Wednesday, September 27th

September 27, 2017 by 4 Comments

ONE BARNEY’S BRILLIANT BOOK
Finding myself with a couple of hours to kill, I endeavor to make sense of Selfridges’ Music Matters season. “The transformative power of music. Amplified”, apparently. It seems to consist of windows dressed with cymbals, a pop-up vinyl store by Rye Wax, a few gigs and exclusive music-inspired collections by your fave fashion-forward designers. It all left me a little cold until I found the Taschen shop within the Books department. And there I saw 75 Years of Capitol Records. I remember Barney (Hoskyns) telling me that he’d been commissioned to write this a couple of years ago but I hadn’t seen it before. It’s beautifully designed and printed, and the storytelling (in the three sections I read before my arms gave out) is great. The Kingston Trio spread is stunning. The only downside is the price (£99.99 online, £135 in store), but you can’t have everything (as per usual, click on pictures to enlarge).

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TWO VOCODER LISTING ON EBAY
This may be the finest eBay listing ever. “I change the pitch from High to Low, so everybody can enjoy the show…” The fact that it’s perched on a tumble dryer is very “Internet of Things”.

THREE THE SWISS. WHO KNEW?
From Mashable: “On paper, Karlheinz Weinberger lived a mostly boring existence. He worked as a warehouse manager at the Siemens factory in Oerlikon, Switzerland from 1955 until his retirement in 1986, and lived in the same apartment for almost his whole life. But when he was off the clock, he set out with his camera to photograph the unusual. (He literally had “Photographer of the Unusual” printed on his business card.) In 1958, he fell in with the Halbstarken, one of Switzerland’s first underground youth cultures. These young men and women idolized the brooding sexuality of American rebels like Elvis Presley and James Dean, sported flamboyant hairstyles, and wore jeans and jackets adorned with studs, patches, and enormous belt buckles.” [The Cliff Richards one seems an anomaly here – Ed]

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FOUR THE END-OF-LIFE INDUSTRY JUST KEEPS ON GROWING…
…with a new wrinkle aimed at the baby-boomers. Your loved one’s ashes pressed into a record. Painful puns abound – the company is called And Vinyly – but at least we can feel safe in the knowledge that gran is forever in our record collection.

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FIVE IN JAZZ NEWS
It was a week of contrasts and timelines – a first album (Unnatural Events) launch by pianist/composer Tom Millar at the PizzaExpress in Dean Street and the 80th birthday celebration of composer and arranger Mike Gibbs. I went to Tom’s as we’d help kick-start his album (he’s the son of friends) but also because I really like his playing. I feel unqualified to actually write about jazz, so here’s a link to a well-balanced review by Kevin LeGrande at jazzwise.

I went to Mike Gibbs’ because George Foster had told me to. I’m so glad I did – it was a wonderful sound that his 14-piece band conjured up in the tiny 100-seat Vortex, with an audience made up of jazz lovers and musicians who’d played with Gibbs. His charts are restless and physical, and the assembled orchestra did them proud, with a supple rhythm section, a seriously great guitarist in Mike Walker and an amazing group of horn players (one of whom doubled on accordion, rather beautifully). I had invited Marcel along as he grew up listening to Mike Gibbs, and we discovered that Marcel’s dad and Mike Maran (who was seated behind us at a table with John Walters of eye magazine fame) were both in the rather sparse audience at Ronnie Scotts’ in 1972 when Gibbs’ Just Ahead was recorded. Oh, and Richard Williams introduced me to the mighty Evan Parker – it was that kind of night (see John Fordham’s Guardian review here).

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Tuesday, September 19th

September 19, 2017 by 4 Comments

ONE JONI BUGG
Well there’s inspiration, and then there’s stealing, but if you steal you have to make something better than the original, which this sorry attempt fails to be.

joniThe cover of Hejira is made up of 14 different photographs collaged by Mitchell and retouched by an airbrush artist. I had bought UNCUT’s Ultimate Music Guide to Joni Mitchell which has the unretouched image by Norman Seeff [above, left] on its cover. It’s generally terrific, and a good companion to the recent Rock’s Backpages book, Reckless Daughter, but I was slightly appalled to find that it barely mentions my favourite song, “Black Crow”. Mitchell’s open-tuned electric rhythm guitar scrubs out a midwest blacktop backdrop for Jaco Pastorius to dig into and move around, all angles, like a tractor twisting and turning in the endless fields that line the road. At the same time Larry Carlton’s hovering above with an electrical storm of distorted guitars. At one point Carlton and Pastorious leap into the air like a couple of crop dusters and circle the skies before being reined in by Mitchell’s high yelp. The song irons out for the fade where it races off into the distance and, right before it disappears beyond the horizon, Larry Carlton suddenly summons up the ghost of Mick Green and plays an outrageously swaggering rock & roll riff. It’s a unique sound, a unique song.

TWO I’VE JUST ORDERED…
…The Invisible Man: The Story of Rod Temperton, the “Thriller” Songwriter, partly because it’s such an unlikely story, partly because he wrote “Always and Forever”. From Heatwave to Hollywood, he ended up as Britain’s third most successful songwriter. Jed Pitman on Thriller: “Temperton wrote three songs for the record, including the title track which began life as a song called “Starlight” but [Quincy] Jones asked Temperton to come up with new lyrics to fit the tougher theme that was emerging from other tracks around it. Rod knew he wanted one word because that fitted in with the song He said about writing lyrics that the meaning of them didn’t necessarily matter, the lyrics to him would disappear into the melody of the song. The lyrics themselves were all about how many syllables they were for each word to fit lyrically and melodically with the song structure. He’s effectively using the words as another musical instrument rather than sending a message. He wrote about 300 words down and then he wrote the word ‘Thriller’ and that was it, he stopped and went, ‘Wow, I can see it on top of the Billboard charts, I can see the merchandising, I can see everything – Thriller by Michael Jackson.’”

THREE ONE TRACK MINDS
The wonder of Wilton’s Music Hall is in its restoration. When you hear that a venue from the past has been restored you imagine a lot of gilt, a kind of “overloud” painting where the brashness of the colour may be accurate, but shouts too much, and there’s a general air of fussiness. None of this has happened at Wilton’s. A building at risk has become a beautiful encapsulated ruin (in the nicest possible sense).

A couple of months ago it played host to One Track Minds, a series where generally well-known people talk about a song that means a lot to them. A varied lineup included Tulip Siddiq, MP, comedians Mark Thomas and Harry Mitchell, sports writer Jenny Offord and session man and all-around entertainer Guy Pratt. It was great to hear Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Want Fi Goh Rave” again, from the fantastic Forces of Victory album, to be reminded of how great Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy” is. Guy Pratt, session man extraordinaire [below, left], talked about being on a disastrous teenage holiday. There’s an excellent review of the show by John Sills at thoughtsfromwestfive: “In Guy’s case, he was at one point lying on a bunk bed, recovering from having tried smoking with an ‘evil’ cousin. He noticed a cassette player nearby and pressed play. A song came on, all jittering synthesizers, throbbing bass, strident guitars and, at the end, an Irish violin. He was mesmerized, and at that moment knew what he wanted to do with his life. Be a musician. And the song? “Baba O’Riley”, the opener on the Who’s 1971 album, Who’s Next.”

Harry Mitchell was the highlight, though. After a long set up about relationships and angst, he revealed that he cemented his friendship (with his friend, Ed) through a shared love of dancing to Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al”. Sadly, he said, Ed can’t be here tonight… at which point, Ed arrived, and said dancing commenced.

5-wiltonsOne Track Minds is highly recommended, and back at Wilton’s on October 9th. Simon Napier-Bell is one of the six guests. Details here.

FOUR WIND RIVER: DON’T GO THERE
I expected much more from Taylor Sheridan. The scriptwriter of Sicario and Hell or High Water, here – as both writer and director – piles an implausible plot with clunky dialogue: “Can’t we call for backup?” “This ain’t really backup country… this is go it alone country” goes one bit of business, six words too long. Jeremy Renner is a hunter (and philosopher, judging by his gnomic utterances) and Elizabeth Olsen an FBI agent investigating a murder on a Native American Res. It’s an irritating film with a pretty good soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (although there’s nothing as memorable as the music created by Robbie Robertson for tv doc The Native Americans). It also has that thing where an unrelated song by a sensitive male songwriter plays over the end credits (in this instance, “Feather” by William Wild).

FIVE HAVE YOU HEARD OF BENARD IGHNER?
Me either. A month ago I was listening to Peggy Lee sing, sensationally, “Everything Must Change”, from an album recorded live in London in 1977. I knew the song – Nina Simone had covered it [among too many others to list here] but I wondered where it had come from originally. So I went looking, and found this obituary, by A. Scott Galloway (at TheUrbanMusicScene.com), of the man who wrote it, Benard Ighner. He had died a week or so before.

“Benard (not “Bernard” and the last name pronounced “eyeg-ner”) was most widely known and adored for his composition “Everything Must Change”. A deeply existential musing about the unmovable ‘way of time,’ it was introduced [on Quincy Jones’ platinum-selling 1974 album, Body Heat] by Ighner singing with hushed intimacy ascending into reverent earnestness over a dreamy surround sound arrangement of piano, Fender Rhodes, synthesizer, rim shots and a trombone solo by the great Frank Rosolino. Never a single, the haunting masterwork went a long way toward selling the full-length album as a 6-minute slice of interstellar Heaven.”

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Sunday, September 10th

September 10, 2017 by 4 Comments

ONE IMAGE OF THE WEEK

5-cloudshillThis spectacular gramophone belonging to T.E.Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), seen at his tiny rural retreat, Clouds Hill, in Dorset. From the National Trust website: “The Music Room was where Lawrence used to write and where he entertained his guests. Sometimes they would listen to music played on the special gramophone Lawrence had made, with its huge horn. At other times they would chat, or eat simple suppers out of tins.”

TWO RIP WALTER BECKER 1
“To properly honor Walter Becker, your editor is auditioning 15 freelance eulogists.” 
– American music critic Brad Shoup, on Twitter.

RIP WALTER BECKER 2
Rickie Lee Jones: “The best musician of our group loved Steely Dan, and that was how I came to hear “Bodhisattva”, “My Old School”, “Pearl of the Quarter”. Lines about Annandale and oleanders with pesky stomping bass and drums. I mean these guys knew how to make music. They had a hit on every record – I mean a thing that was played on the radio over and over – that became part of how we saw our collective selves. I was brought up, you might say, on writing thick with imagery and subtle implication and I loved it. I loved the innuendo, the humor, the sting. The genius was as much in the part we filled in, the lines they didn’t write. That was where the sticky stuff of memory made their music a part of our own personal history. I knew about hiding behind the oleanders, heck I grew up in Arizona… It wasn’t the specific line, it was the sorrow and fury of the melody, Bring back the Boston rag. Tell all your buddies that it ain’t no drag.”
On the music player on the right hear Steely Dan in 1974 at the Rainbow Theatre in London ripping through “The Boston Rag.”

RIP WALTER BECKER 3
The “Mu Major” chord. This is the clearest explanation that I found. Apparently, its first appearance was in the 12th Century, in Perotin the Great’s “Viderunt Omnes”. It appears in many Dan songs, including “Deacon Blues”, “Black Cow”, “Don’t Take Me Alive” and “Fire in the Hole”.

THREE DON’T FORGET THE MOTOR CITY
I’m trying to finish Stuart Cosgrove’s book, Detroit 67 before I go to see the movie, but frustratingly, it’s a bit of a slog. Great research, fascinating information, but poorly edited, so progress has been slow. The story told here of the Supremes is perfect as a microcosm of the problems inherent in Berry Gordy’s Motown project, and the Florence Ballard material key, but there’s too much repetition and it isn’t focused enough. The evocation of that time in Detroit is terrific, and I’d still recommend it, but the skill involved in book editing should not be overlooked. (Still below from a selection of photos of performers backstage, taken by Magnum photographers – thanks, Bob).

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For extra background, this WXYZ-TV Detroit Channel 7 segment on Detroit in 1967 is interesting. There’s a lovely bit 11 minutes in where Dennis Coffey plays the intro to “Just My Imagination”. Which is just fabulous.

FOUR THE VILLAGE VOICE’S PRINT EDITION IS DEAD
I remember occasionally finding copies of VV in Camden, and on any trip to New York, it had to be picked up immediately. There were some excellent online tributes, amongst them this from Joe Levy, who was the music editor there in the late eighties/early and is currently contributing editor for Rolling Stone… “In 1987 I was an intern for the Voice music editor, Doug Simmons. There was a strike benefit for the union that summer — Public Enemy and Sonic Youth played. It was at a small club, but Public Enemy’s show was already pretty much arena-sized, with the S1Ws stepping as Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Terminator X upended all notions of musical possibility. When Sonic Youth took the stage, they announced they would play an instrumental set because ‘Public Enemy had used all the words.’ Think for a second about these two groups, and how they defined the noise that New York City gave the world. And think about the next year, which would bring Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. Then think about the two of them showing up at a newspaper’s union strike benefit and playing back to back. That was the Voice, and its music section, in action.”

FIVE DON’T YOU LOVE A PRESS RELEASE FROM ANNIE (ST. VINCENT) CLARK?
hi, all.
it’s been a while. songs, albums, videos, shows, press. putting out a record is like having a bridezilla-style* wedding every 2-3 years. lots of “did you get the save the date? it was an email cause, you know, the planet…” and fussing over flower arrangements, except you’re walking down the aisle to your own music by yourself, to your “self.” your bridesmaids and groomsmen are your label, agents, managers, day managers, personal assistants standing expectant with a mixture of stress, excitement, pride. the fans are the attendees, who will pick sides (this side prefers the old you walking down the aisle, this side is onboard for the new you waiting at the altar, there is definitely one person who will protest the marriage in a drunken, dramatic way…) a lot of pomp. plenty of circumstance. but sometimes what gets lost in all the mothers-in-law, speeches, and seating arrangements (has this metaphor stretched so thin that it belies the fact that i have neither attended many weddings, nor aspired to my own?) is this simple fact: it’s about love**. At its best and at its core, it’s about love. that’s it. that’s all. that is literally the only point. (and i mean “literally” to mean literally.) this record is from my heart to yours. i hope it finds its way there.
love, ac
* yo, i know it’s sexist AF.
** for the sake of the emotional momentum of this note, we are choosing to ignore that century of marriage were not, in fact, about love but about wealth consolidation/women as chattel***
*** yo, i know that’s sexist AF.

A RECOMMENDATION
Ozark on Netflix. Money launderer for the cartel Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) has to get out of town with his wife (Laura Linney) and kids and swiftly relocate. To the area of the title (the highland region of the central United States) where the lake of the Ozarks has more shoreline than California. Great acting and terrific to look at, and there’s some nice work on the soundtrack, especially in the early episodes. One of the later ones has Bob Seger’s “Still the Same” running through it, used in almost every scene. I missed Bob and His Silver Bullet Band back in the day – just not on my radar, but I was pleased to make amends.

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