If I’d known they were going to end up in a frame on an art gallery wall, I would have hung on to a few of the bags holding the albums I carried away from Dobell’s Jazz, Folk & Blues record shop in the 60s and 70s. In design terms, they were classics of their era: cool, clean-lined, high-contrast graphics for a cool, clean-lined, high-contrast time. And there they were on Tuesday evening at CHELSEA Space, a small gallery inside the Chelsea College of Art and Design, at the private view of an exhibition devoted to the history of Doug Dobell’s shops, in particular the one he ran at 77 Charing Cross Road.
A good crowd of hipsters turned up for the launch, including the photographer Val Wilmer, whose work lined one of the walls, the poet Hugo Williams, and lots of faces familiar from jazz clubs down the decades. Put together by Donald Smith, the gallery’s director of exhibitions, and Leon Parker of the British Record Shop Archive, the show features dozens of fascinating images, some of the old shop signs and fittings, posters and memorabilia, and even one of the original record players from the listening booths.
The premises at 77 Charing Cross Road had been opened by Dobell’s grandfather as an antiquarian bookshop in 1887. When Doug came out of the army at the end of the Second World War he asked his father if he could sell jazz 78s from a corner of the premises, and before long the discs had taken over from the second-hand books. He started a small record label, 77 Records, and everyone knows the story of how Bob Dylan recorded in the basement there with Richard Farina and Eric von Schmidt in January 1963 under the nom de disque of Blind Boy Grunt. In 1965 Doug took over the next-door premises, No 75, and turned it into a folk and blues department.
The shop survived until 1980, when the developers moved in: the entire west side of Charing Cross Road was demolished, to be replaced by a hideous piece of architecture housing fast-food joints and tourist souvenir shops. I cannot walk down it today without glancing across at the opposite side, where the original buildings survive along with some of the bookshops that gave the street its unique character, and cursing such wanton destruction. Eventually Dobell’s found a new home a couple of minutes away, in Tower Street, which lasted from 1981 until 1992, three years after Doug’s death.
My own experience of Dobell’s began in 1963, on a day trip to London, and it was not an entirely happy one. I was in search of two recent releases from members of the early-60s avant-garde: My Name is Albert Ayler (including an incomparable version of “Summertime”, which you can hear here) and Ken McIntyre’s Year of the Iron Sheep. The rather intimidating bearded man behind the counter was able to put his hands on both albums, but while taking the money from his schoolboy customer he couldn’t resist adding a word of appraisal: “McIntyre’s all right,” he said, “but that bloke Ayler can’t play at all.”
I’m afraid it coloured my view of the place a little, and in the years that followed I was more likely to be found a few minutes away buying records from Ray Smith at Collett’s, first in New Oxford Street and later at the junction of Shaftesbury Avenue and Monmouth Street. But the exhibition is highly enjoyable, conveying a real sense of time and place. I’ve still got that treasured copy of My Name is Albert Ayler, the object of such lofty scorn 50 years ago. I think I’ll play it now.
* The exhibition runs until May 18 at CHELSEA space, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1, just down the road from Tate Britain. There are talks on April 17 and May 15 and a special event on April 20, which is Record Store Day UK. Details: http://www.chelseaspace.org
By the time Brian Eno and I pitched up in New York to make a set of demos with Television in mid-December 1974, Richard Hell was on his way out of the band. I didn’t know that at the time, although it was apparent from his demeanour that he was already somewhat semi-detached from the other three. And perhaps I should have recognised the significance of the fact that none of the five songs we recorded during a three-day stay was written by Richard. They were all the work of Tom Verlaine, which meant no room for “Blank Generation” or “Love Comes in Spurts”, two of the Hell-composed songs that had been performed when I saw the band a couple of months earlier and would become, after Richard had moved on to the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids, anthems of the New Wave.
I suppose that if anyone is entitled to boast of having invented the punk movement of the late 1970s, it’s him. And he does make that claim, quietly but firmly, at various points throughout his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. Published in the US by Ecco, it tells the story of his life from his birth in 1949 up to the point at which he abandoned his career in music, in 1984. Since then Richard has become a novelist (Go Now, Hot and Cold, Godlike, etc), so he knows how to write and his book is an entertaining, informative and mostly unvarnished — although inevitably subjective — story of sex and drugs, garnished with a little rock and roll. Set mostly in the streets of the Lower East Side, its cast of characters includes Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, the poet-turned-agent Andrew Wylie, Malcolm McLaren, Seymour Stein, a number of drug dealers and many girlfriends, including the wife of the artist Claes Oldenburg, immortalised in a picture caption that sums up the book’s tone: “At the beginning, she was just a funny rich chick who liked my company and took good care of me and loved having sex.” And, of course, Tom Verlaine, with whom Richard ran away from school in Delaware (they were called Tom Miller and Richard Meyer then) and with whom he was reunited as they created their new identities in New York City in the late Sixties.
No band can exist for long with two leaders, which is how Television started. Especially not when their ambitions are so divergent, as Hell’s and Verlaine’s became. Both were poets, and they collaborated happily on a small poetry magazine during their early years in New York, but only one of them was really interested in music per se. When I talked to Verlaine, our conversations ranged from Booker T and the MGs (later he sent me a copy of their rare Christmas album that he’d found, still shrink-wrapped, in a Chicago thrift shop) to Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, and the way he played and wanted the band to sound reflected his obsessions. Hell was far more interested in what music could achieve on a social plane: not just as a way of getting girls into bed, although that was clearly the priority, but as a vehicle for what became the DIY philosophy of punk. His dandyish deployment of ripped and safety-pinned clothes and his spiky hair certainly made him a pioneer, and there is a certain disdain in his attitude to the way the English new wave appropriated his notions (although he admired McLaren and approved of the Sex Pistols). Not that Verlaine was unaware of the aesthetic dimension: no one ever brought the fugitive-poet look to rock and roll more effectively.
It was in 1972 that Verlaine found a second-hand Danelectro bass guitar for $50 and told Hell that he could teach him enough technique for the kind of music they were going to make together with a drummer, Billy Ficca, in a trio calling itself the Neon Boys. Verlaine himself was on his way to become an expert and highly original guitarist, and a couple of years later he found a fourth member, Richard Lloyd, to help him create the intricate two-guitar filigree that was in his head. Now they were called Television, a name chosen by Hell and approved by Verlaine (“Much later I noticed that ‘TV’ was his initials,” Hell notes drily).
That was the line-up when I was taken by my friends Richard and Lisa Robinson to see them at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre on East 4th Street (now the home of the New York Theatre Workshop) in October 1974. The newly formed Blondie opened the show, replacing the Ramones at short notice and performing a set that, beyond Debbie’s looks, betrayed little of their potential. Television’s set was tense, sometimes rickety, but spellbinding even when a song like the never-recorded ballad “Bluebirds” threatened to fall apart. The one that really made an impact had an unforgettable chorus: “I fell… (Did you feel low?) Not at all.. (Huh?) I fell… right into the arms… of Venus de Milo.” And Verlaine’s stage presence, with its sense of suppressed anguish, was as compelling as his laconic, sidelong delivery. Hell sang “Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts”, but I’m afraid he and his songs didn’t make much of an impression. I took away a poster for the band’s forthcoming appearances at Club 82, Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, with approving quotes from from David Bowie, Nick Ray, Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith, plus a list of the 30-odd songs in their repertoire scribbled by Hell in ballpoint pen on the reverse side.
I was running the A&R department at Island Records in London then, and looking for something new, preferably something that wasn’t wearing denim, and when I got home I made arrangements to return as soon as possible and make demos with Television. They were keen, and no other company was interested at the time. I contacted Eno, who readily agreed to help out at the sessions; his presence, I felt, might help to influence my bosses at Island, and he might even get his management company, EG, interested in taking them on.
The studio we used, Good Vibrations at 1440 Broadway, a 25-story office building a block down from Times Square, was not an obvious choice. I booked it because I’d been doing some work with Fania Records, the salsa label, whose records Island released in the UK, and that was where they recorded Ray Barretto, Johnny Pacheco and the rest of their stable, so I’d get a good rate and the use of an experienced engineer, Jon Fausty. And it was only going to be a demo session, so we didn’t really need Electric Lady or the Record Plant.
The five tracks we recorded over the course of two days, and mixed down on the third, have been endlessly bootlegged, often with inaccurate information attached. The tracks were “Prove It”, “Venus de Milo”, “Marquee Moon”, “Friction” and “Double Exposure” — the last of those being the only one that didn’t make it on to their debut album when they finally signed with Elektra two years later. The piano on “Marquee Moon” was played by Tom. Eno played no keyboards and did not sing on the tracks. And the location was not “Fairland Studios, Hollywood”.
Tom didn’t like the way things turned out, and later he blamed Eno. “The whole thing sounded like the Ventures,” he told Viv Goldman in a Sounds interview. “It sounded so bad. I kept on saying, why does it sound so bad? And he’d say, ‘Whaddya mean? It sounds pretty good to me.'” Tom might equally have blamed me or Fausty, but he and Eno didn’t get on, although there was no overt falling out. That still seems a shame. I didn’t realise at the time what a perfectionist Tom was, and that he wanted perfection even on his demos. But did we make those songs sound like the Ventures? I don’t think so. If you know the bootlegs, you judge.
Anyway, I took the tapes home with me and played them to my bosses, crossing my fingers that they’d get the point. Sadly, no one else was greatly impressed, and at the time Island’s success as a small independent label was based on the whole company getting enthusiastic about an artist or a band. In retrospect it would have been good to try and bring them to London, so that people could see them, but it might have been a year or two too early even for that. Tom was disappointed, I was disappointed, and gradually we lost touch. Before long he had squeezed Hell out of the band — they were also divided by their attitude to heroin — and brought in Fred Smith to play bass on their debut single, “Little Johnny Jewel”, released on a label set up by their manager/chief fan Terry Ork, and eventually on Marquee Moon, which deservedly became a classic.
Hell and Verlaine didn’t speak for a long time. “Tom was highly protected, well defended,” Richard writes in a shrewd but hardly impartial assessment of his erstwhile partner’s temperament. “There are good things and bad things about that. It gave him a certain kind of integrity — he wasn’t going to be blown around by fashion, he was discreet and reliable, but it made him really difficult to work with or be friends with. He was afraid of infection and robbery, so he lived in this high, remote, walled-in place, which enabled him to look down on everybody else… I respected his abilities and valued his friendship, but his coldness and egotism came more and more to the fore as he began to get more public attention. He was a lot easier to get along with before strangers started admiring him.”
Maybe Hell saw me as one of those strangers. I didn’t keep up with him because his side of the new wave didn’t interest me greatly, but I listen to everything Verlaine does in order to see if he’s still trying to get closer to the ideal version of what Hell calls his “crystal-clear crisp sweet-guitar suites”. In my view he came nearest to such perfection in Television’s 1992 reunion album, in great songs such as “Shane, She Wrote This”, “1880 or So”, “No Glamour for Willi” and “Call Mr Lee”. So here’s the promo video for “Call Mr Lee”, with wonderful lead work from Richard Lloyd:
and a TV performance of “1880 Or So”:
and, on the basis of equal time, here’s Hell with the Voidoids (including Robert Quine on guitar) in 1979 doing one of his contributions to the early Television repertoire, “Love Comes in Spurts”:
Finally, here’s “Blank Generation”, also filmed at CBGBs the same year, making me think that it’s a pretty good song, after all:
A new Boz Scaggs album is always a welcome arrival in this quarter. Whether it’s a collection of R&B warhorses, a set of jazz standards or — best of all — a clutch of new original songs, there’s a better than even chance that it will throw up an enduring personal favourite like “Loan Me a Dime” (from the first solo album he made after leaving the Steve Miller Band in 1969), “Runnin’ Blue” (from 1971’s Boz Scaggs and Band), “We Were Always Sweethearts” and “Near You” (Moments, also 1971), “Breakdown Dead Ahead” (Middle Man, 1980), the sublime “Sierra” (Some Change, 1994), “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ (But the Blues)” (Come On Home, 1997), and “King of El Paso” and “Thanks to You” (Dig, 2001).
I’ve interviewed him a couple of times, first in 1971, when he was spending time in London (and played a memorable gig at the old Country Club on Haverstock Hill with the fine band from his second album), and then in 1994, on a plane from San Francisco to Los Angeles, when Some Change had just come out, ending a long silence caused by his decision to stay at his Bay Area home in order to be close to his growing sons, following the end of his first marriage. I liked him a lot. He seemed to be a man who had the whole thing in perspective. By pacing his career carefully and not getting too carried away when “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle” turned him into a white-suited pop star in the late 1970s, and by holding on to his enthusiasm for music, he’s managed to maintain a consistency so impressive that there’s virtually no one of his generation whose releases I look forward to more, even though I know they’re not going to be pushing back any boundaries.
The new one is called Memphis, because that’s where it was recorded. In Willie Mitchell’s Royal Recording Studios, in fact, with a basic band of Scaggs himself and Ray Parker Jr on guitars, Willie Weeks on bass and Steve Jordan on drums, plus guests including Charles Hodges on organ, Spooner Oldham on various keyboards, Keb’ Mo’ and Eddie Willis on guitars, Charlie Musselwhite on harmonica, the crack horn section of Ben Cauley (trumpet), Jack Hale (trombone), Lannie McMillan (tenor) and Jim Horn (baritone), and a small string section arranged by Mitchell and Lester Snell.
Many of the songs will be familiar to fans of rock ‘n’ soul, among them Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia”, the Moments’ “Love on a Two Way Street”, Tyrone Davis’s “Can I Change My Mind”, Jimmy Reed’s ‘You Got Me Cryin'”, Al Green’s “So Good to Be Here” and — the biggest surprise — Steely Dan’s “Pearl of the Quarter”. They’re done in the way you’d expect from Boz, which is to say with taste and finesse and respect. Too much of all those qualities for some people, probably, but it doesn’t bother me, although I’m not as bowled over by his gentle version of “Corrina, Corrina” as others seem to be: I’m happy to stick with the reading of this lovely song included 50 years ago in The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “Rainy Night in Georgia”, “Can I Change My Mind” and Moon Martin’s “Cadillac Walk” are also a little on the underwhelming side. An immaculately sharp treatment of Willy DeVille’s “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl” (nothing to do with Patty and the Emblems’ girl-group classic of the same name) is the track I’m going to take away from this album, along with the opener, a slinky Scaggs original called “Gone Baby Gone” in which he taps into the real Memphis vibe. And that’ll do for me.
This beautiful painting, by Emma Matthews, forms the cover of Chris Petit’s new vinyl LP, Museum of Loneliness. It reminds me of the days when record companies had art directors who viewed the 12×12 space on the front of an album as an opportunity to do something interesting, creative, and complementary to the content of the package, which is what is happening here.
What is the Museum of Loneliness? In Petit’s words, it exists to “embark on a series of projects of infiltration” including audio projects that might feature “installations from the memory bank; non-radio exercises for radio and i-players. Sound montages for the electronic age, the audio equivalent to channel-hopping, sound quilts, alternative programming. Cubist radio. Post-DJ. Cut-ups. Audio junk. Electromagnetic slums. Music played in another room. Lonely songs for lonely places.”
There are no discernible songs, lonely or otherwise, on this album. On the first side Petit reads extracts from his fiction, including Robinson (1993), his debut novel; on the second he reads what is in effect the Museum’s manifesto. His voice is set into sound-beds compiled from a variety of sources — “last year’s traffic news… tinny surveillance recordings… dead weather reports… calls waiting… dial-up internet connections” — by Jess Chandler and Will Shutes of the Test Centre, the producers of this disc. There’s a short extract from it on this page; you’ll get the idea.
I first met Petit in the mid-1970s at Time Out, where he edited the film section. His career as a director started in 1979 with Radio On, a British road movie which made extensive and highly effective use of contemporaneous music (Berlin-era Bowie, Kraftwerk, Ian Dury, Robert Fripp, Wreckless Eric, etc). It was around that time that I sent him to Germany to write a long piece for the Melody Maker about what was happening in German music; he spoke to Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, to Frank Farian (the producer of Boney M), and to the producer/engineer Conny Plank, who gave him a memorable quote: “The future will be a little bit kitsch, but ice-cold.”
Some of that future can be discerned in Museum of Loneliness, which is released in an edition of 600 copies (www.test centre.org.uk). Petit will be appearing at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London on May 2, talking about his project and showing Asylum, one of the four films he has made with his pal Iain Sinclair, who will also be present.
There’s something about John Coltrane that makes obsessives of us all, from the people who set up a religion in his name 40 years ago (still flourishing as the St John Will.I.Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, and here is one of their icons) to fellow musicians: I remember visiting the great saxophonist Evan Parker’s house many years ago and looking enviously at the shelf containing what appeared to be the complete works, including a row of immaculate orange Impulse album spines.
Forty five years after his death, every time I walk into a record shop I still head to the Coltrane section in the hope that I’ll discover he’s done something new — and if that’s too much to ask, then maybe someone will have unearthed a previously unknown session or concert tape, like the fascinating 1960 audience recording from the Jazz Gallery in New York which made its appearance a couple of years ago. It featured a hitherto unheard (at least by me) prototype version of what would become Coltrane’s classic quartet, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass and Pete LaRoca on drums, the last two eventually to be replaced by Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones.
One day the well will run dry, and every note Coltrane played during his two decades of professional activity will be available in some form or other. But that may take a while, to judge from the entries in The John Coltrane Reference, an 800-page large-format soft back volume just published by Routledge in the UK. It will set you back around £40, but the depth of scholarship exhibited by the four authors — Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler and David Wild — and their editor, Lewis Porter, makes the outlay seem a bit of a bargain.
A sort of catalogue raisonee of his career, the book is divided into two halves. The first is a chronology, listing all known public appearances, with as many details of location and personnel as possible, sometimes enhanced by extracts from relevant newspaper and magazine articles. The second is a discography, which appears to list every known reissue: a formidable undertaking. The first section begins with his stint with the band of the trumpeter King Kolax in 1947 and ends with his final concert, at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom for the Left Bank Jazz Society in May 1967, two months before his death. The second opens in 1946, when Coltrane was still in the services, with an informal session recorded by a US Navy band on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and ends with an unreleased session for Impulse at Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio 10 days after the Baltimore date.
There is a section of photographs, some of them previously unknown to me, along with reproductions of early record labels (including 78s under the leadership of Dizzy Gillespie, Gay Crosse, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges) and concert and club advertisements. There is also a page of his original contract with Prestige Records, containing a reminder that musicians were once paid their royalties on only 90 per cent of the records sent out from the pressing plants, because it was assumed, in the days of brittle shellac, that one in 10 would be broken before the shipment reached the stores (an arrangement that, to the industry’s great discredit, was maintained well into the 1970s).
All this might seem like a version of stamp-collecting, were Coltrane’s legacy not so rich in meaning and beauty. What this apparently dry work of reference does is send the listener back to the music, hungry for more.
Since everybody else seems to have shared their memories of Television Centre, the home of most of the BBC’s visual output for the past half-century, which the corporation finally abandoned to the developers today, I might as well join in. It was from that distinctive building in Shepherds Bush that the first series of The Old Grey Whistle Test, which I presented, was broadcast live on Tuesday nights in 1971-72, and here is a photograph (by Robert Ellis) of Ornette Coleman being interviewed by me on the programme in 1972.
Ornette was not your typical OGWT guest. He was in London to record his symphonic work, Skies of America, at Abbey Road with the LSO, and I had to plead a bit with the producer, Mike Appleton, to get him on the show. It was one of my happiest moments of the series, along with the appearances of Curtis Mayfield and John Martyn, and the night Dr John came into the studio and, in the guise of Mac Rebennack, sat down at an upright piano and spent a mesmerising 10 minutes working his way through the history of New Orleans keyboard styles. And who would not have cherished the night Captain Beefheart arrived to present his paintings to the world? They were strikingly excellent, and gave an indication of the direction he would take when he re-adopted the identity of Don Van Vliet a few years later.
A lot of the series wasn’t so much fun for me, particularly some of interviews (notably those with a near-psychotic Jerry Lee Lewis, a sneery Mick Jagger and a sarky Randy Newman — each one no doubt a justified response to my indifferent interrogational technique). That’s why I called it quits at the end of the first series and returned to the typewriter. I thought the programme needed someone more extrovert to front it. Mike, however, chose to hand the baton to Whispering Bob, who was even quieter than me. It wasn’t for a couple of decades that Jools Holland and his producer Mark Cooper came along with Later, which in its early days was almost exactly the kind of programme I’d have liked the OGWT to be: musicians playing live, without many restrictions.
That first series was broadcast from a studio called Presentation B, which measured 32ft by 22ft and had been designed for reading the news. Somehow bands managed to crowd into it, along with a couple of big old 1950s-style cameras, while the production staff occupied a control room the size of a phone box. And Curtis Mayfield’s wonderful band turned their amps all the way down to 1 but managed to make their short set sound and feel like the best gig happening anywhere in the world that night.
Sometime last year I stopped at a service station halfway up the M1 and, while paying for my petrol, picked up a four-CD set of Northern Soul favourites. Mood and location were behind the impulse purchase. I needed cheering up, and I was close enough to Nottingham to be thinking fondly about 1960s nights at the Dungeon and the Beachcomber, when the sounds of Stax and Motown laid the foundations for what later transpired in the clubs of the north.
And then I realised what I was getting: 100 tracks for £9.99. In other words, 10p a track. And these were pieces — including the famous Wigan Casino “3 before 8” triptych of Dean Parrish’s “I’m On My Way”, Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By” and Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Long After Tonight Is All Over” — for which collectors parted with fortunes in their original 45rpm vinyl incarnations. It made me wonder about values, intrinsic and acquired. Although this was not a bootleg set, the chances of any of the surviving artists seeing even the tiniest fraction of my £9.99 seemed remote. And it also made me question whether you could possibly feel as strongly about something for which you’d paid 10p as I did when I paid six shillings and eight pence for my new copy of “Long After Tonight Is All Over” on the Stateside label back in 1965.
I’ve been thinking about that again recently since buying a couple of multi-disc sets devoted to jazz artists of the post-bop era on a label called Real Gone Jazz. Today’s purchase, for the princely sum of £6.99 at Soul Jazz Records in Soho, was of a four-CD set containing “seven classic albums” by George Russell (pictured above), the pianist, composer and bandleader who was partly responsible for guiding Miles Davis in the direction of modal jazz and Kind of Blue. There’s nothing misleading about Real Gone’s description of the contents of their package: besides being out of copyright, the seven albums — New York NY, Jazz in the Space Age, Stratusphunk, George Russell Sextet in Kansas City, Ezz-thetics, The Stratus Seekers and The Outer View — are indeed authentic classics, for which Russell’s British admirers were prepared to pay premium import prices on their first appearance between 1959 and 1962.
Russell leads a big band on the first two albums, with John Coltrane and Bill Evans among the sidemen. The remaining five titles are by his sextet (and, in one case, a septet), which I rank alongside the quartets of Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the Bill Evans-Scott LaFaro-Paul Motian trio and Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop among the most stimulating small groups of their era. As a composer, Russell took bebop in new and provocative directions: his tunes have strong outlines and interesting implications for improvisers. As a bandleader, he persuaded young musicians to produce their very best work: the trumpeters Al Kiger and Don Ellis, the trombonist David Baker and the saxophonists John Pierce, Dave Young and Paul Plummer are all outstanding on these sessions, with Eric Dolphy making an indelible mark as a guest on the Ezz-thetic date. The bassist Steve Swallow — before he took up the electric instrument — and the drummer Joe Hunt formed an alert and swinging rhythm section, one of the most effective of the time. And the startingly original 12-minute version of “You Are My Sunshine” on The Outer View, with Sheila Jordan taking the vocal, is a masterpiece by any standard.
It’s nothing short of amazing to be able to acquire such stuff for so minimal an outlay, a real gift to listeners who might just be setting off into the foothills of this music, even though they won’t be getting the benefit of the full recording information (not even the composer credits), the excellent sleeve notes by such sympathetic critics as Joe Goldberg and Martin Williams, or the beautiful sleeves commissioned by Riverside’s Orrin Keepnews from the gifted designer Ken Deardoff. I just hope that those acquainting themselves with these albums for the first time, all at once, come to value them as much as we did when we saved up for the expensive imports on the Riverside or US Decca labels, our purchase of the individual LPs, spaced over a period of months and years, giving us the chance not just to keep pace with the personal evolution of an outstanding musician but to absorb, memorise and cherish every single note.
It was during the sessions for John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” at New York’s Record Plant studio in October 1971 that Phil Spector showed me how he procured the characteristic string sound that hung like a silver mist over so many of his finest records. The secret, he said, was to send the signal to an echo chamber, and to use only the echo, not the primary signal, in the final mix. By robbing the strings of their attack, the trick lent his records, from the Paris Sisters onwards, an air of diaphanous romanticism. In some of them, too, it was used to counterpoint the ferocious pounding of a rhythm section that, by the mid-’60s, had grown to gargantuan proportions.
Nowhere was this more perfectly achieved than in the Ronettes’ “Born to Be Together”, to my mind the greatest of the recordings by the sisters Veronica and Estelle Bennett and their cousin Nedra Talley, even though it became the first of their Philles singles to fail to make the US Top 50 on its release in the summer of 1965. (In her autobiography, Ronnie Spector accuses Phil of failing to promote the group’s career because he did not want his wife-to-be to become too famous, although it seems just as likely that, after “Be My Baby”, “Baby I Love You”, “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up”, “Do I Love You” and “Walking in the Rain”, the public was growing a little weary of their distinctive sound.)
The song gives its name to the latest release in Ace Records’ invaluable Songwriter series: Born to Be Together: The Songs of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Remastered here with greater warmth and richness than versions on the earlier ABKCO or Sony anthologies of Ronettes recordings (although not, of course, with the bite of the original US vinyl 45), it remains one of Spector’s unacknowledged masterpieces, particularly notable for the way the producer and his arranger, Jack Nitzsche, withhold the drums — probably Hal Blaine and Earl Palmer in tandem, by the sound of it — through the verses before bringing them crashing in for the chorus. Above their hammering, the strings sound simply celestial. Listen, too, for the way Ronnie applies her dramatic vibrato to the final syllable of each line — and, in the case of the climactic appearance of the word “together”, to the second and fourth syllables. That’s proper singing.
For this album, a second helping of Mann/Weil compositions to follow 2009’s Glitter and Gold, the compiler Mick Patrick also plunders the Spector archives for the Crystals’s “Uptown”, the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling” and Dion’s “Make the Woman Love Me”. I’m particularly grateful for Doris Day’s “Love Him” (destined to become “Love Her” in the hands of the Walker Brothers), Ruby and the Romantics’ charming “We’ll Love Again”, Dusty Springfield’s “I Wanna Make You Happy” (although I marginally prefer Margaret Mandolph’s version of this lovely Titelman/Weil song) and Len Barry’s “You Baby”. And just as Glitter and Gold reintroduced me to the Vogues’s glorious “Magic Town”, so the second volume provides a reminder of how much I always liked Slade’s “Shape of Things to Come”, a dynamic slice of quasi-psychedelic youthquake proto-punk produced in 1970 by Chas Chandler before the Black Country quartet started writing their own material and getting famous.
The name of Karlheinz Stockhausen was a cool one to drop in the more advanced zones of rock and jazz at the end of the ’60s. Thanks to the British cellist and arranger Paul Buckmaster, the effect of the German composer’s thinking was even felt by Miles Davis. When Buckmaster introduced the trumpeter to works including Gruppen, for three orchestras, the electronic piece Telemusik, and Hymnen and Mixtur, which blended both approaches, the consequences could be heard in On the Corner, the 1972 album in which Miles (and his producer, Teo Macero) applied new ideas about structuring recorded music to the trumpeter’s rapidly evolving love of funk.
Stockhausen died in 2007, aged 79. Some of his pieces will be featured at the South Bank in London later this year as part of the festival titled The Rest is Noise, after Alex Ross’s best-selling history of classical music in the 20th century. And now comes a version of his Tierkreis, written in 1974-75, arranged for jazz sextet by the UK-based pianist Bruno Heinen and released on the Babel label.
Tierkreis is a 12-tone composition based on the signs of the zodiac: 12 separate movements, each based on its own tone row. It was originally written for a dozen musical boxes, as part of a theatre piece, which is probably why its individual melodies are uncharacteristically approachable (and have been sneered at as being childish). Stockhausen stipulated that it could be played by any instrument or combination of instruments, and there are recorded versions for solo piccolo, trumpet, double bass, violin, guitar and trombone, and many sizes and types of ensemble, from a duo of tenor voice and synthesiser to the Strasbourg percussion group and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It is, perhaps, the most popular single work to have issued from the famously knotty world of dodecaphony.
The rare attempts to bring jazz and serialism together have not always ended happily, although the 1964 album New Directions by the British composer David Mack (and featuring the flugelhornist Shake Keane) has its admirers. Bruno Heinen’s version of Tierkreis meets the challenge of serialism while remaining extremely approachable, not least because the voicings for trumpet (Fulvio Sigurta), tenor saxophone (Tom Challenger) and bass clarinet (James Allsopp), and the grooves supplied by Andrea di Biase’s bass and Jon Scott’s drums, are not a million miles away from the result of Herbie Hancock’s decision to pare away some of the shock elements of the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-’60s, of which he was a member, and produce the beguiling and much-imitated melodicism of the Maiden Voyage album.
If that makes it sound a bit bland and derivative, it’s neither of those things. Heinen, whose English mother, a violinist, and German father, a cellist, both worked with Stockhausen, and who now teaches at the Guildhall School of Music, sounds completely at ease with the challenge. He also has a handful of interesting soloists: Sigurta delivers his agile, unpredictable phrases with a bright, cornet-like tone, Scott shows himself capable of producing an unusually absorbing drum solo, and Allsopp could be the latest in a short line of bass clarinettists — Eric Dolphy, John Surman, Rudi Mahall — to give the instrument an authentic and original jazz voice.
It’s more than half a century since Gunther Schuller presided over the Third Stream movement, a short-lived attempt to bring jazz and classical music together in mutually fruitful collaboration, often derided despite successes with John Lewis’s “Three Little Feelings”, George Russell’s “All About Rosie” and Ornette Coleman’s Jazz Abstractions LP. But where frontal assault failed, stealth and individual initiative eventually succeeded: works like Russell’s subsequent Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature (written in 1968), Coleman’s symphonic Skies of America (1972), Wadada Leo Smith’s majestic Ten Freedom Summers (released last year) and this new version of Tierkreis show that the instinct was fundamentally sound.
Wandering amid the ruins of HMV’s Oxford Street store this week, browsing the half-empty CD racks in a jazz and blues section now relegated to the rear of the basement, I came across genuine treasure: a three-disc set on the Fantastic Voyage label titled Wailin’ Daddy: The Best of Maxwell Davis 1945-59. It had one of those big blue Xs on the cover to alert customers that here was an item marked down in what amounts to the chain’s fire sale: so for a tenner, I got myself 89 tracks of music from that era when jazz and R&B were almost indistinguishable from each other, and when Los Angeles’ Central Avenue must have seemed like heaven.
Maxwell Davis isn’t one of the better known musicians of his era, but he was a key figure. Born in Kansas in 1916, he arrived in LA as a 20-year-old saxophonist with eyes to make a name for himself on the local scene. Having switched from alto to tenor, he secured a job playing with and arranging for the Fletcher Henderson orchestra — until Henderson relocated to New York, where he became Benny Goodman’s arranger, and the band was no more.
It was after World War Two that Davis established his key credentials as a talent scout and organiser of recording sessions. His ability as an A&R man became highly valued by the heads of such local R&B-slanted labels as Aladdin, Modern, RPM and Specialty, not least because he was capable of hiring session musicians, providing them with head arrangements, and taking the tenor solos that were then almost obligatory, whether in raucous, bar-walking mode on an up-tempo number or in more subdued fashion on a ballad or a slow blues.
Dave Penny, the compiler and annotator of this exemplary collection (which was released a couple of years ago, and from which the photograph above is taken), points out that no less an authority than the lyricist and R&B fan Jerry Leiber once estimated that, between Davis’s arrival in LA and his death from a heart attack in 1970, he must have been responsible for a hundred hit records. Those we know about include such classics as Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love”, Joe Liggins’ “Pink Champagne” and Amos Milburn’s “Chicken Shack Boogie”, none of which appears on this anthology, presumably being too familiar to qualify for inclusion. Instead, much of the pleasure of Wailin’ Daddy resides in the chance to discover such comparative obscurities as La Melle Prince’s “Get High”, Crown Prince Waterford’s “Love Awhile” and Cordella De Milo’s “I Ain’t Gonna Hush”, although there are also tracks by Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Jimmy Witherspoon, Helen Humes, B.B. King and T-Bone Walker.
Davis made his career as a high-class back-room boy, but he certainly possessed the instrumental chops to have survived in straight-ahead jazz, had he so wished: tracks here with the young Charles Mingus, the boogie pianist Pete Johnson and others leave no doubt about that. On the first disc, which is devoted to singles released under his own name, there are two tracks on which he trades choruses with Marshall Royal, later to become famous as Count Basie’s stalwart lead altoist, and he suffers not at all by comparison.
But my favourites are four instrumental tracks recorded for Modern in 1949 with a hot little eight-piece band featuring Jake Porter (trumpet), Jack McVea (alto), Davis (tenor), Maurice Simon (baritone), one “A McCoy” (piano), Chuck Norris (guitar), Red Callender (bass) and Lee Young (drums): the highlights are the rolling “Boogie Cocktails”, a forerunner of James Brown’s “Night Train”, and “Belmont Special” and “Bristol Drive”, the greasiest of shuffles. There aren’t many places I’d rather be transported back to than a Central Avenue club on a hot night in the summer of ’49, listening to that lot holding forth for the assembled hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies.
If I’d known they were going to end up in a frame on an art gallery wall, I would have hung on to a few of the bags holding the albums I carried away from Dobell’s Jazz, Folk & Blues record shop in the 60s and 70s. In design terms, they were classics of their era: cool, clean-lined, high-contrast graphics for a cool, clean-lined, high-contrast time. And there they were on Tuesday evening at CHELSEA Space, a small gallery inside the Chelsea College of Art and Design, at the private view of an exhibition devoted to the history of Doug Dobell’s shops, in particular the one he ran at 77 Charing Cross Road.
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