Link to an article by Barry Witherden from The Wire Primers (2009):
Tag: Jazz
Frank Sinatra – Sinatra At the Sands
Frank Sinatra With Count Basie & The Orchestra – Sinatra At the Sands Reprise 2F 1019 (1966)
Sinatra with Count Basie, arranged by Quincy Jones — what’s not to like? Well, for starters, Sinatra was starting to sound a little sluggish in his vocals, and the Basie Orchestra was kind of an anachronism by the 1960s. This is music from Sinatra the institution, and as such lumbers along in adherence to a formula that leaves little room for spontaneity or individualism. The song selection pares away the more youthful love songs in favor of quite a few about longetivity and nostalgia. Still, even if this represents the artist past their prime, it still beats most of the lounge concert records that Broadway singers without any swing released in this era. Not a great one, but fans will get reasonable enjoyment from it.
Cecil Taylor – Unit Structures
Cecil Taylor – Unit Structures Blue Note BST 84237 (1966)
Cecil Taylor brought a composer’s sense to improvised music. His percussive use of the entire piano keyboard was unlike anyone else’s. His harmonic sense was also unique. Not to mention that his “unit structures” were tiny fragments built up by his combo in improvised songs. The “superstar” group rehearsed Unit Structures extensively before recording it for Blue Note, which distinguishes the music from strictly spontaneous “free jazz”. The resulting album is essential listening. It is useful as a benchmark to have a familiarity with someone like serialist composer Anton Webern to appreciate (by comparison and contrast) how the composing/improvising linkage in Cecil Taylor’s intense, atonal music operates — another useful reference is the chapter on Taylor in Ekkehard Jost‘s book Free Jazz. A true high point in 1960s music, Unit Structures has integrity and honesty at all times while still remaining utterly fascinating.
Frank Sinatra – Songs for Young Lovers
Frank Sinatra – Songs for Young Lovers Capitol H-488 (1954)
Sinatra was the perfect representative for the American WWII generation. In the 1940s, he had a somewhat frail and scrappy voice, capable of sounding very vulnerable and unsure. He sang many maudlin pop songs. By the 1950s, that all changed. His voice was more confident and debonair, with a cocky sense of swing. He recorded more music with jazzy arrangements. Songs for Young Lovers is Sinatra accomplishing his aims flawlessly. All of these songs are great. The album as a whole conveys a sense of contentment, a “top-of-the-world” feeling that is unshakable. Of course, in the aftermath of WWII, American geopolitical power peaked in the early 1950s (1951 to be exact), and the country was well into a period of unparalleled prosperity that would stretch out until the early 1970s, when Europe had rebuilt and the Third World started to fight against and (partly) overcome legacies of imperialism.
Nelson Riddle provides the arrangements and conducts. Although there are horns, strings and a jazz combo rhythm section, the accompaniment conveys a large and full sound with relatively few performers. It helps that almost every song has slightly different instrumentation, from electric guitar, to harp, to saxophone, to violins, piano…it is all here. The jazz treatments aren’t innovative. They take the best of what the genre had achieved over the last decade and distils it to a highly potent elixir. Sinatra, for his part, is just perfectly matched to the music. While the vocals and accompaniment do complement each other, Sinatra always finds ways to capture a listener’s attention with a whole range of techniques from brash vocal gymnastics to subtly nuanced shadings, while maintaining an impeccable sense of balance. He can change up his approach in an instant. In lesser hands this would come across as arrogant posturing. For Sinatra, though, it just seems like part of a world of limitless possibilities.
The legendary jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis credited Sinatra’s singing (and Orson Welles‘ speaking voice) as being a big influence on his own playing. Davis was onto something. Sinatra, at least on an album like Songs for Young Lovers, absolutely commands attention. This is a master class on how to be a star soloist. For every riff the band offers Sinatra has one more move to offer. The band leads, in a sense, yet Sinatra operates by his own rules and always pushes things further. Each step comes across as effortless. The effect is that his voice is unstoppable without ever being forceful, angry or merely loud. Maybe he had no basis for this confidence, or was overestimating his own personal independence (never acknowledging the structural social factors that made it possible for Sinatra to sing this way, unlike, say, the European songstress Lotte Lenya on her Lotte Lenya singt Kurt Weill of the following year that relied upon a fractured, scrappy elegance), but Sinatra never once flinches and he can convince just about anyone that this is the best pop music around. Take “The Girl Next Door,” with a part near the end in which a single violin plays a tremolo, like what accompanies silent movies in a sentimental scene with one character longing for another, supported by a gentle run on a harp, in which Sinatra comes in and calmly holds some notes to melt away the sentimentality. He follows that song with a solid, sturdy yet smooth delivery of “Foggy Day.”
For clear-eyed delivery, Sinatra was never better. No doubt, one of his best.
Gil Scott-Heron – Pieces of a Man
Gil Scott-Heron – Pieces of a Man Flying Dutchman FD-10143 (1971)
Fortunately Gil Scott-Heron never held back the power of his words. He was not afraid to knock you down right off with a left hook. His initial blow leaves you a bit vulnerable to his messages for which you would otherwise guard against. But these are defensive tactics meant to assuage the theft of his humanity. He brings you in to a place rough seas have yet to engulf.
Gil Scott-Heron talks about redemption but not in simple assumptions. He deeply reasons it through, complete with all the unpleasant but unavoidable consequences. Drug abuse told through the eyes of an addict, revolution as hard work.
This album was the beginning of a long collaboration with Brian Jackson. The great Ron Carter also appears on bass, proving that great musicians can make great pop music or anything else they want. Together with producer Bob Thiele, these musicians reject perfectionism. This disc sounds like it came from the early 1970s, with a funky, jazzy backing an sing-speak raps over the top. It is worth the effort to hear this as more than a novelty from time capsule. Gil had a wit that was sharp, incisive and generous. He rarely gets his due as one of the great poets of rock and roll. This semi-autobiographical masterwork — it doesn’t have to be flawless to be that — isn’t the whole story. Pieces of a Man is Gil Scott-Heron’s gathering of the remains of what could have been.
Anthony Braxton – Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983
Anthony Braxton – Four Compositions (Quartet) 1983 Black Saint BSR 0066 (1983)
A good one for sure, but overshadowed by what came before and after. This is a transitional album. George Lewis is still around, but Braxton is essentially putting together a new quartet (Marilyn Crispell would soon replace Lewis). New ideas are surfacing, but they aren’t quite fully developed yet. This is a man who recorded and released music so prolifically that, for better or worse, you get to hear him evolve. “Composition No. 69 Q” is the highlight here; it kind of looks back to Braxton’s 70s work.
Anthony Braxton – Composition N. 247
Anthony Braxton – Composition N. 247 Leo CD LR 306 (2001)
A pretty challenging extended piece from Braxton and co. I like it, though it’s certainly not a casual listen and I don’t listen to it that often. It’s pretty dense, even relative to other Braxton releases, which says a lot. This will probably turn off many listeners. It features a lot of circular breathing and even includes bagpipes — to excellent effect. It’s yet another entry into Braxton’s “Ghost Trance Music” series. This comes more from the realm of modern composition than jazz, although it mixes elements of both. As composition, it intrigues me most because of what it suggests for music that extends continuously without any real fixed reference points to distinguish beginning, middle, end, or anything else. I also like the texture of the bagpipes, which you don’t often hear in this kind of setting.
Sonny Sharrock – Guitar
Sonny Sharrock – Guitar Enemy 88561-8177-1 (1986)
Sonny Sharrock’s solo album Guitar is a jazz album that might fairly be called sui generis. Sure, there are other solo guitar albums out there. But Guitar uniquely tried to push across atonal free jazz noise (high theory) and lovely melodic composition (low entertainment) simultaneously using contemporary recording techniques. While that risked reaching neither sort of audience, the album in many ways succeeds in breaking down intellectual barriers that usually segregate the musical genres Sonny throws together. Sharrock had been doing these sorts of things for a long time, though here he is routinely exploring disparate concepts within a given song, rather than merely in the juxtaposition between different songs (though there is some of that too). “Like Voices of Sleeping Birds” perhaps best exemplifies the collision of sweetly strummed melody and caustic runs of biting metallic noise. Those two parts of the song are opposite extremes, brought together to imply a third path that is not wholly determined by either extreme but that also is not a unified synthesis — both parts remain intact. The music throughout the album is performed “solo”, but with the aid of studio overdubbing Sharrock lays down a sort of harmonic bed of echoing, reverb-laden sounds, which might have significant melodic content or might be more like atonal washes and pulses of sound, then he recorded solos over that foundation. So he really accompanies himself. It all sounds like it was recorded in the mid-1980s, because it was recorded then. The album has a tinny, sterile, compressed sound. But rarely did music of the day glide past such heavy-handed production so readily. There is a glimmer to Sharrock’s guitar playing that can’t be denied. He sounds like he’s making music that matters, to him if no one else. Whether the version of his old composition “Blind Willie,” with celebratory and rousing riffs, or “Devils Doll Baby,” with abrasive and angular playing, or “Broken Toys” and “They Enter the Dream,” with pleasant and sentimental melodies, or “Kula-Mae,” with menacing rock phrasing, Sharrock always offers a twist on familiar forms. Back in this time period, there were a lot of “fantasy” genre movies, and in a way Guitar is like a little musical fantasy epic brimming with hopes and dreams, and desires and laments. In any event, listeners who like this may find themselves utterly captivated by it. One of Sharrock’s best.
Linda Sharrock & Eric Watson – Listen to the Night
Linda Sharrock / Eric Watson – Listen to the Night Owl SSC 3525 (2007)
Ranges from some decent if rather ordinary piano bar vocal jazz to a few songs with failed vocal embellishments that would have been better left in the vaults. The new compositions are fairly weak too. Just not an ambitious enough project really.
Kamasi Washington – The Epic
Kamasi Washington – The Epic Brainfeeder BFCD050 (2015)
Washington’s studio debut album, the sprawling three-CD The Epic is organized as a kind of summary of jazz of the last 60-70 years meant to be as accessible as possible to audiences more familiar with hip-hop. This veers toward the sorts of jazz sampled the most in hip-hop: fusion, organ-driven soul jazz, urban smooth jazz/acid jazz, slick L.A. jazz with a big-band vibe, 70s “spiritual” jazz; plus there is a heavy dose of classic quartet period Coltrane — for credibility. Though certainly The Epic avoids entirely the comically paternalistic zip-zap-rap jazz/hip-hop hybridization of corny bands like Buckshot LeFonque. Hip-hop is only implied, by omission. One device that is particularly effectively used are late 1960s style vocal choruses to build momentum (though the vocal solos are less impressive). In the end, the album succeeds in its rather modest ambitions. It doesn’t really expand upon anything it alludes to. There is no attempt to break any new ground. Yet it genuinely gets in tune with the historical precedents it recreates, demonstrating a kind of deference and respect, while always seeming fully committed to its project without irony or detachment — sometimes the leading innovators can’t do such things well because they get bored or become condescending. It also adopts certain bygone styles that never really bubbled up to wide audiences, because they were ones always committed to a space largely outside (and often opposed to) the strictures of big business music. That makes it all the more significant to recreate these particular styles now — more significant than other retro-focused practitioners like Wynton Marsalis recreating jazz forms from exclusively before its democratizing, liberation movements. Anthony Braxton named three categories of musicians/music: restructuralists (the revolutionaries), stylists (who expand upon existing concepts) and traditionalists (who work within existing forms). The Epic is a traditionalist recording. If you want a more challenging run at the same concept from a stylist rather than a traditionalist, you could go back to early Norman Connors, or maybe even James Carter‘s Conversin’ With the Elders. For a sort of textbook-like primer of modern jazz from about 1964 to maybe 1979, though, this is about as good as can be hoped. Of course, jazz heads might get bored with this as much as a tenured professor would reading an introductory textbook, but they should lighten up and accept the premise of this music, which is sort of to popularize the stuff they have been familiar with since the beginning.