Wednesday, January 9th

January 9, 2019 by 3 Comments

{ONE} BEAT IT!
It’s great, discovering that there are still things to discover, like this great 60s tv show with a fantastic typographic title: The !!!! Beat. It was essentially a black music program out of Dallas Texas, with a white presenter (Nashville DJ “Hoss” Allen) and a house band led by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. There’s a bunch of episodes on YouTube, and so much to enjoy (Freddy King doing a lot with a little, the matching suit and Stratocaster of Louis Jordan’s guitarist) but my favourite performance so far is probably Barbara Lynn. As Clarence fiddles his way to the end of a country song, his band looking like the slickest Uptown Soul Revue, Hoss says “Have mercy, have mercy, thought I was on the wrong show there for a minute, lost my way in the Opry House with “When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again”. Well, darlin’s, it’s nice to have Miss Barbara Lynn back with us. She’s got a swinging thing to do for us. Right here, from Beaumont, Texas, Barbara…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoaLCc2jR_g

And, looking like Jimi Hendrix’s younger sister, she rocks “You’ll Lose a Good Thing”, her unvarnished rhythm guitar playing and great phrasing leading the band in a Southern Soul classic. Thom Hickey at The Immortal Jukebox wrote about this performance a few years ago, but I must have missed it. Oh, and note the varnish worn down on her blonde Esquire where her wild style with a thumb pick has scraped raw the body above the scratchplate…

{TWO} LIKE EATING A PICTURE OF FOOD
At Marc Myers’ Jazzwax, this fascinating insight into the (as bassist Chuck Israels sees it) limitations of the recording process. Marc: Following my post on trombonist J.J. Johnson’s Broadway Express (1965), Chuck Israels sent along a few observations about J.J.’s Broadway, a show-tune album from 1963… “Hi Marc, I was on some of the sessions for JJ’s Broadway, and they were memorable. The experience demonstrated how inadequately most recordings represent the real sound of music played by fine musicians and experienced by listeners in the same space. Those five great trombonists, JJ, Urbie Green, Lou McGarity, Dick Hixon, and Paul Faulise made an overwhelmingly rich and powerful sound in the studio. We recorded at the old A&R Studio above Jim and Andy’s on 48th Street. It was loud and beautiful, perfectly balanced, in tune and rhythmically coordinated. You not only heard it with your ears, you could feel it on your body.

“But when we heard the playbacks, I was deeply disappointed. Little of the experience carried over into the recording, and the lush, deep and powerful blend of sound, the humanity of it, was rendered thinner and more brassy after being processed through a reverb system that the engineer, Phil Ramone, had installed in the building’s stairwell. When I hear the recording now, I enjoy it. JJ’s arrangements and the performances are all fine. The sound is good by most standards. But it’s a fraction of how the music sounded in the room. My friend, Jerry Rosen, former associate concertmaster and later pianist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, says listening to music on recordings is like getting kissed over the telephone. Another friend, pianist and composer-arranger Bill Dobbins, says it’s like eating a picture of food. I’m still glad we have recordings.”

{THREE} JIM AND ANDY’S SOUNDS THE BUSINESS
“Over the years, Jim & Andy’s became more than just a place for studio guys to relax between sessions. There was a shelf in the back for storing small instruments and upstairs there was room for a couple of drum sets, basses, and guitar amplifiers. There was a coat rack where guys could hang a jacket or a tux for weeks at a time. In fact, I used to leave a topcoat back there from winter to spring, and no one ever bothered it. We could also leave phone messages, letters, packages, even checks with Rocky or Jim. We always knew they’d be delivered to the right person.” – Milt Hinton in his book, Playing the Changes. [photo copyright of Milt Hinton]

{FOUR} 2019: YEAR OF DONEGAN
The Voice’s opening show had a couple of moments that, for all the programme’s set-up narratives, actually worked. The last singer, Nicole Dennis, was a professional (no bar to competing in The Voice), currently singing in the Dreamgirls chorus and understudying the part that sealed Judge Jennifer Hudson’s fame. Cue a stormin’ duet!

The contestant before, Peter Donegan, Lonnie’s son, was trying his luck, and struck gold at the mention of Lonnie’s name – Judge Tom [Jones] had recorded one of Lon’s songs! It was “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”, written by Donegan and his then-guitarist Jimmy Currie, and inspired by a Josh White song, “Wanderin’”.

Although Tom said on the programme that it was written for him, Wikipedia has this to say, quoting Tom: “I did some shows with Lonnie and we became friends… One night he said: ‘Look, I have this song, you’d sing the pants off it. I’ve recorded it, but I can’t really sing it. It’s a sort of a rewrite of a song from the Thirties when the Depression was going on, called “I’m Never Going To Cease My Wandering.” I knew that song because a lot of guys used to sing it in pubs in Wales. I went to his house in Virginia Water, and he got this record out to listen to… With the big chorus on it, it sounded fantastic. He was singing it Lonnie Donegan style, completely different from the way I did, like somebody busking…” So they duly gather ’round the old Joanna and bash it out, not badly.

In Patrick Humphries’ excellent biography of Lonnie, he tells how Elvis heard the song when Jones performed it as part of his Vegas show (which became the model for Elvis’ own return to live performing). “Tom had told Elvis that the song was written by this guy Lonnie Donegan. ‘Oh I know him,’ replied the King, ‘He used to take me on in the charts’. In 1976, at one of his last-ever recording sessions, Elvis finally covered “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”.

Sometime this year the BBC should broadcast Billy Bragg’s documentary on the cultural impact of “Rock Island Line”, directed by George Scott., which is based on Billy’s fine book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World.

{FIVE} PROBABLY NOT

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Five Things End of Year Part 2 follows next week.

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Wednesday, August 2nd

August 2, 2017 by 1 Comment

ONE ROCK REFERENCES EVERYWHERE…

5-tiger

For this one, we have Tiger (the Danish retailer, a “celebration of all things fun and creative”) to thank. Which leads us neatly on to…

TWO ROCK ’N’ ROLL GUNS FOR HIRE
Subtitled The Story Of The Sideman, this was an enjoyable, if slightly repetitious, watch, that sadly proved why most sidemen are sidemen. There’s an artistic gulf between being a great musician playing anything brilliantly at the drop a hat, and an artist with something to say, who realises that he needs people who can play anything brilliantly at the… you get the picture. Presenter Earl Slick was as r ’n’ r as they come, even when he was chopping wood outside his cabin in upstate New York, but the moment that he and Bernard Fowler (second vocalist, the Rolling Stones) start in on the Bowie stuff – oh, mama, hands in front of your face time.

THREE SORT-OF-SATISFIED SIDIES
Steve Cropper, perfect sideman, relished the role and was happy and content, as he’d written some of soul music’s most cherished – and lucrative – songs (see One). Wendy and Lisa found their version of success by branching away from the frontman role into award-winning tv and movie scoring. They are so openly in love with music-making that the scenes of them in the studio playing and talking, were the programme’s most interesting. Here’s the bit when Wendy realises that something has gone wrong…

Prince (in the film Purple Rain) “This is a song the girls in the band wrote – Lisa and Wendy…”
Wendy Melvoin: “The song “Purple Rain” – in the movie he says, I’d like to perform a song the girls wrote… I had an interview and someone misquoted me, asked Did you write “Purple Rain”, and the answer in print was Yes. I get a phone call from Prince, and he’s extremely upset. “Why did you say that? Do you think you wrote “Purple Rain”?” And I said, “Stop. No, but we helped you”.

Prince walked in the room and said, here’s the chord progressions… I thought to myself that’s like a Country progression, and what I pride myself on is finding a way to re-harmonise something that’s very simple. So, I played the chords, but I stretched bottom notes and I put ninths, different shades… here comes the chords… [Wendy plays beautiful suspensions over Lisa’s piano, creating the gorgeous feel that we know and love].

“Did I write “Purple Rain”? Neoowww. But would “Purple Rain” have been the song that you hear to this day without chef [meaning herself] coming in – this is the dish I wanna cook, I’ve assembled a crew here – what are we gonna do? I wanted to be a great guitar player in a great band. I wanted to be a great player. But there’s ambivalence about that role that I had, and what I knew Lisa and I were giving him.

I did have moments of anger at him – I always wanted him to say, You are great! God, I couldn’t do this without you… that didn’t come out of his mouth. Prince made it perfectly clear that if you had that role, and you were next to him, playing, that was his validation. In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted his validation… But when it came right down to it, he had every right to ignore you. He hired you. He wanted to do this thing, and he was signed to Warner Brothers. And it wasn’t specified, there wasn’t a distinction made that You are now going to partake in my soup. It was just like – This is gonna be awesome, aren’t you going to be having fun? I’m having fun. And we’re like Yeaaahhh!”

FOUR ANOTHER SIDEMEN MOVIE!
Now, this movie here, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory, celebrates three sidemen of the blues: Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. Looks good. I remember seeing Willie with Muddy Waters at, I want to say the Edmonton Sundown (or maybe it was The Rainbow), and for half the gig I was convinced that Willie “Big Eyes” Smith was the star of the show. The rest of the band kept great time and Willie played his thing, song after song, a brilliant dancing, shuffling beat. He could play the slowest blues and make it move and groove. Here’s a nice ’76 concert in Dortmund, from around that time. Check out “Long Distance Call” at around 48 minutes, his cymbals following James Portnoy’s harp. Wonderful.

FIVE ROOTS, RADICALS AND ROCKERS AT THE LIBRARY
Billy brings the music home to America – whilst explaining the twist given to it by Britain’s jazzers, skifflers, and bluesers – talking to an audience at the Library of Congress. It took place, worryingly, in the Mumford Room. My researches don’t reveal if it’s named after Marcus Mumford or not. I’m hoping not. [Thanks to Charlie Banks for the link.]

PLUS…
So many good pieces to read in the last few weeks. Here’s two – Patti Smith’s farewell to her friend Sam Shepard in the New Yorker and Richard William’s lovely note about Shepard’s co-write with Bob Dylan on “Brownsville Girl”, one of the great vocal performances in the whole of American music.

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Extra! Billy Bragg Comes to Tea…

May 19, 2017 by 11 Comments

In the late summer of last year, I received an email out of the blue from Billy Bragg.

“Hi Martin”, Billy wrote, “For the past couple of years I’ve been writing a book that seeks to put skiffle into its proper context in British cultural history. My starting point is your dad’s record collection and it ends with Ken playing at the 100 Club the night after the first punk festival held there in September 1976.” [These pictures show the posters on the back wall of the club].

club

He went on to say that Goin’ Home: The Uncompromising Life and Music of Ken Colyer – a collaboration between Mike Pointon, Ray Smith and myself that presented Ken’s story as an oral biography – had been a great help, “not only giving me some insight into the British trad scene, but also helping me to understand the importance of New Orleans to both jazz and skiffle.”

Billy wanted to find some pictures that helped to highlight that this was the moment when guitars came to the fore, and the music shifted, setting the stage for the British Pop and R ’n’ B boom of the early sixties. Some were in the Ken book, but there were others left over, so I looked them out and Billy, who was in the East End for family reasons, came to tea. It was great to meet someone so passionate about the story of that time, as well as being what you hoped he’d be – a genuinely nice fellow. So we talked about the romance and inspiration of American roots music of all stripes, and sorted out the most relevant images.

A few days later Billy sent me a few of the chapters, and I was thrilled by the amount of love and devotion that had gone into the book. It needed someone who was willing to put the time and effort into researching and reading widely, and in finding those who had lived through those times and still had stories to be told. I know how pleased my dad would have been to see a light shone on this period – to see the story so well recounted, placed in the context of Britain’s post-war years and the American and British music that preceded and followed. From America’s prison farms to New Orleans at the turn of the century, and forward to the birth of rock, it’s not only a remarkable musical journey but also a terrific piece of social history.

It’s a bonus that Billy comes at it from the viewpoint of a working musician, and a political one at that. Following in the footsteps of Pete Frame’s excellent The Restless Generation, Billy puts flesh on the bones of the story – he shows the wild effect that Skiffle, through Lonnie Donegan, had on the youth of Britain and America, a DIY genre that gave a whole generation the means to make their own music, while shoving aside the bland and tired-out variety shows of their parents.

Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is released on June 1st. I really recommend it. There is a lengthy excerpt [on the music player to the right] of Billy in conversation with Bob Harris at a preview of the book, which took place at Cecil Sharp House. Here’s a short extract:

lonnie

“Lonnie Donegan takes centre stage in a photograph from the period, playing guitar and singing into the mic. To his right, Alexis Korner plays mandolin and Ken Colyer strums the guitar slung across his knee. To his left, Bill Colyer sits playing a washboard, while Chris Barber plucks a stand-up bass. This picture embodies a revolutionary moment in British popular music, when the guitar, for so long stuck at the back of the bandstand, an often inaudible part of the rhythm section, comes to the front and takes control. A young Pete Townshend was there to witness this paradigm shift.

The future powerhouse guitar player of the Who was just a schoolboy when he saw Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen at Acton Town Hall, west London. At the time, his father was a professional musician, playing with the Squadronaires big band. Used to the smooth, sophisticated swing played by his father, Townshend was shocked by the primitive nature of the Jazzmen and their crowd. “I was used to the tidy music of my dad’s era. It was messy. He (Colyer) was messy. The band were messy. The audience were messy.” In scenes of seeming chaos that would not have been out of place at a punk gig twenty-five years later, Townshend described how the men were drunk, wore cheap rough duffel coats, some had wet themselves and instead of wearing wrist watches, some had alarm clocks hanging around their necks.

Disorienting though these scenes must have been to the young Townshend, what made a lasting impression on him was the sight of guitarist taking control of the gig by bringing his instrument to the front of the stage. In that moment, he grasped the enormity of what was happening. “This instrument was going to change the world. For me, this was absolutely massive because my father was a saxophone player. I could see the end of my father’s world – I was going to get this guitar and it was going to be bye-bye old timer and that’s exactly what happened.”

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Extra. One Thing. Tuesday, November 8th.

November 8, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Joe Henry and Billy Bragg, Shine A Light tour of train songs, Union Chapel last night
Joe Henry: “I can’t tell you how nice it is to be here. It’s very important for you to understand that this project is in no way a ‘nostalgia’ project – that neither one of us would of had one interest in going into a recording studio and making a record that just says “Joe and Bill like trains…” [audience laughter]. The impulse really was to reclaim some of our culture and vocabulary. For me as an American, it’s our national poetry – the folk tradition is not a dead language… you know, we take up these songs that are still relevant for the same reason that theatre companies still stage “King Lear” and “Richard III”, because they’ve got something to say to us about who we are, and where we are, and why.

I’d also like to say that when I came in this evening for our soundcheck, because our dressing room is the rector’s office, I was asked specifically not to blaspheme [audience laughter]. And as a younger man I might have bristled at such a, uh, mandate… but as a grownup, and as a writer, I was very affirmed for it to be acknowledged that words matter. That language is power. And we all know it when we hear it.”

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