Nina Simone

Nina Simone was an enigma.  She is often described as a jazz singer.  She wasn’t one of consequence.  Stack her next to an actual jazz singer and this becomes pretty clear.  She developed a reputation as an artist with moral integrity.  Yet that reputation wears thin when looking at how many misguided concessions to pop fads are littered all through her recording career.  Much is made of her bitter break from Euro-classical music early in life.  Denied entry to a conservatory (The Curtis Institute of Music) as a pianist, she turned to singing in lounges.  Little of her piano playing impresses on her own recordings, though it can be effective in accompaniment.  But when you hear her voice on a good recording, she definitely had something special.  Singing may not have been her desire, but it was her great talent.  Sometimes talents choose their medium, rather than the other way around.  She was often at her best when adding a rough blues or gospel or jazz inflection to burningly austere chamber pop songs.  She was sort of a gothic shadow cast from commercial pop.  It was the tone of her voice that embodied a palpable sense of anger that drove so much of it.  Close listening doesn’t reveal much clarity in her rhythmic phrasing, her control of vibrato, her pitch range, or even her use of melisma.  All that aside, she had the power to deliver songs as if saying, with a firm scowl, “I will sing this song and I will make you remember it.”  The single-minded resolve to put her own identity into her music is fiercely determined.  This makes the greatest impression on the material that resists that approach.  When she worked with jazzy orchestral backing, as was a prevailing style for a time during her long career, the resistance to her identity could be too much.  When she played straight blues or even militant soul and R&B, there was nothing really working against her identity to put up any challenge.  She reversed her formula and added formal pop technique to rougher electric soul and R&B, and it came across as a reflection of her limitations rather than her positive talent.

What follows is a long yet incomplete set of brief reviews of her albums.  This is limited to what I’ve heard, which does not include anything from her time with Colpix Records.  Continue reading “Nina Simone”

Sun Ra – Jazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1

Jazz By Sun Ra - Vol. 1

Sun RaJazz by Sun Ra, Vol. 1 Transition TRLP J-10 (1957)


Sun Ra didn’t start releasing recordings as a leader until he was well into his forties, making him somewhat of a late arrival–like Sam Rivers or Bill Dixon.  Recorded for Tom Wilson‘s Transition label in 1956, Jazz By Sun Ra, Vol. 1 (later issued as Sun Song, the CD edition of which Includes the bonus track “Swing a Little Taste” from Jazz in Transition) is made up of the type of skewed big band music featured on Jazz in Silhouette and a smattering of other recordings The Arkestra made in Chicago but did not release until they had relocated to New York City in the 1960s.  As an album made specifically for a willing record label, this sounds quite a bit more hi-fi than the many rehearsal tapes from the same time period released on El Saturn records in the coming years.  As for the music, it’s all quite good.  The Arkestra sounds very polished.  Some great songs too, with Sun Ra’s arrangements giving this an adventurous feel.  The harmonies were advanced and novel for the day.  Hindsight may not make this seem all that innovative, given what came later, but you wouldn’t have found solos like John Gilmore‘s on “Brainville” or “Future” anywhere else in 1957 (save perhaps Jazz Advance).  The prominent percussion on “New Horizons” and “Street Named Hell” were also rare in a jazz context when this came out (though Buddy Collette and others had similar notions).  Then of course there is the closer, “Sun Song”, on which Sun Ra’s organ gives a big hint as to where he would go in the next few decades.  This album is pretty consistently good from beginning to end.  Sun Ra and his Arkestra may have made even better recordings, but this still ranks among their most listenable efforts.

Sun Ra – Space Is the Place

Space Is the Place

Sun RaSpace Is the Place Blue Thumb BTS-41 (1973)


What Space Is the Place (not to be confused with the soundtrack to the movie of the same name) offers is a broad and eclectic overview of the multifaceted musical philosophy of Sun Ra and His Arkestra.  From here you can move into a lot of different territories of Sun Ra’s oeuvre according to what strikes your fancy.  This is one of the very best introductions to Ra’s music, even if further exploration of the catalog will likely quickly supplant it with new favorites.  The title track is one of the group’s space chants, but at an extended length that allows room to go a bit further out than usual.  “Images” is a fresh new performance of one of the band’s swinging evergreens.  It’s probably my favorite version, with a hint of smiling sourness in the horns, a hearty electric bass that stands out from the rest of the band without just playing a walk, and Ra himself clanging away at the keys in perfect rhythm.  “Sea of Sounds” is free-form noise that would appear a bit less frequently in the coming years.  “Discipline” and “Rocket Number Nine” fill out the album with more of the quintessential afro-futurist Sun Ra sound.  An excellent place to start.

Nina Simone – Little Girl Blue

Little Girl Blue

Nina SimoneLittle Girl Blue Bethlehem BCP-6028 (1958)


Nina Simone’s debut.  Basically she’s making a Nat “King” Cole Trio album, and only occasionally doing that well.  There’s a sort of smokey vibe to it.  The atmosphere doesn’t quite carry the whole thing though.  There’s really excellent stuff, the vibrant, effortless buoyancy of “My Baby Just Cares for Me”–with Simone embracing the lightness of the song more than she would later in her career–the smooth, lonely grace of “I Loves You Porgy”–where her gently unobtrusive piano accompaniment suits her plaintive vocals–and the stark, harsh, painful solemnity of “Plain Gold Ring”–a tone she would later use many times over with success.  But there are also plenty of really, overextended flashy gimmicks that go beyond Simone’s range, particularly as a pianist (“Mood Indigo,” “Love Me or Leave Me,” “Good Bait”).  The pure instrumental cuts (“Central Park Blues,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone”) drag as rote exercises at best dressed up with touches of stodgy formalism.  It’s as if she tries to insert European classical training directly into a “jazz” setting with the expectation that the mere reference to it adds credibility.  But doing so just seems like pandering to the sorts of audiences who don’t really like “jazz” on its own terms and need reassurance that they are hearing somebody with “real” skills from a different–valid–style.  The poppier stuff (“My Baby Just Cares for Me,” “I Loves You Porgy”) crackles with more vibrancy and confidence.  Simone dives into it, steps out of herself, and treats the material as it deserves to be treated.

This album has more or less continuously remained in print since the 1950s, and is among Simone’s most well-known.  Yet Simone’s most fundamental approach to performance throughout the entirety of her entire career was all about stamping her own personality on her music, and there isn’t so much of that here, for better or worse.  Still, if you chalk up the weakest stuff as “filler” in an era when albums weren’t usually great from start to finish, this compares fairly well to other albums of the day.

Anthony Braxton – Eugene (1989)

Eugene (1989)

Anthony Braxton with the Northwest Creative OrchestraEugene (1989) Black Saint 120137-2 (1991)


A good one, though somehow falling just shy of being one to recommend without qualification.  Braxton, himself, plays exceptionally.  He sounds particularly enthusiastic in his solos.  The synthesizer, which is surprisingly reminiscent of late period Sun Ra (in a good way), is nonetheless as dated as a silver lamé jumpsuit from a 1960s sci-fi movie.  This live recording is also a merely adequate document of the performance at times, without the richness that surely must have been felt in-person at the performance. And Braxton on alto sax is often buried in the mix, but that’s not a major problem.  The album’s main strength is that despite featuring such unique and daring music, it maintains fluid and almost upbeat qualities that definitely stand out.  When this music gets going it is really fresh.  The use of electric guitar to produce crunchy yet sinuous blocks of sound anticipates John Shiurba and Mary Halvorson‘s work with Braxton more than a decade later, though the instrument has a relatively minor role here.  The best parts of the album are those reinterpreting big band jazz in new ways.

This album marked something of a turning point in Braxton’s orchestral jazz music.  It was the beginning of a new phase that left behind many of the reference points to traditional big band jazz that appeared sporadically through many earlier works and recordings.  Influences from some of Sun Ra‘s and Ornette Coleman‘s large-scale works became a little more clear.  Braxton also was transitioning to bands made up of students, as he would do with smaller groups as well.  Braxton may have better large ensemble recordings but this one represents an important change in approach that relied less on having “professional” musicians in large numbers available.  Even the Braxton novice will catch on to this quickly.

Air – Air Lore

Air Lore

AirAir Lore Novus AN 3014 (1979)


This has definitely grown on me since my first listen.  It’s now one of my most favorite jazz albums of the late 1970s, with “The Ragtime Dance” and “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” possibly being my favorite songs on the album (though it is hard to choose because all are great).  The only new composition here is “Paille Street”; the others are old tunes by Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin.  The performances make rather unusual choices in melding bits of more traditional styling with more modern improvisation.  But what is most unusual is which bits they update and which bits they leave alone.  The group changes up dynamics, timbres, rhythms, in ways I haven’t ever quite encountered before. One minute you can recognize this as music composed for piano, but the next you can’t.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America’s Music

Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America's Music

Various Artists – Ken Burns Jazz: The Story of America’s Music Legacy C5K 61432 (2000)


As an overview of jazz, this set definitely falls in the shadow of the great compilation The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz.  There is a lot of overlap between the two, and to the extent that they are different, the Smithsonian collection is superior.  One principal reason is that the Smithsonian collection sticks to being an overview through about 1960, and doesn’t really go beyond that date (with a small number of exceptions mostly linked to the early 60s).  This Ken Burns set, however, does go beyond 1960, but offers only an extremely scattershot and poor representation of anything post-1956, and by the last disc seems veer into the territory of rock and pop songs rather than jazz.  Anyway, pick it up if you find a bargain copy more easily than the Smithsonian one.

This set does track somewhat the TV miniseries Jazz by Ken Burns, which in my opinion is an abomination.  Sure it has some great archival footage, but it’s buried under some hammy, overproduced narration and a deluge of longwinded Wynton Marsalis monologues.  The TV show is more a history of the rising and falling popularity of jazz in society, more than a musicological history of jazz the folk art and its evolution in predominately musical terms.  So, naturally, things stay pretty much on track through the rise of jazz to the height of its popularity, but completely fall apart during the period when the popularity of jazz was on the decline.  Rather than discuss the incredible space that was created at a time when tremendously creative artists more at the fringes were vigorously pursuing the idiom relatively free from commercial concerns when there were still enough jazz venues open, enough willing record labels, and recording technology had never been better, rather than touch on that era in a meaningful way, the TV series merely offers a few blunt dismissals of the “new” music of the 1960s (though you might say there is no such thing as bad publicity).  Then, as a final touch, the TV series displaces the discussion they should be having about the fragmented nature of modern jazz by filling up an unnecessary amount of time with lengthy obituaries to the jazz legends of decades past, many of which were previously presented in the miniseries at length, at the expense of the modern jazz legends of the era they purport to be discussing.  Given the length of the TV series, they can hardly say there was no room for modern jazz.  Also, you might guess it from the title of this particular box set, but they ignore 99% of jazz that came out of Europe or elsewhere.  In all, though, the TV series has all the faults of those history books that Howard Zinn, James Loewen et al. have pointed out: they revel in feel-good myths at the expense of hard facts, and manage to paint jazz as no more than a quaint historical oddity, only relevant today to the extent that it can be trotted out as a dusty museum piece or nostalgic/retro fad.  Contrary to what you’ll hear in the Burns TV series, jazz didn’t kinda die in the 1970s; the (hack?) critics selected for interviews in the TV series just happen to not like music of that era.  Bring in a different set of critics and you would have an entirely different set of perspectives.  The problem is that it relies on a kind of false consensus.  It would be like doing a documentary of 20th Century politics and featuring only talking heads from a single political party, one that was actively involved in politics of that era.  Would you trust it?

Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

Charles MingusThe Black Saint and the Sinner Lady Impulse! AS-35 (1963)


I think this is a pretty good album.  It’s really just a refinement of Ellingtonian ideas, rather than anything groundbreaking.  And the album does insist itself upon the listener.  I think there are better Mingus albums.  But this is still good.  Oh, lest I forget to mention this:  read the liner notes.  The whole pretentious asshole quality of Mingus that you might detect in the music should become crystal clear.

Art Ensemble of Chicago – Les stances à Sophie

Les stances à Sophie

Art Ensemble of ChicagoLes stances à Sophie Pathé 2C O62-11365 (1970)


The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s greatest strengths were their versatility and eclecticism. Les Stances a Sophie is a great example of their best qualities, as they swing between mellow soul jazz, free jazz skronking, Euro-classical adaptations, delicate world fusion, retro bluesing, and points in between. I don’t know if you could point to the group as being ultimate masters of any one style, but that didn’t ever seem to be their intention. They came up at a time when lots of the last barriers in music had been torn down, and these guys made a case for the beauty found in stitching all the various strands together in intriguing ways. The individual pieces are familiar, but the tapestry feels genuine and fresh. It would be hard to hear this and not immediately find something to like, even if the entirety takes some time to absorb.

Sun Ra – The Antique Blacks

The Antique Blacks

Sun RaThe Antique Blacks El Saturn 81774 (1978)


The Antique Blacks fits on the continuum of albums Sun Ra made in the 1970s with electric instrumentation and fusion-influenced stylings, like “The Night of the Purple Moon” and The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals / Crystal Spears from earlier in the decade and Lanquidity and Sleeping Beauty later on.  An unknown electric guitarist (possibly a young Dale Williams or someone named “Sly”) armed with a wah pedal lays down some fervid licks much like what Pete Cosey was doing with Miles Davis around the same time period, though without the same nuance as Cosey.  John Gilmore is of course great on sax.  Many songs, like “There is Change in the Air,” feature free-form improvisations from the whole group and solos interspersed with spoken word passages where Sun Ra recites cryptic and confrontational poetry thick with references to afro-consciousness and socio-political issues and deeply imbued with biblical and cosmic overtones.  Other tracks feature some nice group chants.  This is a good disc, even though there are more impressive ones from the era.  The highlights are a choice reading of “Space Is the Place” and some noisy keyboard soloing — comparable to that of Concert for the Comet Kohoutek — on “Would I for All That Were.”  Ra’s spoken word readings are noteworthy too.  While people who lived in close proximity to Ra probably knew full well that he could rant with the best of them, as he regularly distributed leaflets and preached on street corners about various topics of intergalactic significance (some books like The Wisdom of Sun Ra: Sun Ra’s Polemical Broadsheets and Streetcorner Leaflets have posthumously documented those activities), this album is one of the few times that aspect of Sun Ra’s life directly manifested itself in his recordings.