting gangbangers and a soundtrack that included Garbage, the Butthole Surfers and Radiohead.

Paul Whiteman, incidentally, earned the undying disrespect of purists who correctly believed he had no right to the absurd “King of Jazz” title (bestowed by a journalist in 1919 but eagerly seized upon as a marketing slogan), at least as long as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington and other African American innovators were around. But an unbiased listen to some of his 1920s recordings reveals a man who hired good soloists — including the cornetists Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke and the saxophonists Jimmy Dorsey and Frank Trumbauer — and definitely had some sort of a feeling for jazz.

As for “Vladmir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World”, wouldn’t it be fun if some modern composer with an understanding of the period took it upon himself to imagine the piece into actual life? I’d love to hear it, tinny banjoes and all.

* The photograph of Paul Whiteman’s Ambassador Hotel Orchestra was taken in Atlantic City in 1920; the leader is on the extreme left, a violin under his arm. It is included in the booklet to the CD Paul Whiteman ‘King of Jazz’ 1920-1927, released on the Timeless Historical label.

Apr 26

6 Comments

Special occasions and bad situations

Millie Jackson

Millie Jackson became notorious for her dirty mouth, featured in albums with titles like Live and Uncensored and EST (Extra Sexual Persuasion), which was a shame because throughout the 1970s she also produced a series of compelling ballad performances that deserve a high place in the rankings of the sub-genre which the disc jockey and writer Dave Godin named Deep Soul. Jackson was born in Georgia, the daughter of a sharecropping family, and most of her recording for the Spring label was done in Muscle Shoals, Alabama; her music was steeped in the sound of the South.

Now Ace Records have compiled a selection of her finest Spring ballads into a single album, The Moods of Millie Jackson, which amply demonstrates what a powerful singer she could be. The best known tracks probably come from the two outstanding albums in which she explored the theme of infidelity: Caught Up (1974) and Still Caught Up (1975). Among the highlights of that pair is her version of Tom Jans’ “Loving Arms”, with its devastating line about “looking back and longing for the freedom of my chains”. Her early singles “A Child of God” and “It Hurts So Good” will also be familiar to many. But some of the lesser known tracks are equally cherishable: the beautiful “A Love of Your Own”, co-written by Hamish Stuart of the Average White Band with Ned Doheny, the aching “Solitary Love Affair” from the pens of Billy Kennedy and Gus McKinney, Sam Dees’ gorgeous “Special Occasion” and, maybe most of all, the slow-burning but ultimately volcanic “Making the Best of a Bad Situation”, by Richard Kerr and Gary Osborne, one of those songs that make you realise for the millionth time the huge role played by the emotional triggers of gospel music in the evolution of pop.

For all these things, it’s easy to forgive Millie her manifold trespasses across boundaries of taste and discretion, even the album cover for which she posed while seated on the lavatory. As far as I’m concerned, The Moods of Millie Jackson is an indispensable album.

Apr 22

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Richie Havens 1941-2013

The death of Richie Havens has just been announced, of a sudden heart attack at his home, aged 72. A lot of people will think fondly of “Freedom”, “High Flying Bird” and his Beatles and Dylan covers. The tracks I’ll remember him by are both from the double album titled Richard P Havens 1983, released on Verve Folkways in 1969:  they are “Parable of Ramon” and “What More Can I Say, John?” — a pair of protest songs all the more effective for their sombre understatement. The former is about a dirt farmer, the latter about Vietnam, and they both deserve to be thought of as classics. They also feature Paul Williams, Havens’s superlative lead guitarist, whose filigree solos and accompaniments provided a perfect foil for the leader’s rough-hewn voice and guitar strumming. I haven’t a clue what happened to him, but whenever I went to see Richie play in those days I looked forward to Williams’s contribution as much as anything.

I interviewed Havens once, for the Melody Maker, and it gave me a good story to tell. It was at a hotel on Park Lane, in 1970 or 71. I went up to his room at the appointed time, knocked on the door, and was shown in. He greeted me with great warmth, and looked me straight in the eye. “Aquarius,” he declared. Er, sorry, I said, but no. Still that piercing look. “Sagittarius!” No, wrong again. “Capricorn!” Look, sorry about this, but… “Taurus!” You can guess the rest: he ran through the whole card before a process of elimination gave him the right answer.  He didn’t appear at all embarrassed, and it certainly amused me. Then we got to talk. He seemed like one of the good guys.

Apr 22

3 Comments

Ancient and modern

Scodanibbio

All the way through the year of 1995, or so it seemed, I was stalked by a song. “Besame Mucho” was already quite familiar to me, particularly from the work of Art Pepper and Barney Wilen, two saxophonists for whom I’ve always had a special admiration, and who both played it frequently. But in 1995 it seemed to be coming at me from all over the place: a cocktail pianist in a Johannesburg hotel, a bandoneon-player busking by the ancient walls of Lucca, and most of all on an album called Marvellous by the French pianist Michel Petrucciani, who performed it in a spellbinding arrangement for the Graffiti String Quartet augmented by the bassist Dave Holland.

It was Petrucciani’s version that made me realise what a truly remarkable song this is. Written by Consuelo Velazquez, the daughter of a Mexican army officer and poet (you can read more about her in an obituary here), it was inspired by the sight of a couple kissing in the street and the first of its countless recordings was made by the singer and actor Emilio Tuero, the Carlos Gardel of Mexico, in 1941 (listen to his version here). Tuero’s example was followed by countless singers, from Frank Sinatra to Diane Krall. As the obituary says, it is the only Mexican song most people know.

I love the contours of its melody. In common with many of my favourite songs from mid-century Broadway shows, such as “Here’s that Rainy Day” and “My One and Only Love”, it has a strongly chromatic tune containing shapes that seem, by themselves, to suggest the flow of powerful emotions. The main melody of “Besame Mucho” ascends in steps that portray an ardour bursting out of its conventional restraints before returning with a yearning elegance to the starting point. The bridge passage brings a decorous contrast, suggesting the dominant emotion recollected in tranquillity. Like many great love songs, it seems to contain an intimation of sadness to come.

And now there’s an outstanding new version, from an unexpected source. It comes from Reinventions, a ECM New Series album devoted to pieces chosen and rearranged by the Italian virtuoso double bassist and composer Stefano Scodanibbio and performed by the Quartetto Prometeo. Scodanibbio (pictured above) died last December of motor neurone disease, aged 55; he was previously known to me for his work with Terry Riley, but his other collaborators included Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Brian Ferneyhough, Markus Stockhausen and Vinko Globokar.

His work is founded on extended instrumental techniques making powerful use of string harmonics (the higher sounds produced by the bow when the fingers of the left hand touch the string lightly rather than pressing it down on to the fingerboard, if I remember rightly from childhood violin lessons). In the compositions selected for Reinventions, which was recorded two years before his death, three items from Bach’s The Art of Fugue are juxtaposed with sequences of guitar pieces from Spain and songs from Mexico, and in all cases the results are striking. The combination of the harmonics and the sounds produced by “normal” bowing and pizzicato techniques produces marvellous textures, at once ethereal and earthy, ancient and modern.

Inevitably, I suppose, it’s the seven-minute arrangement of “Besame Mucho” that keeps drawing me back to the record. There’s something magical about the way Scodanibbio seems to refract the theme, slowly and gently dismantling and reassembling it in a more complex form, like an image seen in mirrors set at different angles, new shades of emotion overlapping as you feel the the tectonic plates of its harmonies shift beneath you. Each freshly revealed facet is tested for weight, light and meaning. It’s something new, and unforgettable.

Scodanibbio clearly had a strong feeling for Mexico. He chose to die (like Charles Mingus, another great bassist and composer) in Cuernavaca, and he apparently believed “Besame Mucho” to be the most beautiful song ever written. I wouldn’t argue over that. With this recording he and his players took a lovely thing and made it even lovelier.

Apr 19

17 Comments

2013 (A merman I should turn to be…)

HendrixThe last time I saw Jimi Hendrix, he was getting into a helicopter to take him away from the Isle of Wight, still wearing the stage clothes, flowing silks in orange and dark red, in which he’d performed in the early hours of August 31, 1970. It was a chilly, misty morning, not long after dawn. Eighteen days later he was dead, and the speculation began about what, in musical terms, he might have left undone.

None of the posthumous releases have given us much of a clue, and that’s certainly true of People, Hell and Angels, the Hendrix estate’s latest production, in which mostly familiar songs are presented in the guise of alternative takes or versions cleansed of the overdubs undertaken after his death. Hard-core obsessives will find more than enough to satisfy their appetites, but it’s foolish now to hope for revelations.

So what would he have gone on to accomplish? Could he really have moved on beyond the basic template laid down by “Hey Joe” and Are You Experienced soon after his arrival in London in 1966? What happened to truncate the arc of musical progression created when that first album was followed within the next two years by Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland?

The year 1969 was the one in which he seemed to hint at future directions. Not just the staggering Woodstock version of “Star Spangled Banner” — a Guernica for the Vietnam era — but the jams that took place whenever he was in New York, often involving musicians associated with Miles Davis. In March of that year the guitarist John McLaughlin took a night off from playing with Tony Williams’ Lifetime to jam at the Record Plant with Hendrix, the bassist Dave Holland (then a member of Davis’s quintet) and Buddy Miles. In May there was a much bootlegged session with Hendrix, the organist Larry Young (another member of Lifetime), Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell. Later that summer a session was booked at the Hit Factory for Hendrix and Miles Davis, at Miles’s behest, but was aborted half an hour before the scheduled start time when the trumpeter demanded $50,000. And there were rumours that Hendrix and Gil Evans, the arranger of Davis’s Sketches of Spain and other classics, were planning to make an album together.

None of this resulted in anything of consequence and Hendrix never found himself with those musicians in a structured environment where serious work might have occurred. For all his sublime talent, would he have been technically capable of taking McLaughlin’s place in Lifetime, the most adventurous jazz-rock group of its time? (“He wasn’t very schooled; he had a limited knowledge as far as harmony is concerned,” McLaughlin later reflected. “But he had such an imagination that he made up for it.”) How would he have sounded with a group of post-Coltrane free improvisers? Could a meeting of Hendrix and Albert Ayler have worked out? But these weren’t the sort of projects in which his managers were interested, and Hendrix’s own way of life probably militated against any more rigorous pursuit of musical adventure.

There’s an interesting quote from Carlos Santana, who was present at the Record Plant during a session in November that year: “This was a real shocker to me. He said, ‘OK, roll it,’ and started recording and it was incredible. But, within 15 or 20 seconds into the song, he just went out. All of a sudden, the music that was coming out of the speakers was way beyond the song, like he was freaking out, having a gigantic battle in the sky with somebody. It just didn’t make sense with the song any more, so the roadies looked at each other, the producer looked at him and they said, ‘Go get him.’ I’m not making this up. They separated him from the amplifier and the guitar and it was like he was having an epileptic attack… When they separated him, his eyes were red. He was gone.”

The following summer, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull was surprised by what he saw when his band shared the bill with Hendrix at the Randall’s Island festival in New York. He seemed like a different person, Anderson said, from the one he had known a year earlier. “I wanted to go and talk to him, but I couldn’t get anywhere near him because he was surrounded by a phalanx of very sinister people. I saw him briefly as he made his way to the stage and he looked very out of it.”

It all reminds me of Charlie Parker, who had a similar revolutionary effect on the way music is played before meeting a similarly premature demise in 1955 (Hendrix was 27 when he died; Parker was 34). The tinest scraps of Parker’s output are preserved and cherished, and we know that he remained capable of great improvisation all the way to his death. But, like Hendrix, Parker died leaving questions about what would have happened next. Was his work already done, or might he have found a new context to stimulate and nourish further artistic growth? In both cases, the odds seemed to have been stacked against it. But, of course, we’ll never know.

* The photograph of Hendrix is by Gered Mankowitz and is taken from the cover of People, Hell and Angels, just released by Sony Legacy. The quotes are from Eyewitness Hendrix by Johnny Black, published by Carlton (1999).

Apr 17

2 Comments

L’amour fou

F Hardy 1

It was only a couple of hours after buying her new CD in Paris the other day that I picked up an English newspaper and read an interview in which Françoise Hardy was characterised as a “muse” to leading male artists of her era: Dylan, Jagger, and so on. The writer may have intended it as a compliment to one of the great 60s beauties but it seemed more like an insult because the term usually suggests a passive supplier of  inspiration, and Hardy was never that. What’s often forgotten is that she wrote her first hit, “Tous les garçons et les filles”, herself in 1962, when she was a mere 18 years old, and over the years she has turned into a singer and writer whose albums are seldom less than compelling.

Since the excellent Decalages arrived in 1988 I’ve bought pretty well all of them as a matter of course, with Clair-obscur (2000), Tant de belles choses (2004) and La Pluie sans parapluie (2010) being particularly worth the trouble. And in 2008 there was her autobiography, Le Desespoir des singes et autres bagatelles (The Monkeys’ Despair and Other Trifles), in which she recounted the tale of a rather extraordinary life with clarity, honesty, humour and the sort of style you’d expect from someone who, albeit briefly, studied literature at the Sorbonne. (And there’s a particularly good passage about spending time with Dylan in Paris in 1965: he was more impressed than she was.)

Most of her music has been made in association with others, from Michel Berger and Gabriel Yared to her husband Jacques Dutronc, and her new album, L’amour fou, finds her  working with a selection of collaborators. Names unlikely to be familiar to most British listeners are sprinkled among the songwriting credits, including those of Thierry Stremler, Calogero, Pascal Colomb, Alain Lanty and Benoit Carre, but at no cost to the unity of mood found throughout this sequence of the 10 songs.

These are modern chansons, blue-hour ballads of loss and regret elegantly cloaked in discreet arrangements — piano and strings, mostly — that accentuate the mood and never get in the way of a voice that is very slightly (and appropriately) deeper and richer but still recognisably that of the woman who, in her young days, sang “La fin de l’ete” and “Comment te dire adieu?”: the girl on the cover of Salut les copains and Mademoiselle Age Tendre, of course, but always much more than that.

There doesn’t seem to be a promo clip of my favourite track, “Mal au coeur”, but here’s one of the title song:

Apr 16

5 Comments

Pasolini’s Theorem

TheoremWhatever your opinion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem, which is showing at the BFI South Bank in London over the next few weeks as part of a season devoted to the director’s work, there’s no denying the quality of its soundtrack. Mozart and Morricone are the names on the credits, and both play significant roles in Pasolini’s 1968 drama of a family whose bourgeois lives are torn apart by the passage through their household of a mysterious stranger (played by Terence Stamp).

But the first music you hear, after the newsreel-style prologue set outside the gates of a factory and over a credit sequence shot on the dusty  slopes near the crater of a volcano, is actually “Tears for Dolphy”, a beautiful ballad written by the American trumpeter Ted Curson in 1964 to mourn the passing of his friend and sometime bandmate (in Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop), Eric Dolphy. Mystifyingly, it’s uncredited, leading the viewer to assume that it’s by Ennio Morricone, which it certainly isn’t. It was recorded by Curson with Bill Barron (tenor saxophone), Herb Bushler (bass) and Dick Berk (drums) in the year of Dolphy’s death, and initially released a year later in Dutch Fontana’s memorable series of New Thing albums before being reissued first on Arista/Freedom label 10 years later and then by Black Lion in the mid-1990s. (It’s out of print again now, but you can hear it here.) Curson died last November, aged 77; let’s hope he saw some benefit from the use of his piece in a much studied film.

It was certainly a great choice. As I listened to it while the credits rolled last night, it brought to mind the creative use of post-bop jazz in the scores for several important European art movies in the early 1960s, such as Antonioni’s La Notte (Giorgio Gaslini) and Blow Up (Herbie Hancock) and Polanski’s Knife in the Water (Krzysztof Komeda) and Repulsion (Chico Hamilton). Elsewhere in the film, excerpts from Mozart’s Requiem are used effectively to underscore the anti-clerical aspect of Pasolini’s message, while Morricone earns his fee — and reminds us that from the age of 12 he studied composition at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome — by providing jagged post-serialist pieces for string orchestra to accompany scenes of psychological turmoil. But it’s Ted Curson’s piece that carries the greatest emotional weight, its spare contours providing the perfect evocation of the discontents that accompanied Italy’s post-war reconstruction.

Apr 15

12 Comments

Terry Adams on the cello

When I went in to see A Late Quartet, a new film by Yaron Silberman that includes a wonderful performance by Christopher Walken as an ageing cellist, I was already thinking about string quartets, and cellists in particular. A friend had just sent me a link to the YouTube clip of an event that took place 40 years ago this summer and which represented probably the first successful introduction of a string quartet into rock music: the 1973 tour by Van Morrison’s Caledonia Soul Orchestra.

That tour was commemorated in the classic double-album It’s Too Late to Stop Now, some of which was taped at the Rainbow Theatre in North London. I was there that July night, along with just about everyone I knew. It was the gig of the year, not least because Morrison was returning to the UK for the first time since his days with Them, and it was no surprise to me when it turned out to be an absolutely perfect night because I’d seen them a week or so earlier, at Birmingham City Hall, and that had been spectacular enough. In the meantime I’d talked to Van and some of the musicians in order to write a combined review/interview/preview of the London shows for the Melody Maker (the piece is archived, if you’re interested, at the subscription-based library http://www.rocksbackpages.com).

At that point Morrison had been living in Northern California for a couple of years, and to the regular line-up of his excellent six-piece band he’d added two violins, viola and cello. Playing arrangements written by the keyboard player Jeff Labes, the string quartet added depth and texture to favourites such as “Into the Mystic” and “Listen to the Lion”. As the concert neared its end, they were featured at length on a magnificent version of “Caravan”, in a passage representing a wonderful moment of baroque and roll.

But I know exactly why my friend sent me the clip of that performance of “Caravan”. It was to remind me that this was the night we all fell in love with the blonde cellist.

When those who were at the Rainbow that night gather to reminisce, the name of Terry Adams invariably finds its way into the conversation, accompanied by swooning gestures. It’s like the face you glimpse through the window of a bus and never forget.

Along with Nate Rubin and Tim Kovatch (violins) and Nancy Ellis (viola), she was a member of the Oakland Symphony Orchestra. Forty years later she is still active in the Bay Area, playing in  musicals in San Francisco theatres and performing with the recording orchestra at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch film studio. She also runs something called the Nob Hill String Ensemble: “Whatever you’re planning — a wedding and reception, private party, or company convention — Terry will work with you personally to help create a mix of elegant classical, light-classical and popular music to help brighten your special event.” When Morrison put together the band to play Astral Weeks live in 2009, she and Nancy Ellis were recalled; they can be heard on the album recorded at the Hollywood Bowl concert.

That warm July night in 1973, anyway, Teressa “Terry” Adams took her place in rock and roll history. In the clip, you’ll see her responding to Van’s introduction with a smile that some of us swear we can still see hanging in the sky above Finsbury Park.

Apr 11

2 Comments

Session man

Hugh McCracken

Hugh McCracken, the great New York session guitarist who contributed to recordings by Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Laura Nyro, Aretha Franklin, the Monkees and countless others, including all four Beatles, died on March 28, aged 70. Most of the obituaries, including this one in the New York Times, carried the anecdote about John Lennon meeting McCracken for the first time at the “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” session in October 1971 and, on learning that he’d played on Paul McCartney’s Ram earlier that year, telling him: “You know that was just an audition to get to play with me.”

The quote came directly from an interview with McCracken himself, but he didn’t get it exactly right. What happened that evening at the Record Plant was that Lennon was introduced to the group of guitarists who, playing acoustic instruments, were going to lay down the basic track for the song, according to the formula required by Phil Spector. All but one of them were young and inexperienced.

He asked them for their names. “Chris.” “Stu.” “Teddy.” “Hugh.” Lennon turned to Yoko Ono and said, “Hey, Yoko, doesn’t Hugh look just like Ivan?” Yoko didn’t respond. “Hugh, you look just like a mate of mine from school. A cross between him and Paul.”

He was referring to Ivan Vaughan, the friend who played bass guitar with the Quarrymen and introduced Lennon to McCartney at Woolton village fete that famous July day in 1957. Vaughan had known Lennon since childhood and had gone to school with McCartney, with whom he shared a birthdate. He studied classics at university, became a teacher, and was later engaged by the Beatles to develop an education project on Apple’s behalf. He was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease in 1977 and died in 1993.

A little later, during a break, someone told Lennon about McCracken’s impressive record as a session man, including his contribution to McCartney’s second solo album a few months earlier.

“Oh,” Lennon responded. “So you were just auditioning on Ram, were you?”

If you think I’m splitting hairs here, you’re probably correct. But we might as well get the verbatim right for posterity’s benefit, if there’s going to be a posterity.

McCracken was a first-choice session man who could nevertheless often be found playing the less glamorous rhythm parts behind guitarists with bigger reputations. But if I had to pick a highlight from his career in the studio, it would probably be Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”, a track from Gaucho (1980), to which he contributes a startling intro and a discreet but beautifully shaped short solo.

* The photograph of McCracken is taken from http://www.jimmyvivino.com — the website of the guitarist who leads the house band on Conan O’Brien’s late-night chat show on TBS, the US cable channel.

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