The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Sweetheart of the Rodeo

The ByrdsSweetheart of the Rodeo Columbia CS 9670  (1968)


Here’s a very well crafted album, free from any identifiable faults, that most listeners will probably like.  I tend to agree with Lester Bangs, providing context in a two-part review of The StoogesFun House for CREEM Magazine, that The Byrds and their ilk were really an obvious and direct electrified extension of acoustic folk of the early 1960s, and their attempts at genre crossover, like this album of country/rock, really presented a straightforward combination of the styles that would have inevitably been attempted by somebody at some point.  They take proven elements from country and rock and set them side-by-side.  The vocal harmonies sound like typical smooth, airy and Anglo-centric Byrds stuff, and the country material is all authentic twang.  But even if the Byrds rarely take any real chances, you can’t really argue with the craftsmanship here.  Tons of great old tunes and covers of contemporary country, folk and R&B too.  If you are going to do the obvious, you can’t make any mistakes, and on that score The Byrds really deliver.

Frank Sinatra – The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952

The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952

Frank SinatraThe Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952 Legacy C4K 64681 (1995)


Few singers have established themselves the way Frank Sinatra did.  He is instantly recognizable.  Even people who don’t really listen to much music, and certainly not Sinatra, probably still know who he was. He got his start in the mid 1930s as a singer with big bands, and his solo career took off in the early 1940s.  But his later career, once he had crossed over into the movies, and became associated with Las Vegas and the “rat pack”, for a long while took precedence in the popular consciousness.  So The Best of the Columbia Years 1943-1952 is an opportunity to go back to Sinatra’s formative years.  These are the recordings that helped make Sinatra Sinatra, and set up everything that came later.

There is a nearly cloistered quality to this music, particularly in the earliest songs of this batch.  It is as if that music tries to take a moment in time and encase it in a hermetically sealed vial.  Sinatra and his primary conductor and sometimes arranger of this period Axel Stordahl made music that seems to fit a particular constellation of the period of WWII and the immediate post-war period.  The gentle orchestration with sedate rhythms, with the lightest possible syncopation, horns and strings that appear at the “proper” times in response to Sinatra’s vocal statements — it all contributes to a sense of an agreed desire for safety and security.  Although the song lyrics often deal with romance and associated heartbreak, the way that Sinatra and Stordahl deal with those themes is to, in a sense, belittle them.  Heartbreak and romantic loss are trivialized.  In the aftermath of a major war, these are treated as trifling concerns, or at least ones that can be taken in stride.  A dutiful resolve is all it takes to move on from such hurts, or so it would seem from these recordings.  “The Night We Call It a Day” is emblematic of the way these songs assign a proper place to emotion.

On the other hand, the earliest songs lie in the realm of simple pleasures.  There is never a sense of pretension that this was “great” music.  These are meant to be popular tunes, a far echo of “highbrow” European classical music, though at the same time also clearly indebted to a type of orchestrated pop music with quasi-operatic bel canto singing that was still popular two decades or so earlier.  It also is nearly indistinguishable from a great deal of film music of the black and white Hollywood era before the McCarthy hearings.  The orchestration rests on very familiar and recurrent styles.  Typical is a kind of cradling effect, with swooping swells of strings embellished with vibrato.  Hushed vocal choruses back Sinatra more frequently than in the later years too.  The effect is like a velvet-lined case for a luxurious piece of jewellery.  And, make no mistake, the jewel it cradles is Sinatra’s voice.

Sinatra is still young across the first two discs.  And he has talent to spare.  His young voice had a confident tone, yet without any sort of brute force bombast or acrobatics that typically accompany confidence.  Take for instance Paul Robeson, who was another of the biggest stars on the Columbia roster in the 1940s.  Robeson had a voice that seemed like it was summoned from primordial depths, bringing with it all the aspirations, pain, suffering and joy of human existence.  An anthropologist took a Robeson recording to a non-western tribal village where the chief was impressed, which is really about the tone of Robeson’s voice alone.  The young Sinatra, on the other hand, often came across as scrappy, even waif-like (just compare him on his rendition of a song strongly associated with Robeson: “Ol’ Man River”).  He seemed to succeed and earn his confidence through wit and ingenuity alone.  It was a practiced sort of skill, something learned.  He embodies the kind of Horatio Alger myth of self-determination.  But that’s too harsh.  Sinatra was a tremendously talented singer.  His greatest assets from the beginning were a purity of tone and an impeccable sense of rhythm.  In the earliest parts of his career, these things were deployed mostly for sentimental ballads.  In that setting, he builds dramatic tensions through timing.  But really, it does seem like the occasional tracks with more of a jazzy feel, almost the opposite of the sentimental ballads, are where Sinatra shines brightest.  Jazz syncopation gave Sinatra a broader canvas on which to work out his rhythmic palate.  That was what he emphasized throughout most of the next decade at Capitol Records.

The problem is that much of this music seeks too much enjoyment in artificially limited aspirations.  In this way, this music includes within its vision contradictions.  Sinatra is sort of the emblem for American exceptionalism.  While, no doubt, Sinatra was an exceptional performer, most of his early recordings projects a sense of limiting the field of view to the point that answers appear just a little too easily.

Into the third disc, there are more showtunes and movie musical fare.  They are especially prevalent on disc four.  These songs have aged the worst.  They neither conjure a bygone era nor really contain the power to impress.

It is with the later recordings of this set — aside from the showtunes — that Sinatra seems to find his best voice.  Even with sub-par material like “American Beauty Rose,” with hackneyed New Orleans second-line brass band flourishes, the recording captures Sinatra’s impeccable sense of vocal timing and his clear-eyed delivery.  He even characteristically summons his deep, booming Jersey accent on the “O” sounds (like in the word “choose”).  It was a vocal affectation nearly as iconic as Buddy Holly‘s vocal hiccup a few years later when rock and roll broke.  “Deep Night”, recorded with Harry James‘ orchestra, with an arrangement by Ray Coniff, points more to what Sinatra would do through the rest of the 1950s.  It is more adult.  There is a jazzy feel, but it doesn’t swing hard.  This is an early peek at the Sinatra of Las Vegas.  It conjures the image of him with a drink on the rocks in his hand, surrounded by “The Clan” (the group’s own name for the Rat Pack).  These recordings lack the depth and pathos of Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely (1958).  And nothing swings as hard and easy at his later collaborations with Nelson Riddle: Swing Easy! (1954), Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! (1956), A Swingin’ Affair! (1957), etc.  But the cocksure swagger of the older Sinatra starts to be felt a little more, particularly when his renowned sense of timing blends seamlessly with a cutting sense of dynamics.  It wasn’t just that Sinatra had great rhythmic timing.  He also incorporated dynamics — going between loud and quiet volumes — to soften and smooth his delivery.  This was the secret for swinging hard and easy at the same time.  It was the signature of Sinatra’s singing at its best and most recognizable.  And in the later years he used it in a far more condensed and potent manner.  The earliest songs here find him using it on long, drawn out notes (legato), when he holds a note for a long time (sostenuto).  In the later songs he is using dynamics within short phrases, with dynamic changes happening quickly with each syllable, even without legato phrasing.

In the end, this patchwork collection of Sinatra’s first decade on his own as a recording star is decidedly uneven.  It lacks the kind of memorable songs he would record in the following decade.  Instead, much of this moves at an almost glacial pace to new styles, with handfuls of songs sounding almost indistinguishable from one another at times.  The average listener will find this four-disc collection to be very much overkill.  A far better distillation of only the best material is found on the singe-disc collection Sings His Greatest Hits (1997).

Willie Nelson – To Lefty From Willie

To Lefty From Willie

Willie NelsonTo Lefty From Willie Columbia KC 34695 (1977)


For those who don’t know the story, Willie Nelson got his first big break in Nashville in the early 1960s as a songwriter, penning big hits for Patsy Cline, Faron Young, etc.  He also maintained a career as a solo performer, but with less commercial success.  Labels like RCA signed him more to gain access to his songwriting than for his performing abilities.  After some period of years, he developed associations with New York based record labels, relocated to the Austin, Texas area, and brought together the conservative, redneck country music crowd with the liberal, hippie rock crowd.  He struck gold with The Red Headed Stranger, his first album for Columbia records, in 1975.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Willie’s idea for a follow-up to the smash success of The Red Headed Stranger was to record a tribute album to honky-tonk legend of the early 1950s Lefty Frizzell, To Lefty From Willie.  The record executives in New York City didn’t agree with the choice, and shelved the album.  Willie went back to the studio and recorded the excellent — if under-appreciated — The Sound in Your Mind, which was released in 1976 as the proper follow-up to The Red Headed Stranger.  Columbia also released a gospel album in late 1976 recorded way back in 1973 for Atlantic Records, The Troublemaker.  After editing out a squeaky drum pedal from the recordings, Columbia eventually released To Lefty From Willie in 1977.  Willie sings alright, if not at his best, and his sister Bobbie provides some excellent honky-tonk piano, but it’s hard not to see that the New York executives had a point in balking at the album.  It’s a fairly low energy outing, held back by unambitious performances by the backing band, especially the persistently cartoonish bass of Bee Spears.  This was recorded with Willie’s touring band, who sometimes lacked both musical muscle and finesse.  It’s a fine enough album, in the end, but hardly the best Willie could do at this point in his career.  Choice track: “Railroad Lady.”

Herbie Hancock – Crossings

Crossings

Herbie HancockCrossings Warner Bros. BS 2617 (1972)


Herbie Hancock’s brief tenure on Warner Bros. Records was somewhat akin to Thelonious Monk‘s tenure on Prestige Records.  Both tend to be relatively overlooked periods tucked in between more widely known recording periods.  For Monk, his early recordings for Blue Note Records have become as highly regarded as any recordings of the 20th Century, and later albums for Riverside are fan favorites.  Yet that middle Prestige period was a fertile one that debuted many classics of the Monk songbook.  For Hancock, his early recordings for Blue Note Records have long been the subject of the mainstream jazz hype machine, with a couple of those early albums — like Maiden Voyage — frequently mentioned alongside works as well-known as Kind of Blue, and then his decades-long association with Columbia Records producing some of the best-selling jazz of all time with Head Hunters and the like.  But the middle period on Warner Bros. Records was when he radically changed his musical vision.  He reached out into fusion territory.  While Hancock’s vision wasn’t unprecedented, drawing heavily from pioneering work by Miles Davis, it was distinct.  And his early fusion recordings displayed more genuine experimentation and creativity than the near-pandering qualities of some of his later fusion efforts.

Crossings was recorded with Hancock’s Mwandishi sextet, which also recorded Mwandishi and Sextant.  Compared to its predecessor, Mwandishi, the musical approach of Crossings is quite similar.  Though if anything the band goes out a little further here.  The word most often applied to this music is “atmospheric”, and there is probably no question about that description.  Rock-oriented showiness is nowhere to be found.  What distinguishes this music from most other fusion of the day are its long-form conception and its slow, smoldering tempos.  The balance of collective and individual improvisation was key to the success of the album’s mellow yet searching tone.  An enjoyable listen, and surely among Hancock’s very best recordings, even if Sextant proves to be still better.

De La Soul – De La Soul Is Dead

De La Soul Is Dead

De La SoulDe La Soul Is Dead Tommy Boy TBCD 1029 (1991)


De La Soul is lionized as one of the great hip-hop groups.  Their debut is acknowledged as a classic, and their sophomore effort De La Soul is Deal is occasionally mentioned as being as good or great an achievement, even if as a dark horse.  What I hear on this evidence is something entirely different.  I came to this while reading Thorstein Veblen‘s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).  Taking Veblen’s theory as a starting point — and if you’ve ever read him you know it becomes hard not to! — what I hear on De La Soul is Deal is an exercise in demonstrating affluence.  This is a group that spends more time crafting in-jokes and distracting skits than they do forging proper songs.  It becomes clear that much of what they are doing is posturing.  In some eyes it was a refreshingly different type of posturing.  Nerds in hip-hop!  But this was also a middle class type of posturing, which reflected the decadence of having time to goof off and make dumb jokes rather than toiling away at activities that provide sustenance.  In Veblen’s terms, it’s conspicuous waste.  I listen to this and can’t help feeling impatient that they seem to avoid getting to the real music.  They do get there, eventually.  But I’m left with what seems like a lot less than an album’s worth of artistic craft.  Listening to this along with fellow Native Tongues group Jungle Brothers‘ finest achievement (Done By the Forces of Nature), this pales.

Willie Nelson – Red Headed Stranger

Red Headed Stranger

Willie NelsonRed Headed Stranger Columbia KC 33482 (1975)


After garnering his first taste of real success as a recording artist by switching to Atlantic Records in the early 1970s, Atlantic promptly closed up its fledgling country division.  This left Willie to find a new label.  He landed at none other than Columbia, home of Johnny Cash.  As Columbia pondered what to do with Nelson, he showed up with a complete album he recorded off on his own, Red Headed Stranger.  His third wife Connie had suggested he record a song he sung to his children and that he had often performed when he worked as a radio DJ prior to any success in the music business.  From that beginning, he crafted a loose concept album around the story of an Old West preacher who kills his wife and a romantic rival.  Willie had garnered his recent success by fusing elements of rock and soul music, and elaborate suites of music.  Red Headed Stranger was something else entirely.  Stripped down to just the barest accompaniment, this was music that reached back more than looked forward.  Most of the music dwells in the same rural, time-worn songwriting of The Carter Family, that has the feel of being written, sung, rewritten, sung again, and lived in for years.  These are songs about dealing with the vagarities of life and its inevitable tribulations.  There are touches of western swing added at times.  Sometimes this reaches even further back, as with “O’er the Waves” (“Sobre las Olas”) the famous Mexican composition from the 19th Century.  There are some slower, romanticized passages too, that give this a modern sheen.  For the most part, though, this album could well have been recorded in the early 1930s.  This is hard country.  But it’s also the best kind of country music: plain and from the heart.  This is the album that made Willie a superstar and a household name.

Flipper – Public Flipper Limited: Live 1980-1985

Public Flipper Limited: Live 1980-1985

FlipperPublic Flipper Limited: Live 1980-1985 Subterranean SUB 53 (1986)


Flipper was one of the great rock bands of the 1980s.  Often times the alternative and grunge rock scenes of the 1990s are described as a group of young people rejecting a bourgeois lifestyle.  This is most pronounced when young adults choose to be downwardly mobile from a middle or upper-middle class lifestyle to a lower-middle or lower class lifestyle when options to be more upwardly-mobile were available — this explains some hostility to “hipsters” (doing the same) by those who aspire to what the hipsters reject.  Anyway, Flipper was there first, of course.  There is definitely something aggressive about Flipper’s quite explicit indifference to all expectations.  “Ambition” is like a foreign word.  But this all has a point.  Flipper present a very political approach to life that is an alternative but equally “violent” tactic as Mahatma Gandhi‘s civil disobedience.  Some explanation is due.  Modern thinkers can call Gandhi “violent” in the sense that he challenged the “structural violence” of a society that was premised on exploitation and disenfranchisement of many, in other words a social structure that accepted and indeed promoted as a base foundation the conditions of sweatshops, extreme poverty and other deplorable conditions.  Flipper’s aesthetic built upon the rejection of that “structural violence”.  What made them great though, was that they built up a whole new vocabulary of sleazy, indifferent, non-cooperation that didn’t rely on the regular features of pop and rock.  When on “Life” they sing repeatedly, “Life is the only thing worth living for,” it recalls Motörhead absurdly singing, “Killed by death,” but more daringly turns new age positive thinking into a kind of empty, meaningless slogan.  Awesome.  Major record labels, like all big businesses in their own ways, are dependent upon the creative talent of musicians to exploit it to turn a profit.  By expressing no viable “talent” in the conventional sense, Flipper could exist outside of that system.  Yet, they were very talented, because you’d have to be to come up with a song like “Sex Bomb,” and because there is such a creative consistency in what they did through the 1980s.  But it was a talent that was useless to the big music industry.  The slogan on the band’s touring van was “Flipper suffer for their music – now it’s your turn.”   Most of the world couldn’t image why anyone would subject themselves to this music.  That’s only because of a lack of imagination of their part though.  So, of course, Public Flipper Limited is an inspiration to the rest of us.

Iggy Pop – Préliminaires

Préliminaires

Iggy PopPréliminaires EMI 50999 6985782 9 (2009)


Iggy Pop has had a fascinating solo career.  He burst on to the scene in the late 1970s as a shell-shocked hard rock survivor who crashed the disco-era party with his unique brand of ironic electro-pop/rock.  From there, he veered all over the place, from more hard rock to palatable pop/rock but always gravitating toward rock music of some sort.  As he got older, his act just seemed more and more absurdist.  Here was a guy well into middle age still thumping away with the kind of music rarely associated with anyone over thirty.  Even at his worst moments, there was always intrigue in the sheer train-wreck quality of the spectacle of it all.  He just kept on being the same Iggy Pop…a character that fit Hunter S. Thompson‘s description of the “Brown Buffalo” Oscar Zeta Acosta in a memoir published in Rolling Stone Dec. 15, 1977: “one of God’s own prototypes–a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.”  In that one could laugh at his music being used in ads to sell cars and oceanliner cruises.  Something did change later on.  Almost, at least.  Iggy released the disastrous Avenue B in the late 1990s, which was leaden with despairing lyrics and hinted at some kind of bongo-laden electro-pop that didn’t rock very much.  But it looked like just a blip on the radar as he moved back to familiar hard rock with his next recordings (even if hindsight reveals at least potential in the likes of “I Felt the Luxury”).

Fast forward to 2009 (right past a horrifying reunion of The Stooges).  Iggy releases Préliminaires.  Just a few seconds into the album it is clear something is very different.  The opening “Les feuilles mortes” could pass for Leonard Cohen.  Being sung in French, comparisons to Serge Gainsbourg wouldn’t be out of place either.  The rest of the album goes off in other directions, even to spoken word (like Avenue B).  It largely stays away from rock, moving instead within the ambit of more adult-oriented pop, blues and the like.  This raises the question: why now?  It would seem that if he was going to commit to a new and different direction, he would have done it long ago.  Iggy never had a voice that could be called impressive.  Here he goes about as far as his abilities permit.  But he’s very clearly trying to push himself.  And, surprisingly enough, it all works.  Then again, maybe that’s not so surprising considering that this is just another example of Iggy being a creature of his own making, and when he does something that flies in the face of reason and common sense he’s completely in his element.  What differs most of all from his earlier failed effort at something new is that he goes for it all the way here.  He just dives in.  He also focuses on what he likes in life, instead of wallowing in hurt feelings, and he runs with musical ideas he’s probably harbored an interest in for a long time.  So no wonder this may just be a late-career classic.

Wayne Shorter – Speak No Evil

Speak No Evil

Wayne ShorterSpeak No Evil Blue Note BST 84194 (1966)


You don’t have to know thing one about jazz to enjoy Speak No Evil. As party jazz or a stepping stone of mid-sixties post-bop (that leans ever so slightly towards the avant-garde), this album seems to appeal to everyone who hears it.

Wayne Shorter made a name for himself as a brilliant songwriter. Speak No Evil even features one of his most beloved standards, “Infant Eyes,” which is the song that often brings people to the album. The mistake some make is to only think of Shorter as a songwriter. His sax style was his own, with a smooth melodic style like Freddie Hubbard only much mellower. In 6/4 on “Wild Flower,” Shorter’s lines create graceful motions. Hubbard and Shorter mix vibrato perfectly with the dance-like melody.

The horns sound bright even though, when you get down to it, the harmonies are unusual. Take the swinging 32-bar number “Witch Hunt” or the robust blues ballad “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum.” Shorter makes each song a classy affair. The album is somewhat eclectic in the songwriting, but it floats so effortlessly off the disc that there is no trick to taking it in its entirely. “Speak No Evil” is among the more distinctive tunes. Its medium tempo falls perfectly between a casual lope and a driving jaunt. Shorter steps outside his usual self. He soloing is more textural. Against precisely executed dissonant intervals Shorter and the band make themselves right at home. Again, as interesting as the compositions and improvisation is, there is no need to understand any of it to enjoy it all. Wayne Shorter as a bandleader gave opportunities for each of the stars in his band to shine. There was a lot of shining to be done.

Herbie Hancock slides in and brings along much of the style of the Miles Davis Quintet.  He is relaxed enough that his piano performances jump out from the rhythm section without having to force it.

Of course, the entire band is brilliant. It’s that something extra a bandleader can’t plan for. The December 24, 1964 recording session had everyone stealing the show simultaneously.

Classic jazz doesn’t get any more classic than Speak No Evil. No matter how or what you like in music, you can find it all here. Dig it now rather than later.