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Posts tagged ‘Mavis Staples’

Nov 27

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Voces humanae

Amazing, isn’t it, that even in this Tower of Babel an individual human voice can be unmistakeable. Mavis Staples sounds like Mavis Staples. Boz Scaggs sounds like Boz Scaggs. No one else. And over the decades those voices become trusted friends. Each of them has a new album out that suggests, as they head towards the inevitable end of long careers (Mavis is 86, Boz is 81), that they could never outstay their welcome.

After albums with Ry Cooder, Jeff Tweedy and Ben Harper in the producer’s chair, it’s the turn of Brad Cook, whose credits include Bon Iver and Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, to supervise Mavis’s new album. He doesn’t let her down.

The song selection on Sad and Beautiful World is thoughtful and empathetic, starting with the conscious boogie-shuffle of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “Chicago” and proceeding through Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ “Hard Times”, Curtis Mayfield’s “We Got to Have Peace” and Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” to Eddie Hinton’s “Everybody Needs Love” via material less familiar to me. The most striking of those is Frank Ocean and James Ho’s “Godspeed”, set in a dense instrumental weave that summons all the best elements of Americana into one perfect arrangement.

There’s no showing off by the many fine players involved on the 10 tracks, but I love Derek Trucks’ beautiful slide guitar decorating “Hard Times” and the glinting pedal steel of Colin Croom on “A Satisfied Mind”, the gorgeous country song by Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes, whose many cover versions go back to 1954 and Mahalia Jackson — perhaps the exemplar Mavis had in mind. And to take us out, there’s a backing choir on “Everybody Needs Love” consisting of Bonnie Raitt, Patterson Hood, Kate Crutchfield and Nathaniel Rateliff. Everybody loves Mavis, don’t they?

For Detour, Boz Scaggs returns to the sort of American standards he investigated on But Beautiful in 2003 and Speak Low in 2008, although it sells a dummy straight away by opening with a night-club version of Allen Toussaint’s “It”s Raining” before settling into the likes of “Angel Eyes”, “The Very Thought of You” and “We’ll Be Together Again”. After the very fine arrangements by Gil Goldstein that helped make Speak Low such a success, here Scaggs favours the more stripped-back setting of a piano trio with the lightest touches of string arrangements here and there.

OK, you could say that his “Angel Eyes” and “Once I Loved” don’t match those of, say, Sinatra and Shirley Horn respectively, but if you like Scaggs’ voice as much as I do, you won’t be worried by that — and you’ll be delighted to hear him excavate “I’ll Be Long Gone”, a waltz-time song from his very first solo album back in 1969, refurbishing it with a deeper, richer, more controlled approach.

Sometimes these American Songbook projects work (Bob Dylan) and sometimes they don’t (Rod Stewart), their success largely dependent on what their significance is to the singers and how much real appreciation they have of the art of the men wrote the melodies and lyrics. I don’t think there’s much doubt on which side of the divide Boz Scaggs falls.

Jul 4

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Chapel of love

This September it will be 70 years since Roebuck Staples took his daughters Cleotha and Mavis and his son Pervis into a studio in Chicago where, accompanied by his guitar and the piano of Evelyn Gay, they made their first recordings. Mavis had just turned 14, but the unearthly power of her voice was already transfixing congregations in the local churches where they sang. Now the only survivor of the Staple Singers, she’ll turn 84 in a few days’ time, and this week she returned to London to fill the Union Chapel to capacity two nights in a row, still growling and roaring out her message of love, still a tireless soldier in the army of her Lord.

She’s a monument, and that’s all there is to it. To attempt to “review” her would be an insult. It’s enough to say that she and her two female singers and three-piece rhythm section delivered a well chosen repertoire with vigour and warmth to a clamorously admiring and affectionate response. She spoke of the Union Chapel, a Grade 1-listed nonconformist church built in 1870s and still doing work for the homeless, isolated and dispossessed, being “home”, and that’s how it felt.

The songs she performed included beautifully minimalist versions of Norah Jones’s “Friendship” and Ike Cargill’s “Are You Sure”, and trenchant readings of Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth”, Talking Heads’ “Slippery People”, Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That” and Dottie Peoples’ “Handwriting on the Wall”. And, most of all, “Respect Yourself”, a song by Luther Ingram and Mack Rice that the Staple Singers recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1971, and whose sentiments carry even greater force half a century later. If the song’s brand new day has yet to come, it’s not Mavis’s fault. As she once sang, she’ll never turn back.

Jul 16

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‘Summer of Soul’

So much has been written about the documentary based on unseen footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that you won’t really be needing another recommendation from me. But among all the performances assembled by the director, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, from the series of concerts in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park — now known as Marcus Garvey Park — during that summer 52 years ago, there are some things in particular that I wouldn’t want you to miss.

The gospel sequence, which begins with the profoundly thrilling sound of Dorothy Morrison’s deep contralto leading the massed Edwin Hawkins Singers on “Oh Happy Day”, stands as the foundation of the whole thing. Its climax comes when Mahalia Jackson, feeling unwell, invites Mavis Staples to start off “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”, which the younger woman does beautifully. But then Mahalia, evidently revived by what she has heard, comes forward to join Mavis — and you can sense the bedrock of Manhattan Island shaking to the majestic roar of their voices.

It’s like one generation handing the torch to another, and there’s quite a lot of that feeling throughout the film: the elaborate stage costumes of the Fifth Dimension and the straw-thin David Ruffin giving way to the hippie threads of Sly and the Family Stone being one example, the contrast between restrained mohair-suited blues of B. B. King and Nina Simone’s closing recital of a challenging poem by the Last Poets’ David Nelson being another. As someone says, this “was when the negro died and Black was born.” (Ruffin, by the way, had just left the Temptations and sings “My Girl” magnificently, wringing the neck of his extraordinary falsetto.)

The director uses standard documentary techniques — a strong gallery of talking heads and the deployment of newsreel footage — but there were times, particularly in the opening sequences, when I thought he’d been influenced by the video montages of Arthur Jafa, whose shows in London and Berlin I’ve written about. That’s a good way to go, although Thompson doesn’t overdo it. The stories parallel to the music are well chosen. The activist Denise Oliver-Velez talks about the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault gives a shattering description of her experience in 1961 as the first black female student to be enrolled at the University of Georgia; she went on to become the first black female journalist in the New York Times newsroom.

Of course the deepest impression is left by the knowledge that here are black artists performing to black audiences numbered in the tens of thousands, on their home turf — something on a different scale from the Apollo Theatre a few blocks away. (Harlem was thought to be dangerous territory for white people then, and there are very, very few non-black faces to be seen in these vast crowds.) Sly Stone was also a star at Woodstock that summer, but you can’t watch his “Everyday People” in Harlem without thinking that this spine-tingling performance has gained an extra dimension from the context. And you can see very clearly why Miles Davis (who is not in the film) wanted this audience rather than those who came to see him in European-style concert halls, expecting to hear “My Funny Valentine”.

I remembered, too, the times I’d seen Nina Simone at Ronnie Scott’s or the South Bank, and been irritated and even infuriated by the distance she’d chosen to open between herself and her all-white audiences, expressed in bouts of brusqueness and truculence generally ascribed to a diva’s temperament. To see her in a Harlem park, gently crooning the brand-new “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” to her people, so centred, so serenely beautiful in her Afrofuturist hair and robes and jewellery, made me feel ashamed of those responses from 30-odd years ago. Sure, I loved the music in Summer of Soul, but I also came out of the cinema into a warm London night with a lot to think about.

* Summer of Soul is in cinemas and on the Hulu streaming platform now. Here’s the trailer.

Dec 17

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Mavis Staples goes high

030913_mavisstaples_2685As soon as she made her first record with her family’s gospel-singing group in the early 1950s, Mavis Staples made it clear that she occupied a vocal and emotional register of her very own. At the age of 14, already she could invest the lines “Won’t be the water / But the fire next time” with an almighty dread. Today, at 78, she may have lost some of the range and raw power of her youth but she retains every ounce of the visceral impact. And in terms of its relevance to the state of the world, her new album, If All I Was Was Black, takes its place among the year’s most essential recordings.

It’s her third album with Jeff Tweedy, the leader of Wilco. Tweedy wrote all 10 songs, three of them in collaboration with Mavis, and plays in the small band assembled for the project. The songwriting is superbly sensitive and appropriate, using various forms of primal guitar-led R&B as settings for lyrics dealing with the racism that has refused to go away in the 50 years since the Staple Singers recorded “Freedom Highway” and played their part in the civil rights struggle.

“Little Bit”, structured on a wiry riff reminiscent of the early Magic Band, deals with the deaths of boys and young men at the hands of the police. “Who Told You That” is similarly stripped-back, putting Mavis and her backing singers firmly in the spotlight as they reject advice not to “rock the boat” and to “stop acting up”. Mavis is at her most urgent on “No Time For Crying”, which hits a relentless groove like a cross between Tinariwen’s desert blues and Otis Taylor’s one-chord chants. “We Go High” marries a famous phrase from Michelle Obama’s speech in support of Hillary Clinton — “When they go low, we go high” — to a gentle, soulful tune that could have come from Curtis Mayfield. “Try Harder” is another exhortation; fuelled by a couple of fuzz guitars and a crunching riff, it could have come from the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There” era. The album closes with the meditative “All Over Again”, in which the duet between Mavis and Tweedy’s finger-picked acoustic guitar reminds us that her dad, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, grew up on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta, listening to Charley Patton and Son House.

That’s one of the things I love about this deceptively simple-sounding album: in its search for a language with which to express its very immediate concerns, it makes connections with important traditions. Nourished by the deepest roots, it makes a direct and poignant address our own perplexing, disturbing time.

* The photograph of Mavis Staples is by Chris Strong.

Oct 21

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Willie and the women

Willie NelsonDid Willie Nelson ever encounter a female singer with whom he didn’t think he could bring off a passable duet? I very much doubt it. His new album, To All the Girls…, is full of successful new collaborations with Rosanne Cash, Alison Krauss, Dolly Parton, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, Shelby Lynne and a dozen others. It can’t fail, and it doesn’t.

My all-time favourite Nelson album is Stardust (1978), which I’d class with Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin and Frank Sinatra Sings For Only the Lonely among the most exalted recitals of the great American songbook. My second favourite is Across the Borderline (1993), in which he tackled standards of more recent vintage from the pens of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt and others with equal success; maybe its most striking track is Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up”, in which Willie and Sinead O’Connor sing the parts originally recorded by Gabriel and Kate Bush. Now Willie, who turned 80 in April, might just have presented me with a new candidate for third favourite.

If there’s nothing adventurous about To All the Girls…, that’s in no way to the new album’s discredit. Produced by Buddy Cannon, it’s a spare, unassuming collection of fine songs performed by terrific singers working in a sensitive environment. Willie’s voice, as ever, is the essence of understatement, as comfortable as a much-washed raw cotton shirt. The arrangements represent the essence of restraint and economy: a steel guitar here, a Hammond organ there, a hint of strings or harmonica, all subordinate to Willie’s unmistakeable gut-string guitar. It’s the pattern set by Booker T Jones on Stardust 35 years ago, and it can’t be beaten.

The highlights include Kris Kristofferson’s “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends” with Cash, Waylon Jennings’s “She Was No Good For Me” with Miranda Lambert, Bruce Springsteen’s “Dry Lightning” with Harris and the imperishable “Always on My Mind” (by Johnny Christopher, Mark James and Wayne Carson) with Carrie Underwood. Norah Jones does beautifully with Willie’s “Walkin'” (containing one of my favourite openings: “After carefully considering the whole situation / I stand with my back to the wall…”), Mavis Staples manoeuvres Nelson into a slightly funkier area on Bill Withers’ gorgeous “Grandma’s Hands”, and Paula Nelson has the good fortune to be featured on a lovely version of John Fogerty’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”. The surprise for me is Lily Meola, a young Hawaiian singer who sounds as  perfect partner as any on Willie’s “Will You Still Remember Mine”, a sultry last waltz on which a six-decade age gap is closed to nothing.

But the one I can’t get out of my head is “No Mas Amor”, another Willie song, on which he’s joined by the divine Krauss and a mariachi trumpet: there’s almost nothing to it, but it won’t go away. Just like the whole album, which is likely to remain close to the top of the pile for as long as there’s a pile to be close to the top of.

* The photograph of Willie Nelson is from the cover of To All the Girls… There’s a rather sweet seven-minute promo video here.

** An early version of this piece credited Willie as the writer of “Always on My Mind”. Thanks go to Phil Shaw for putting me straight.

Feb 27

Uncloudy day

Pop Staples 3Now I think about it, interviewing Roebuck “Pops” Staples 21 years ago was one of the great moments of my life. How could anyone not feel that way about shaking the hand of a man who, while growing up on a Mississippi plantation, had learnt to play guitar from listening to Charley Patton and Son House?

When Pops Staples and his wife Oceola joined the great northwards migration to Chicago in 1936, they took with them a two-year-old girl who was then their only child: Cleotha Staples, who died last week, aged 78 (here is Dave Laing’s very nice Guardian obituary). Later Cleotha, her brother Pervis and a younger sister, Mavis, would join their father in the Staple Singers, one of the all-time great gospel groups — and one which crossed over to the pop charts with remarkable success.

My favourite of their recordings is their first big hit, the majestic “Uncloudy Day”. Released on Vee-Jay in 1956, with a 15-year-old Mavis taking a spine-tingling solo chorus and only Roebuck’s shivering guitar in support of the singers, it supports Richard Thompson’s theory about the special quality of the vocal blend achieved by blood relatives:

http://youtu.be/i7V7OMw7tg8

And here, shortly after Pervis left to become a record producer and was replaced by a third sister, Yvonne, is an imperfect but nevertheless wonderful clip of them talking to Don Cornelius and performing their great Stax hit “Respect Yourself” on Soul Train in 1971: