Month: April 2015

The Swan Silvertones – The Swan Silvertones

The Swan Silvertones

The Swan Silvertones – The Swan Silvertones Vee-Jay LP 5003 (1959)

The Swan Silvertones had been around for over two decades before they released their first album of new material.  Their previous new recordings had been released as singles, first for King Records and then Specialty.  In the late 1950s, they switched to Vee-Jay Records, the label that released The Swan Silvertones.

The group’s first full-length album marked a new approach for the group.  Having already developed their own style by the end of their tenure at King and perfected their musical ideas at Specialty, they transitioned to a phase where they were now expanding upon the elements of their music that were already in place.  The Swan Silvertones really set the tone for all the albums the group would release through the 1960s, with an increased use of instrumental accompaniment and more ornate arrangements.  Often the use of instrumental accompanists went hand in hand with allowing more layers in the song arrangements.  There was also a more liberal use of space.  These trends combined to give everything a softer edge than the “hard gospel” recorded for Specialty.  The LP format also allowed them to record a lot of slower songs to break up the more familiar up-tempo numbers in the album sequencing.  This works well, and the group would only improve on those kinds of subtleties of the album format on subsequent releases.

Songs like “Mary Don’t You Weep” and “Jesus Remembers” demonstrate the full power of what The Swans were capable of in their Vee-Jay era.  Elsewhere on the album particularly in the middle, the results aren’t quite as exciting.  Some songs with a rather conventional doo-wop feel tend to come across as filler.  And at times the arrangements, as on the version of “How I Got Over” included here, feel a bit forced and claustrophobic.  The group’s ambitions seem to get ahead of themselves in piling too much into a single song.  This isn’t a condemnation of the album though.  In fact, there really isn’t a bad track here.

As a bit of trivia, note that some of the lyrics sung by Claude Jeter or possibly Paul Owens (“I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name”) from the opener “Mary Don’t You Weep” inspired Paul Simon to write “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.  Jeter later was a guest vocalist on one of Simon’s solo albums.

The Swan Silvertones – Since I Laid My Burdens Down

Since I Laid My Burdens Down

The Swan Silvertones – Since I Laid My Burdens Down Savoy MG 14468 (1978)

There a number of observations I can make about The Swan Silvertones’ material for the Savoy label from the late 1970s and early 1980s.  The group was in its autumn years, and this was most evident in the song arrangements.  Once a hallmark that placed the group above their peers, in the Savoy years the song arrangements tended to be more utilitarian.  The backing vocals use rather boilerplate harmonies that add almost no rhythmic embellishment.  This makes the backing vocals sound almost the same for every song, and the points of interest are almost never the backing vocals.  Louis Johnson was the only recognizable member from the group’s heyday, and he handled essentially all of the lead vocal duties.  That isn’t to say the songs are always dull.  They tend to be mellow, but are often heartfelt enough to be enjoyable.  The instrumental accompaniment is generally quite respectable, and often is the factor that makes certain songs stand out.  The instrumental performances may not innovate, but are skillful enough to match a typical 1970s soul outfit.  The last point I will make about the Swan Silvertones’ Savoy albums is that they tend to be quite short, typically including only eight rather compact songs — this particular album tops out at just over 25 minutes of music.  About half the material is also usually filler.

Regarding this album in particular, it probably falls somewhere between At the Cross and Day By Day in both style and quality.  Side one might be a little stronger than side two.  But the filler tends toward the tedious more often than not.  The new version of “Mary Don’t You Weep” here pales in comparison to the group’s classic version from the late 1950s, instead being vaguely comparable to the earlier re-make on Only Believe.  The bass line on “Trying to Reach Perfection” is lifted straight from “Chameleon” on Herbie Hancock‘s Head Hunters.  Still, the smooth and mellow “The Lord Will Make a Way” and “It’s Hell” are among the group’s best recordings of the late 70s, those and “Lord I Thank You” being probably the only reasons for fans to bother with the album.

Pharoah Sanders – Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun)

Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun)

Pharoah Sanders – Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun) Impulse! AS-9199 (1970)

If you liked Karma, you’ll probably like this too.  It melds bold African rhythms with free-form soloing like on Andrew Hill‘s Compulsion and Archie Shepp‘s The Magic of Ju-Ju, but Pharoah Sanders’ sound is altogether more upbeat.  The solos aren’t especially great by the standards of this set of performers.  But the most interesting aspect of this music is how accessible it remains throughout, making it a lot more palatable for those listeners skeptical of free jazz or anything remotely connected to the avant-garde.  That is no small achievement.

Dave Van Ronk With The Red Onion Jazz Band – In the Tradition

In the Tradition

Dave Van Ronk With The Red Onion Jazz Band – In the Tradition Folklore FL-14001 (1963)

Dave Van Ronk’s music is tedious.  It is so imposing and yet at the same time rather unfocused in its energies.  He was a below average singer and only a good (but not great) guitarist.  Although bits of this — the parts without the horns — seem to have had a big impact on the sound of early Tom Waits, Van Ronk kind of falls down compared to Waits.  My biggest gripe with Van Ronk is that he clearly had too high an opinion of himself.  He saw himself as a huge innovator and great talent, at least he thought that whatever he did have should have bestowed upon him great influence.  Looking back on his albums, it is hard to find anything that holds up to even the level of fair-to-middling.  He had his talents and his interests, but everybody does.  He makes his case that his talents and interests are (or should be) considered better, more influential, more important than what other people have, but this comes across as more self-serving than he lets on.  This is epitomized by his appearance in the Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, in which he displays a kind of “sour grapes” attitude, clearly still after all those years, thinking that he should have been bigger than Dylan, even as he feigns that he got over all that years ago.  His professed innovations in singing more gruffly and such were really just adaptations of afro-American music to white middle class settings, and his supposedly innovating guitar arrangements seem like a joke compared to what the American Primitive guitarists (John Fahey) were doing around the same time, and later.  But all that aside, Van Ronk has better stuff out there than In the Tradition.

Reds

Reds

Reds (1981)

Paramount Pictures

Director: Warren Beatty

Main Cast: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Edward Herrmann

Although there is frequently an accusation of “Hollywood Liberalism,” after the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, the political left had a fairly low profile in Hollywood post-WWII.  During the “New Hollywood” movement, beginning in the late 1960s, that changed, somewhat.  In the early 1980s, at the tail end of that movement, there were at least a couple of politically leftist epics — no less — that represented some of the last and best examples of what was possible for the political left working in conjunction with big business movie making (the other being Heaven’s Gate (1980)).

Reds is the biographical story of John “Jack” Reed (Warren Beatty), the journalist and author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), an account of the October (Bolshevik) Revolution in Russia, and his companion Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton).  Reed is the only American buried in Red Square in Moscow.  The film opens at the beginning of WWI.  One of the finest moments in the entire film comes in the first few scenes when Reed, a journalist just returned from the front in Europe, is asked to speak at a high society gathering about the real cause of the war.  He stands up and says, “Profit.”  He then immediately sits back down.  Could there be a clearer explanation in any number of words?  Interspersed with the historical dramatizations are documentary interviews with “witnesses,” people who knew Reed and Bryant long ago retelling anecdotes for Reds.  Some were friends, while others don’t have anything particularly kind to say.  Jack Nicholson portrays playwright Eugene O’Neill.  His misanthropic character has clearly been a model for plenty of other Hollywood actors in later films.

Many leftists despise Reds, often because it subordinates the October Revolution to a romantic melodrama.  This seems unfair.  If the romantic drama were not in the forefront, this would not be a Hollywood movie.  As it is, there are hardly any Hollywood films that paint authentic leftist revolutionary activity in such a positive light.  Of course, Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate overcomes all the difficulties with Reds‘ treatment of romantic melodrama (Kris Kristofferson ends the movie married and bored on a yacht) — though at the same time Cimino’s film was butchered to a condensed version that bombed, only to be resurrected with a director’s cut later on.

It is difficult to maintain a suitable pacing throughout an epic.  Reds does well in that regard, even if things slow a bit toward the end when during the midst of the post-revolution civil war the film, paradoxically, focuses on the powerlessness of the characters.  There are bits of Ten Days That Shook the World that might have added some levity, like when the only restaurant open after Reed investigates the storming of the Winter Palace is a vegetarian restaurant called “I Eat No One” with a picture of Leo Tolstoy in the front window.  But, such changes would, again, make this something other than a Hollywood romance film.

As it stands, Reds is one of Hollywood’s finest dramas of the early 1980s.  Beatty and Keaton are fantastic, Keaton as someone from a privileged background desperately striving to cultivate cultural capital in the artistic/journalistic world and Beatty as the slightly vain and adventurous but nonetheless immensely talented figure who made important contributions to the historical documentation of the October Revolution in the English language.

Robespierre on Property

“The first social law is therefore the one that guarantees all members of society the means to live; all others are subordinate to that one; property was only instituted and guaranteed to cement it.  It is in order to live that we have property in the first case. It is not true that property can ever be in opposition with men’s subsistence.

“The aliments necessary to man are as sacred as life itself.  Everything essential to conserve life is property common to the whole of society.  Only the surplus can be individual property and left subject to the enterprise of merchants.  Any mercantile speculation that I make at the cost of the life of my like is not a traffic, but brigandage and fratricide.”

Maximillien Robespierre “The Incorruptible”, December 2, 1792.

The Rolling Stones – Emotional Rescue

Emotional Rescue

The Rolling Stones – Emotional Rescue Rolling Stones Records CUN 39111 (1980)

Like Black and Blue, this is one of those Stones albums that lacks any certifiable “hits” but is nonetheless pretty decent all the way through, for the most part.  It’s rather light fare, vaguely bluesy rock with little undercurrents of disco, ska/reggae, and punk circulating throughout.  Probably not the first Stones album that comes to mind and yet this has to be near the top of the second tier in their catalog.  I do rather like “Let Me Go” and “Dance (Part 1).”  This one has grown on me through the years and it is one of the better later period Stones albums.  Oh, why not say it, “Let Me Go” deserves to be considered up their with the band’s best songs too.

Walt Mink – Bareback Ride

Bareback Ride

Walt Mink – Bareback Ride Caroline CAROL 1737-2 (1993)

Solid 90s alternative rock.  Reminiscent of Smashing Pumpkins, Matthew Sweet, and that sort of thing.  Good guitar.  But thing is, these kinds of records grew on trees back then.  Also, John Kimbrough‘s vocals — super nerdy like They Might Be Giants or The Dead Milkmen — just…don’t work.  It was really the lack of an effective vocalist that kept these guys an underground phenomenon.

Sufjan Stevens – Come on Feel the Illinoise

Come on Feel the Illinoise

Sufjan Stevens – Come on Feel the Illinoise Asthmatic Kitty AKR 014 (2005)

The darling of college radio and the American “indie” rock press, Sufjan Stevens’ Come On Feel the Illinoise  (often mistakenly identified as Illinois) is a sedative for the youngest national public radio demographic. That said, the album is even still a bit of a disappointment. It marks a significant downward slide from Stevens’ wonderful, if flawed, Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State. It’s also a lesser effort than his inconsistent but rewarding Seven Swans. The problem, in short, is that Stevens has become the Cole Porter of christian rock. Now, many might say that comparing someone to Cole Porter would be a complement. Understand that it is no complement here.

Cole Porter wrote finely crafted lyrics that wandered aimlessly and unwittingly amid the melodramatic. Porter’s sense of harmony was extremely limited, and he often dwelled on the same harmonies across countless songs. His only redeeming quality really was his blunt use of melody. He could, after all, write some memorable refrains from time to time. Delivering those, without any dressings, was about his only talent.

Sufjan Stevens fairs much the same. Come On Feel the Illinoise is his second entry into a purported series of albums inspired by and ostensibly about each state of the United States. Moving beyond the borders of his home state of Michigan, here he muses on historical persons and events in an effort to pull sentiments from isolated events. Mostly, these quaint attempts overplay the basic implausibility of constructing something genuine in set pieces built around historical tidbits that are the equivalents of popular newspaper headlines. The album also underplays any sense of unity in the subject matter, so that the songs feel like a journal entries documenting a loose tour of the most peripheral regions of the state of Illinois. The pessimism inherent in that approach is only addressed, if at all, through periodic invocations of christian dogma.

The songs tend to recycle ideas from Stevens’ previous albums. Familiar rhythms and harmonies return again and again. In those respects, Stevens works from a limited palate. Repeating himself has offered only slight improvements over his earlier work. This leaves his melodic sense to carry the album. Rather, it carries a few of the album’s songs. The magical “ Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step Mother!” is buoyed by soft and lively guitar and banjo phrases that gently sway and gently ascend. “The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders” also comes alive with a lively tempo. “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” adds lovely counterpoint to the vocals through recurrent string arrangements. Unfortunately, these are rarities. Most other songs are ultimately too ambitious for Steven’s songwriting skills.

Sufjan Stevens has talent. That much is clear from his previous albums. Yet when it comes to songwriting, and historical research, he has proven to be a bit of a philistine. He should get less of his history from the likes of children’s books and newspapers and more from Howard Zinn.

Come On Feel the Illinoise relies too much on an assumption that history offers an escape from reality. On its own merits, the album seems like just another “inoffensive” pop album. It’s a better pop album than most, sure, but not on the level of achievements of the greatest American pop songsmiths. Sufjan Stevens’ self-satisfied righteousness is holding him back from becoming a mature songwriter. It’s time for him to grow, musically.