Music Notes
By 
The big news in my music life is that I finally watched Jazz on a Summer’s Day, which somehow I had never seen before. It’s a fascinating film for a couple of reasons. While it’s a documentary about the 58 Newport Jazz Festival, it’s as much about the audience and watching them was at least as compelling as the performers. Bert Stern really knew how to film an audience. A few things that stood out–the sheer level of cigarette smoke (of course), the weird attempts of late 50s culture to dress casual (sweater and shorts!), the interracial relationships on display. It’s also, as such things are, a moment in time to consider where jazz was at a given moment.
Now, Newport Jazz has always been a conservative institution and only a couple of years after this, Charles Mingus and Max Roach launched a challenging festival to Newport because it was too pop and too white. And given I’d follow those guys to the end of the earth, I am more on their side in this debate, one which I still think resonates today. So you have to take this consideration when thinking about the lineup in 58. It’s pretty clear from the film, which has a lot of white artists and a lot of cabaret singing. Anita O’Day, who evidently was so strung out on heroin that she had no memories of the performance, is hardly someone who gets listened to much today, for instance. Good performance though for that much smack flowing through her. And then there’s the sad story of Big Maybelle, who was a rising star in 1958 and whose career just cratered almost immediately after, ending in drug abuse and early death from diabetes. Here, she’s a mid-lineup performer.
If the place of an artist in a lineup is indicative of where they stand in the music world at a given time, which it is usually is, the biggest shock here is that the festival started with Monk, who despite being amazing, was a marginal enough figure at this point to start the whole thing out at noon or whatever when it is like half full. Of course the performance is astounding. The other real fascinating thing about all of this is having Chuck Berry perform. At this point, Berry still believed he needed a band who knew his songs so he had an evening spot where he sounded pretty good, though not as good as some of the artists. For a generally conservative institution, bringing the star of that new rock and roll in was a bold choice. And a good one.
Meanwhile, Monk is followed by Sonny Stitt and Sal Salvador. Then you have Dinah Washington (all the vocals in this festival) who is fine, as is Gerry Mulligan. The closers were Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson. Her performance, ending the night was “Amazing Grace” as midnight hit, is legendary and for all the right reasons. Watching Armstrong left me with all the ambivalence I always feel about the man by the 1950s. His corny jokes and clear playing up to the mostly white crowd just doesn’t age well. The music of this period of his career sometimes ages well and sometimes is a bit whatever. No one can question his stardom or even why, but by 1958, he’s just not as interesting as Monk or Stitt or even Mulligan.
Anyway glad I finally saw the thing. The only real problem with the film is the silly sequences with the Yale jazz band guys driving around in their car doing goofy stuff. Total filler.
It was a very tough couple of weeks in the jazz world and there’s a bunch of deaths we need to discuss.
The death of Jaimie Branch affected a lot of people. It was just so sudden and shocking and she had so much to give to the world. It took some time for the Times to get a proper obituary up, but they did a very good job with it when it did come out. Sadly, Branch didn’t have that many recordings, but Pitchfork provided a good playlist. Official Friend of LGM Phil Freeman has a good remembrance of both Branch and Abdul Wadud, who I mentioned last time I did one of these. Freeman also mentions his upcoming book. Let’s do a podcast on it!
Joey DeFrancesco did not mean nearly as much to me, as I wasn’t much of a fan, but he was a hugely important organ player in modern jazz who also died far too soon.
Creed Taylor was yet another major jazz loss this week. Taylor actually founded Impulse! Records but left that before Coltrane made it perhaps the most important label in jazz for awhile, with its distinctive orange and black label designs. He was at Verve when he produced Getz/Gilberto, which may not be my favorite album of all time but is certainly a very important one. He’s most known for his 70s work at CTI, most of which really does not age well at all as this was the point when the fusion guys were going into trying to play disco and pop and a lot that is really crappy. But you can’t overstate his importance to jazz history.
Finally, jazz lost Sy Johnson, Mingus’ late era collaborator.
It makes sense that Jerry Allison, Buddy Holly’s drummer, would have died at the age of 82, as he did last week. What is harder to square with that is the fact that Buddy Holly has been dead for 63 years.
In better news, here’s one of those great Bandcamp guides, this time to Tyshawn Sorey, the fantastic jazz drummer. Somehow, for all the new music I hear and for all the attention I pay to jazz, I haven’t heard a single album listed there. Here’s another fascinating Bandcamp piece, on the label Another Timbre, the British modernist classical label and how it is pushing envelopes. Lot of music to hear!
On the Cincinnati punk scene. The Queen City represents!
The 60s pop singer coming under the influence of gurus rarely went well, with Brian Wilson being the most infamous example. I’d also note the surprisingly bad John McLaughlin/Carlos Santana duet album in which they both look like complete dorks on the cover mediating while Sri Chinmoy has a huge grin on his face between them.
Scott Kelly of Neurosis proves to be a complete abusive piece of shit. Band sucks too.
Interesting looking book on the jazz scene in Hanoi.
You can listen to the Fresh Air interview with Keith Richards from 2010.
The Country Music Hall of Fame, as a museum, is about 500 times better than the awful Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hey rockers, if you want to design a museum, you probably ought to think about the visitor experience instead of just throwing a bunch of money at an overrated superstar architect. Anyway, the County Hall is planning a new exhibit on the impact of the LA country-rock scene and I am looking forward to checking it out. I need some Dave Alvin and Los Lobos and Dwight in my museum.
I did not know that Robert Earl Keen is retiring from the road after 40 years. Bummer. Good for him though.
Greatest Albums lists usually are terrible. So when Rolling Stone decided to do a Top 100 country albums of all time, I was skeptical. But it’s better than you would think. You have to include some of the contemporary pop country. You just have to if you are thinking of country music as a commercial enterprise and you are a major music magazine. So you have to look past that, even if I wouldn’t put any of those albums within a country mile of the top 1,000, never mind top 100. And you can nitpick otherwise–Dolly’s Coat of Many Colors is a very good album but it ain’t the best country album of all time. Not including Ray Price’s Nightlife is just absolutely incorrect. But really, for as far as these lists go, it ain’t bad. And I am glad they didn’t just put some Hank compilation at #1, because the conventional wisdom that Hank has to be the best of all time is not helpful nor accurate.
Playlist for the last two weeks. It’s quite short compared to normal. Almost as soon as I got to Japan in May, the main external drive I use for my music went belly up and I was not able to revive it. This is a giant pain in the ass, as I have to go through every album, see which ones I had not actually saved somewhere else, figure out how to get them again, etc. Then I to go into my itunes and delete each song one at a time, since the new drive doesn’t sync with the old one and so you have two of each song, one of which is broken. Very time consuming to get this right. What this meant is that I mostly just put the music on shuffle while I worked on this. But here’s what I have listened to lately:
- Buddy Tabor, Abandoned Cars and Broken Hearts
- Bobby Bare, Cowboys and Daddys
- Miles Davis, Live in Europe 1967, disc 1
- Eliza Carthy, Angels and Cigarettes
- Johnny Paycheck, Someone To Give My Love To
- U2, Achtung Baby
- Bill Withers, Best of
- Townes Van Zandt, Rear View Mirror
- Adia Victoria, Silences
- Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin I
- Millie Jackson, Still Caught Up
- The Band, self-titled
- Bill Frisell, Quartet
- Charles Bradley, Victim of Love
- Sarah Jarosz, World on the Ground
- Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
- Margo Price, That’s How Rumors Get Started
- Neil Young, Harvest
- Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
- Anthony Braxton, Creative Music Orchestra 1976
- Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage
- Fontaines D.C., Skinty Fia
- Algiers, self-titled
- Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy, Superwolf
- Alejandro Escovedo, With These Hands
- Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Braver Newer World
- Hank Locklin, Please Help Me I’m Fallin’
- Rusty and Doug Kershaw, Louisiana Man
- Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
- Wussy, Attica
- The Paranoid Style, Rock and Roll Just Can’t Recall
- John Moreland, LP5
- John Coltrane, Coltrane Time (though this is a re-marketing of what was initially a Cecil Taylor album)
- Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out
- Richard Thompson, Amnesia
- George Jones & Tammy Wynette, Golden Ring
- Van Morrison, Saint Dominic’s Preview
- Flying Burrito Brothers, Farther Along
- Willie Nelson, Phases and Stages
- Rosalía, Motomami
- Indigo de Souza, Any Shape You Take
- Richard Thompson, Small Town Romance
- Hurray for the Riff Raff, Life on Earth
- Mount Moriah, How to Dance
- Kitty Wells and Red Foley, Golden Favorites
- Merle Haggard, It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad)
- Elizabeth Cook, Aftermath
- Marty Robbins, Saddle Tramp
Album Reviews:
Chelsea Williams, Beautiful & Strange
A pretty singer with a few good songs, but an album that is front-loaded with some insubstantial but alright work on the back half. Williams was a long-time busker in California before a record executive saw her and signed her to a label. It’s a cool story. But she also exists in a long-existed world of female singers in the broad-based Americana world being told to sing real pretty and not worry too too much about whether the songs pack a punch.
B–
Ghost, Impera
Went back to my attempt to understand metal here. This is alright. It has metal trappings, but is honestly much more hard rock with yearning, earnest lyrics and a voice that reminds me somewhat of John Darnielle. Also, the quasi-Satanism in the lyrics is just idiotic and childish. It’s not a bad package but overall it’s kind of a whatever one and that’s how I felt about this–listenable but not much reason to listen a second time.
C
Serpentwithfeet, Deacon
Cool religious/romance album from the underground R&B gospel singer Josiah Wise under this moniker. Mostly a happy album, darker overtones show up later on, which are necessary to cut the happiness and make it more human. This is strong material with a great combination of influences over the history of Black music in America. Besides, who doesn’t like a lyric such as: “Blessed is the man who gambles/ Blessed is the man who wears socks with his sandals.” There’s room for all of us evidently, even those with questionable fashion choices. The album a bit shorter than perhaps it could be, which is a rare complaint given how many albums are overstuffed with filler. But this is good.
A-
Eyevin Nonet, Thomas Chapin III: Unearthed
Thomas Chapin is an outsized figure in the free jazz community during my lifetime. The saxophonist died in 1998, just as I was really starting to explore this music with more intensity, at the very young age of 40. Leukemia did him in. That lost talent, and it’s interesting to be writing this the week of Jaimie Branch’s death, has made him a sort of larger than life character, one with plenty of compositions but also a huge “what if” factor to him. So every now and again, someone does a cover of one of his tunes or even a whole tribute album.
I was not familiar with Eyevin Nonet, which is a mostly French jazz band. It’s a big ensemble, 9 members deep (thus the “nonet”), and is mostly led by the drummer Ivan Bamford. Chapin’s widow gave Banford three of his unrecorded compositions and he arranged them for the band. Also, she gave him Chapin’s saxophone, which appears on the album. That’s more cool than as meaningful as the compositions, but yeah, it’s still cool. The work itself fits Chapin’s frequent musical changes well, as do the original pieces here. A lot happens here–this is no modern chamber music. This is some intense big group jazz. Good stuff.
The other musicians here are:
Yannick Anctil : Piano
James Annett : Alto
Stéphane Diamantakiou : Contrabass
Julie Houle : Tuba
Etienne Lebel : Trombone
Bertrand Margelidon : Trumpet
Marilène Provencher-Leduc : Flutes
Aurélien Tomasi : Saxophones
A-
Jack White, Entering Heaven Alive
Given that Meg White could barely drum, it’s kind of surprising that Jack White’s solo work has received so little attention. He’s now famous for being a star 15 to 20 years ago, like so many others in rock history. And he’s famous for being Jack White. But he still plugs away. That’s cool. But this is just….boring. One wouldn’t think his music would just become boring, but it has, with more strings than jagged guitar and rock star attitude. He’s not some great songwriter or anything, so the songs really have to have the attitude that he seems to have lost.
I also mentioned on Twitter that I thought this album was boring. Evidently, White (or whoever runs the account) took some exception to this and put something on his Instagram about it. I dunno, make better music dude.
C
Hater, Sincere
Shoegazey Swedish pop/rock. Being Swedes, they have songs such as “Bad Luck” where they sing “Feeling Low” over and over again; hard out there being in the world’s wealthiest nations. But hey, you could say the same thing about Bergman. In any case, this is a pretty strong album, if well within the described genre. Fun rocking stretch out in “Summer Turns to Heartburn,” which is a pretty good song title too.
B+
Yvridio, LaBradoodle
I pulled this off a Bandcamp “best punk of the month” release and I’m glad I did. Nice EP here from some very pissed off women. They sound pretty 90s, almost like a Bikini Kill album except for the Greek and Spanish lyrics on some of the songs. It’s post-punk but also catchy as hell. Curious to see what this band does going forward. “Stress” is the real memorable track here.
A-
Riddy Arman, Riddy Arman
There’s a lot of singer-songwriter stuff out there. A lot of it is very mediocre, a certain sector of it is respectable. The latter will get you a record deal if you know the right people or get lucky. But when you are doing singer-songwriter material, you have to be able to hold the entire thing with the lyrics. And not many really can.
The true mark of a craftsperson is the ability to actually hold that audience from the first note. Sometimes, rarely, those people become pretty well known, say a John Moreland or a Townes Van Zandt, not to mention a Dylan. But more often–take the great and much missed Alaskan songwriter Buddy Tabor–you live your entire life receiving almost no attention at all, despite having tons of talent. Even Butch Hancock has never been able to make a living off his music, at least to my knowledge. Here we have Riddy Arman, a woman who lives up in northwestern Montana. From the first moment of her debut album, she grabs and does not let go. An active ranch worker, she wrote this western-ranch based country album while off her duties. And it’s great. Great cowboy songs, great cowgirl songs too, plus a cover of Kris’ “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Not enough Kris covers these days, especially given you could barely make a country album in the 70s without one.
Luckily for her, a few of these songs have received some pretty fair attention; “To Late to Write a Love Song” has over 700,000 listens on Spotify and I’m sure she’s earned a solid cup of coffee for all that.
Finding an album like this is why I keep listening to new music.
A
Monophonics, Sage Motel
Very solid new piece of soul with a strong psychedelic atmosphere. Not a life changing album, but a good listen. Good retro stuff, very strong singer in Kelly Finnigan. Totally enjoyable.
B+
Damien Juardo, The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania
I’m not totally sure it takes a monster to hate Pennsylvania, having spent my fair share of time in the Keystone State. In any case, this is a solid album of fairly intense singer-songwriter pieces, a really honest set of songs about people determined to not let the bastards get them down, which can be so hard to do in this terrible twenty-first century world. Jurado has existed on the edge of my consciousness for a long time but I had never really explored his work. Glad I did, at least on this album. This kind of thing can be pretty boring in the hands of a second-rate songwriter or bad singer but Jurado covers all the bases here.
B+
Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Enigma
Often haunting compositions from the Icelandic composer, performed by the Spektral Quartet. The idea here is to bring the Icelandic landscape into the compositions, or so it seems. This is fascinating music that combines comfortable choral elements in with strange sounds. It’s only 28 minutes but can feel like longer because of the sheer intensity of the compositions and performances.
A-
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and other arts and none things politics.