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Feb 20

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Sweet home Chicago

A friend asked me today if I liked the Delta blues. Then Ted Gioia, the jazz and blues historian, tweeted a link to a story on chicagopatterns.com which reports that the house Muddy Waters lived in from 1954 to 1973 — in other words, during the years of his prime — is under threat. Appended to the story is a link to a video clip of Muddy and his band at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960. That famous gig was the source of his great live album, which an older boy brought to play at a lunchtime session of the school jazz society (yes, there were such things) one day in 1961. And that was how, as a 14-year-old, I first heard “I Got My Mojo Workin'”, sung by Muddy with James Cotton on mouth-harp, Otis Spann on piano, Pat Hare on guitar, Andrew Stevens on bass guitar, and left-handed Francis Clay on drums (note the bite out of the edge of his big ride cymbal). Here’s the link to the story. To me, they still look and sound exactly like a band should. Oh yes, I like the Delta blues, and I like what happened to it in Chicago later on, too.

Feb 19

Dave King on the line

An album that claims it was recorded “in a little church in Minnesota for 4 hours on March 13th 2012” is not, of course, guaranteed to be a work of genius. But that’s not a bad way of introducing yourself. And, as it turns out, Dave King’s I’ve Been Ringing You, the album in question, has been my favourite listening for the past few weeks.

King is the drummer with the Bad Plus, a piano trio whose intense, highly sophisticated work I sometimes find easier to admire than to enjoy (they have a new album, too, called Made Possible). But although I’ve Been Ringing You shares the instrumental format of his regular band, it travels to the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, revisiting a selection of the sort of Broadway standards that have formed the staple diet of piano trios for the past 70 years, from Bud Powell via Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans to Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, yet dealing with them in a completely different way.

This is quiet, careful, ruminative music, built on free interplay around the skeletons of such sublime tunes as Gordon Jenkins’s “Goodbye”, Cole Porter’s “So in Love” and Richard Rodgers’ “People Will Say We’re in Love”. There’s one jazz standard, Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”, and one original, the title track, which is wholly improvised and credited to all three players. If I say that Bill Carrothers, the pianist, outlines the themes while Billy Peterson, the double bassist, and King produce responses that don’t necessarily follow the conventional harmonic and rhythmic guidelines, then that doesn’t sound particularly interesting. But the sensitivity and lateral-thinking adventurousness with which they react to each other is truly exceptional: it’s one of the few records of its type that I could put on immediately after Bill Evans’s genre-redefining 1961 Village Vanguard recordings without a sensation of anti-climax. And if you want to know how far piano-trio music has travelled in 50 years, compare this approach to Rodgers’s “This Nearly Was Mine” with the great version from 1960 by Cecil Taylor, Buell Neidlinger and Dennis Charles (on The World of Cecil Taylor).

I can’t give you a link to any of the actual music from the album, which is on the Sunnyside label (www.sunnysiderecords.com), but here is an interview with http://www.bebopified, the Minneapolis-St Paul jazz website, in which King describes how the album came about, and here’s a recent interview from Modern Drummer magazine, in which he talks interestingly about his influences.

Feb 18

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The Shadow knew

I’ve never forgotten the first time I heard a record created by George “Shadow” Morton, one of the great visionaries of ’60s pop music, who died of cancer in Laguna Beach, California on Thursday, aged 71. It was the Shangri-Las’ “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”, released in 1964, and even to ears prepared by Phil Spector’s records with the Crystals and the Ronettes it seemed to set a new standard in pop records that aspired to be teenage mini-operas.

“Remember” came out on the then-new Red Bird label, owned by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in partnership with the music business hustler George Goldner and the songwriters Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Here’s how Leiber remembered Morton in a passage from Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography (Omnibus Press, 2009):  “I called him Shadow… a guy who appeared in the room without you ever realising that he ever walked in. And he was never there when you looked for him. Shadow was elusive. He was good looking and packed a self-invented mythology that intrigued me. For a guy from New York, he spoke with a strange Southern drawl. He had a sweet temperament and was physically as strong as a bull. As a producer, Shadow threw in everything but the kitchen sink. He created a cacophony, but one that made musical sense — and story sense, as well.”

Maybe the most striking story of all was the one told by the Shangri-Las’ Mary Weiss in 1966 in “Past, Present and Future”, their 11th single (and lovingly recreated a few years ago on Agnetha Faltskog’s album My Colouring Book, which I would need only the slightest encouragement to write about at greater length one day). It’s a piece of pop art as striking as anything Roy Lichtenstein ever produced.

Morton didn’t really train on, as they say in horse-racing circles, and effectively bowed out with the New York Dolls’s second album, Too Much Too Soon, in 1974. In between the Shangs and the Dolls, however, he produced the first Vanilla Fudge album, which has always seemed to me to be another pop-art classic: it’s the one in which they take a series of rock and soul classics — “Ticket to Ride”, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”, “Bang Bang”, “She’s Not There”, “Eleanor Rigby” etc — and slow them right down in order to extract maximum melodrama.

They were a Long Island band with roots in soul and R&B, like the Young Rascals, with whom Morton also did some advisory work, and in Mark Stein they had a devastatingly powerful singer/organist. I saw them at Nottingham University in 1967, the year the album was released, and they were simply perfect. They did the album, of course, but they added a couple more songs which, perversely, they speeded up: I forget the identity of one (it might have been “Gimme Some Lovin'”) but the other was definitely the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love”. It was a great, great gig — but without Morton’s help, they’d probably never have made it out of the Long Island bars.

There’s an excellent New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox here — it reveals that Morton was born in Richmond, Virginia, which explains the Southern drawl, and includes the information that he ended up designing golf clubs. Here is a link to a fine interview (in two parts) conducted by my old friend Lenny Kaye, published in the Melody Maker and now available via the essential http://www.rocksbackpages.com (you’ll need to register). It’s from 1974, when Morton was in the studio with the Dolls (and Lenny had yet to find fame with Patti Smith). “I knew the music business couldn’t exist without me,” he said.

Feb 13

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Bricklayers

It’s Reg Presley’s funeral this week. I didn’t know him in the ’60s, but I met him a few times in recent years at a biannual event called the Strummers, Thumpers and Scribblers Lunch (self-explanatory, really). At one of those functions I found myself out on the balcony of the restaurant, listening to a conversation between Reg and Bill Wyman: they were discussing in some detail the finer points of the building’s exterior brickwork. Reg had started as a brickie, and Bill’s dad had been one. Somehow I can’t imagine, in 30 or 40 years’ time, a similar conversation between a Radiohead and a Foal.

Feb 13

Bryan Ferry’s Jazz Age

It’s a pleasure to see Bryan Ferry’s The Jazz Age getting approving coverage from publications as diverse as the New York Times and Jazz Journal (where Dave Gelly raves about it in the current issue). When Bryan invited me to write the sleeve note, and told me that the project involved restyling old Roxy Music songs — “Do the Strand” and “Avalon” among them — in the idiom of 1920s jazz, I wasn’t entirely sure that this was a good idea. But then he sent me some MP3s and the more I listened to them, the more convinced I became that he and his musical director, Colin Good, had tried something very imaginative and succeeded admirably. Everybody who’s listened to it properly seems to love it. There was a launch party a few weeks ago, at which the band played and Bryan sang one number (which he doesn’t do on the record). It would be good to see them get a week’s residency at some suitable dive in the West End. Here’s a clip of them playing “The Only Face” live:

Feb 12

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The archaeology of ECM

ECM Haus der Kunst

A wall of shelves filled with master tapes might not be everyone’s idea of an artwork, but it was one of the things that caught my attention in Munich’s Haus der Kunst last weekend, as part of an exhibition titled ECM: A Cultural Archaeology. Here, on shelf after shelf, were boxes of two-inch recording tape carrying the labels of the studios in Ludwigsburg, Oslo, New York, Lugano and elsewhere in which Manfred Eicher, the founder of Editions of Contemporary Music, has recorded Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Arvo Pärt, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Jan Garbarek, Bill Frisell, and many others.

It seemed an appropriate installation since attention to the quality of recorded sound was one of the factors that enabled the Munich-based ECM, particularly in its earliest days, to stand out from the herd. Eicher wanted his records to sound beautiful, and he made every effort to get what he wanted. He wanted them to look good, too, and ECM’s artwork – particularly the wonderful graphic designs of Barbara Wojirsch – takes its proper place in the exhibition.

ECM Don CherryIt was nice to see a photograph of the late Don Cherry, who made many important albums with Eicher, on the poster advertising the show. Curated by Okwui Enwezor and Markus Müller, it opened in November and alongside the visual material and the sound installations it included several films related to the label and its artists. Among them were Theodor Kotulla’s See the Music (1971), featuring Eicher in his pre-ECM incarnation, playing bass with the alto saxophonist Marion Brown and the trumpeter Leo Smith; Meredith Monk’s haunting Ellis Island (1981); and Anri Sala’s striking Long Sorrow (2005), in which the alto saxophonist Jameel Moondoc plays while sitting on a window ledge on an upper floor of a Berlin apartment block.

The exhibition was accompanied by a series of concerts which ended on Saturday night with the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his New York Quartet, featuring David Virelles on piano, Thomas Morgan on double bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. This is the line-up that appears on Stanko’s new album, Wislawa, and although there were a few signs to indicate that they hadn’t played together since the recording last summer, there was also a great deal to enjoy.

I found myself listening closely to the playing of Morgan, who was introduced to Eicher by the late Paul Motian; they appeared together last year on the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi’s superlative trio album for ECM, Sunrise, one of Motian’s last recordings. Thirty-one years old but looking about half that, Morgan is unusual among modern bassists because his playing is modest and unassertive, containing none of the rhetorical gestures that most of his contemporaries use to inject drama into their solos – particularly since bass strings got lighter, the action of the instruments became more finger-friendly, and amplification improved. If Morgan’s improvisations sometimes give an impression of tentativeness, that’s merely because he’s weighing and measuring every note he plays.

It’s 43 years since the first ECM release – Mal Waldron’s Free at Last – landed without fanfare on my desk at the old Melody Maker office in Fleet Street. More than 1,000 albums later, no record company has done more to encourage and facilitate a fruitful expansion of jazz’s frontiers, helping to widen its audience as the music expands into an uncertain but exciting future.

The story of Eicher’s project was told in Sounds and Silence, a film made in 2009 by Peter Guyer and Norbert Wiedmer and also on view in the exhibition. It’s worth seeing the whole thing, but here’s a link to a very brief trailer, including snatches of Nik Bartsch and Arvo Pärt: http://bit.ly/3xvKP9

Feb 6

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The home of Johnny Cash

The other day I read somewhere that they’re going to turn Johnny Cash’s home into a Graceland-style museum. Here’s a picture I took from outside Cash’s front gate in Hendersonville one day in 1970, during a visit to Nashville.

Cash

The purpose of the trip was to interview the members of Area Code 615, the Nashville session musicians whose “Stone Fox Chase” later became the theme tune of a TV programme with which I was associated. I talked to the bass player, Norbert Putnam, and the drummer, Kenny Buttrey, at the then-new Quadrafonic Studios, which Putnam had started with the pianist David Briggs and the producer Elliot Mazer. Neil Young recorded “Heart of Gold” there. Here it is, at 1802 Grand Avenue.

Quadrophonic

I was shown round town by a friend of theirs, Troy Seals, a singer and songwriter who would later share the composing credit on Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away” with Mentor Williams. Troy is a distant cousin of Dan Seals (of England Dan and John Ford Coley) and Jim Seals (of Seals and Crofts). He never managed to match their fame as a singer, which is a shame; he gave me an acetate of his version of “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye” that puts him close to the class of Ronnie Milsap and Charlie Rich. But he’s had plenty of songs recorded by some of the big country stars, and he’s a member of the Nashville Hall of Fame, so I guess he’s done all right.
It was Troy who took me to shake the hand of Scotty Moore at Moore’s own studio and then drove me out to Hendersonville. There was no sign of Cash that day, so after I took a couple of pictures we drove back to town and he dropped me at the place where I was staying, Roger Miller’s King of the Road Motel. Here’s a picture of my room, too, with its ultra-modern (for 1970) decor.

Motel

I remember going down to the bar late one night and hearing a young man with a guitar singing Kris Kristofferson’s great “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down” as though he meant it. As John Sebastian had written a year or two earlier, “There’s thirteen hundred and fifty-two guitar pickers in Nashville / And they can pick more notes than the number of ants in a Tennessee ant hill.” I’ve often wondered what happened to that guy.

* This post has been corrected in the light of a reply from Troy Seals’ great-niece, who tells me that Troy is not the brother of Jim and Dan Seals, as I had believed, but their distant cousin.

Feb 6

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Aaron Neville: My True Story (Blue Note)

Back in 1985 the producer Joel Dorn took Aaron Neville into a New Orleans studio to record the five tracks that became a mini-album titled Orchid in the Storm. The chosen songs – and there were six of them, since two were conjoined in a medley – were all drawn from the classic repertoire of 1950s and early ’60s doo-wop and early R&B, giving the third of the four Neville brothers, who was born in 1941, a chance to revisit the sounds of his youth.
First issued on vinyl by A&M and repackaged as a CD by Rhino five years later, Orchid in the Storm remains an absolute beauty: the tremulous purity of Aaron’s voice is exposed to its very best advantage on tender treatments of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love”, the Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love”, the medley of Gene and Eunice’s “This Is My Story” and Robert and Johnny’s “We Belong Together”, and the Penguins’ “Earth Angel”. Dorn’s sparing use of modern instrumental textures – a Fender-Rhodes piano, a lightly flanged electric guitar – is beautifully judged, providing a platform over which that unearthly falsetto voice floats with wonderful grace.
The best part of two decades later, can Don Was and Keith Richards pull off the same trick? At the beginning of his eighth decade, does Aaron still have the vocal chops to do anything more than remind us of former glories? Like its predecessor, My True Story assembles a bunch of classic songs from the same time period, this time arranged and performed more or less in the style of the originals, with Richards playing rhythm guitar in a band that also includes Benmont Tench, a vital ingredient in these projects, on Hammond organ.
For me, it doesn’t have the magic of the earlier recording, perhaps partly because the material is more varied. the album begins with the brusque swing of “Money Honey” – the first of four songs associated with the Drifters — before switching to the tearstained doo-wop of the Jive Five’s “My True Story” (possibly my all-time favourite doo-wop song) and then to a version of “Ruby Baby” closer to Dion’s than to the Drifters’ original. That’s how it continues, and it’s all very nicely done, from the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman” through Little Anthony’s “Tears on My Pillow” and the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” to a lovely all-Drifters medley of “This Magic Moment” and “True Love”.
No, Aaron’s voice doesn’t quite soar as it once did. But he and the band and the material are more than good enough to make you feel that if you walked into a bar one night and this was what the house band sounded like, you might never want to leave.

Feb 6

Discovering Alexander Hawkins

For the past couple of years the pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins has been fêted as one of the most interesting young musicians on the London improvsed music scene. I first heard him playing very unorthodox Hammond organ in a free-jazz trio called Decoy, with the bass player John Edwards and the drummer Steve Noble, who occasionally appear with guest soloists. One particularly good night at the Café OTO with the veteran saxophonist Joe McPhee was released by the Bo’Weavil label, and I can recommend it despite the fact that I wrote the sleeve note.
A couple of weeks ago I went back to the same East London venue to hear Hawkins in a trio context, this time playing piano with the bassist Neil Charles and the drummer Tom Skinner. It was only their second gig together, and the rough edges were evident as they worked through a series of angular, unpredictable tunes, but it was also clear that, given time, they could develop something linking them to the special strand of piano-trio jazz associated with Herbie Nichols, Thelonious Monk, Elmo Hope and Andrew Hill (a couple of whose tunes they included).
Hawkins works with all kinds of units and he is back at the Café OTO twice in February: on the 24th in a trio with the bassist Guillaume Viltard and the former People Band percussionist Terry Day, and on the 26th with his own octet, featuring compositions for a line-up of brass, strings and woodwind. This is a good time to catch him.

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