The P Speaks: Words, Words, Words…

I came across this little quiz the other day. I started strong and then flamed out…  

 

Masterpiece: A Love Supreme

[Today: John Coltrane talks to God, but I hear something else...]

What an album means is much different from what makes it meaningful. Almost every song ever recorded has a specific meaning encoded within it, but music is absorbed and appreciated in millions of different ways that have nothing to do with any lofty artistic intentions.

Take, for instance, A Love Supreme. John Coltrane wrote the album as an offering of love to God – his way of saying thanks to the man upstairs for helping him kick heroin and focus on his music. Coltrane’s playing here contains a spiritual edge that pushes it higher and farther than it ever would have reached without divine inspiration. Trane divided this album into four parts (‘Acknowledgement’ ‘Resolution’ ‘Pursuance’ and ‘Psalm’) that neatly track his religious odyssey. Rarely has an album’s meaning been more transparent.

But for me, A Love Supreme has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with love itself. That’s because the woman who gave me this album (and introduced me to the music of John Coltrane) was someone I once loved very much – someone I had ideas of a long future with. Then one day I woke up and she was gone, and I was left with my record collection and a mountain of broken glass that was once a functioning heart.

I haven’t exchanged a word with her since, but her mad dash to the exit didn’t alter the meaning of A Love Supreme all at once. It took me years to realize that what I’m hearing while John Coltrane is blowing to the heavens is the sound of that relationship in full – its hesitant bloom, blissful duration, and ultimate end. There’s no God, just me and a bunch of questions about what might have been. And every time I listen, the record ends right where it should, and I pick myself up and swap it out for something even better.

Listen: Acknowledgement

Buried Treasure: Out Of A Dream

[Today: Erik Truffaz makes an album for the ages...]

Jazz this good isn’t supposed to get made anymore. Thankfully, somebody forgot to tell French trumpeter Erik Truffaz. Truffaz has experimented with electronica-tinged dance music and ensemble improvisation, but on his 1997 major label debut Out Of A Dream, he channels the spirit and sound of Miles Davis. The way Truffaz delicately and economically phrases smatterings of thin warm notes begs comparison with Miles. But Truffaz doesn’t just play parrot here, he takes that classic sound and wraps it around a bunch of elegant tunes that you’d swear were laid down decades ago.

With a title like Out Of A Dream, one would expect this album to be a languid affair, and it doesn’t disappoint. Truffaz and his quintet spin one mid-tempo ballad into another, each track a strand of golden sunshine piercing through gray rainclouds. ‘Down Town’ opens with Truffaz blowing simple figures on his trumpet before the rest of the group jump in and kick the track into gear. The way Truffaz darts around his band’s interlocking groove cannot fail to bring to mind the first famous quintet of Miles Davis. But it’s the title track – a deceptively complex ballad that sounds every bit like a lazy Saturday morning in bed – that sets the pace for the entire album.

Truffaz has made a game effort to deflect the depth of Miles’ influence upon his sound. Obviously, the bulls eye that comes with such a comparison is daunting enough, but any artist worth their salt strives to be original and not just some two-cent carbon copy of the real deal. So Truffaz says things like “My band sounds like itself” while the biography on his website admits that hearing Kind Of Blue as a 16 year old changed his life and sent him into a career in music.

But Truffaz needn’t worry about dodging such lofty comparisons. Out Of A Dream sounds unavoidably like Miles, but it retains enough of his magic and genius – things that can’t merely be copied rote – that it comes off like a long lost album from the great trumpeter’s archive. And that’s meant as a compliment – one of the biggest I can think of, actually.

Listen: Down Town

Coolin’ Out

It was gorgeous in the East Bay this week, with unseasonably warm weather and new blossoms on seemingly every branch. It’s amazing how much an upturn in the temperature puts a spring in everyone’s step and increases the number of smiles per capita, but that’s exactly where we’re at here in Oakland. And reflecting the good weather and good moods, the P and I have been spinning all kinds of jazz this week. Here is but a sampling of some of the delicious albums that have been passing across our turntable…

Blue Mitchell * The Thing To Do – This 1964 album is one of a long string of pearls that this overlooked trumpeter recorded for Blue Note. Formed from the remnants of Horace Silver’s early 60′s quintet, this group featured a young Chick Corea on piano.

Jimmy Forrest * Out Of The Forrest – A soulful tenor saxophonist, Jimmy Forrest swings lightly on this 1961 session. Occasionally funky but never showy, Forrest and his group play what the liner notes call “roadhouse music… with no frills or embellishments.” In other words, this is straight ahead jazz that you don’t need a PhD to enjoy.

John Coltrane * Lush Life – Miles from the chaotic ‘sheets of sound’ that characterize so much of Coltrane’s work, this is a relaxed set of gorgeous covers that are rough enough around the edges to make them interesting, and feature a simmering intensity that could belong to nobody but Coltrane.

Thelonious Monk * Thelonious In Action - Recorded in August 1958 at the Five Spot Cafe in New York City, this is an excellent live document of the genius of Monk. The way he slides around the beat on ‘Blue Monk’ is really something to behold.

Duke Ellington * The Blanton-Webster Band – This three album box set collects all of the recordings of the famous Ellington orchestra that featured tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and bassist Jimmy Blanton. Featuring many of the songs that made The Duke famous, this set is an indispensable part of any jazz collection.

Philly Joe Jones * Showcase – Jones played with a who’s who of jazz superstars during his illustrious career. Here he fronts a group featuring Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Julian Priester on trombone, and Sonny Clark on piano. In spite of its title, this is a fine ensemble recording, and the rare album headlined by a drummer that isn’t overrun with drum solos.

Stan Getz & The Oscar Peterson Trio – Two great tastes that taste great together, Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson trio complement each other perfectly on this swinging set of standards that were recorded in 1957.

Dave Brubeck * Time Out – One of the best selling jazz records of all-time, this album is proof that popular tastes aren’t always wrong. Named for the odd time signatures that feature in many of the tunes, it boasts perennial favorites ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk’ and ‘Take Five’.

[Of course, now that I've been talking up the weather, it just started raining...]

Jazz Is…

Nat Hentoff is a longtime journalist and legendary jazz critic who has become known in recent years as a quotable civil libertarian. As an associate editor of Down Beat magazine from 1953 to 1957, he took the first steps towards what would become one of the most celebrated careers in the history of music journalism.

If Hentoff’s name is recognizable, it’s because his liner notes have graced literally hundreds of jazz albums. Along with Ralph Gleason, Leonard Feather, and Ira Gitler, Hentoff virtually invented the field of jazz writing. If you have a jazz album from the 50′s or 60′s, chances are very good that the liner notes were created by one of those four writers. But Hentoff didn’t merely write about music – he worked in the industry as an A&R man and producer, overseeing sessions by musicians as talented and diverse as Charles Mingus, Otis Spann, Abby Lincoln, and Cecil Taylor.

This 1976 book is well-served by Hentoff’s insider status. Here he writes like a fan, while drawing on a wealth of anecdotes and personal experiences to illuminate the music and methods of some of the biggest names in jazz. Because jazz had a stroke in the early 70′s and has remained paralyzed ever since, Jazz Is still serves as an excellent primer on the subject. Indeed, it could have been written last week, as it speaks eloquently about Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, and several other luminaries.

Midway through the book, Hentoff references a conversation with John Coltrane, during which Trane told him “The music has to speak for itself. I’d much rather you didn’t put anything technical in the notes. It might get in the way of people finding out what there is in the music for them.” Coltrane needn’t have worried – Hentoff’s writing has always been more about the feel of music rather than its technical properties. And besides, most of us need some help to comprehend the beating heart of jazz, and few guides have proved to be as reliably sure-footed as Nat Hentoff.

Buried Treasure: The Gallery

[Today: One of Disco's pioneering DJs...]

In the early morning hours of June 28th, 1969, eight plain-clothes police officers entered the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in New York City and began harrassing and arresting the homosexual patrons of that bar. The ensuing clash between gays and police touched off five days of rioting that grew to include more than 1,000 protesters, and lit the fuse on the gay rights movement.

After the Stonewall riots, gays were no longer willing to live a cloistered existence, and when they defiantly emerged from enforced hiding they were ready to dance. It’s not much of a stretch to say that the events of June 28th, 1969 started a dance party that has lasted nearly four decades. And at the center of that party has been a number of groundbreaking DJs who changed the way records were spun in clubs, while unearthing a steady stream of little-known songs that filled dancefloors for years in trendy New York clubs like The Paradise Garage, Le Jardin, The Grand Ballroom, and DJ Nicky Siano’s club, The Gallery.

Siano conned his way into a club DJ gig in 1971, when he was just 16 years old. A year later he opened his own club, The Gallery, which quickly became one of the premiere hot spots in New York City. Soul Jazz Records’ outstanding 2004 compilation Nicki (sic) Siano’s Legendary The Gallery features some of the Soul, R&B, Funk, and Gospel cuts that Siano spun in his club between 1973 and 1977. While none of the songs collected here are disco per se, they all strongly suggest the sounds that would unite the genre by the late 70′s.

“There is a force that connects us,” Siano says. “And if I connect with that force, which I think is love… and I’m playing from the center, we’re all gonna get it, we’re all gonna get off on it.” But disco’s inclusive intentions and easily replicated sound would be its undoing, as a bunch of outsiders would eventually crash the party, looking to make a quick buck on a hot trend. [Ironically, much the same thing would happen to punk music around the same time.] Fortunately there are compilations like The Gallery to remind the world of the spirit and sound of real disco music.

Listen: Big John Is My Name [by Undisputed Truth]

Masterpiece: Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack

[Today: Ten weeks of allowance add up to my first trip to the record store...]

I was eight years old, my allowance was 50 cents a week, and disco fever was sweeping the nation. I took out the garbage, mowed the lawn, collected the laundry, and vacuumed the carpet. Only ten weeks of saving up and I’d be able to buy an album. Of course, the only album worth buying in early 1978 was the soundtrack of the entire swingin’ 70′s dance party that I was too young to take part in – the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack.

Even my 8 year-old self could tell that SNF was excellent but deeply flawed. Half of this double album features some of the best music of the disco era, and the Bee Gees songs, including ‘Stayin’ Alive’ ‘Night Fever’ and ‘Jive Talkin’ (all of which went to #1), remain some of the most representative tracks of those times. Kool & The Gang’s ‘Boogie Shoes’, The Trammps’ ‘Disco Inferno’, and Yvonne Elliman’s ‘If I Can’t Have You’ deserve their place alongside the Bee Gees material, but the rest of this soundtrack falls somewhere between boring and laughably bad.

Kool & The Gang’s ‘Open Sesame’ feels like it was knocked off in five minutes. Tavares’ remake of the Bee Gees ‘More Than A Woman’ (also featured on this soundtrack) is pointless. Walter Murphy’s ‘A Fifth Of Beethoven’ is one of the most absurd songs to ever reach number one on the Billboard charts. And David Shire’s three tracks feel like the film score mood cues they are, and will never inspire anyone to do anything except hit the fast forward button.

And yet it’s the hot and cold quality of this soundtrack that makes it such a perfect document of the disco era. The genre as a whole featured about the same 1:1 ratio of brilliant and boring music that’s to be found here. But for characters like John Travolta and the 8 year-old me, the real question wasn’t one of consistent quality, but whether the music could make you dance around like a fool and help you forget about the work week. And on both counts, the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack is a huge success.

Listen: Stayin’ Alive

Disco Express – The Cover Art

Here’s the cover art for one of my latest compilations – Disco Express. I’m a child of the 70′s, so disco music is near and dear to my heart. I never quite got the whole ‘disco sucks’ movement. As far as I’m concerned, any music that’s geared towards dancing and having a good time can’t be all bad. Disco definitely had some low moments, particularly right before its early 80′s ‘death’, but the genre has since been redeemed by the development in the 80′s (and ascendancy in the 90′s) of Hip-Hop and Electronica – both of which were heavily influenced by the culture of disco.

This compilation was not intended as another version of ‘disco’s greatest hits’ – lord knows there are too many of those out there already. Instead, it was meant as a true party mix, a blend of recognizable hits and lesser known club favorites, including tracks that were spun by pioneering New York City disco DJs like Larry Levan and Nicky Siano. At the very least, I’d like to think it’s proof that disco not only didn’t suck, it produced a lot of music that could be downright uplifting.

Here’s the front cover:

Here’s the inside front cover:

Here’s the back inside cover:

Here’s the back cover:

Here’s the track listing:
Peaches And Herb * Shake Your Groove Thing
Evelyn “Champagne” King * Shame
Undisputed Truth * Big John Is My Name
Chic * Good Times
Instant Funk * Dark Vadar
Dan Hartman * Instant Replay
Salsoul Orchestra * How High (Larry Levan Remix)
Peter Brown * Dance With Me
Indeep * Last Night A D.J. Saved My Life
Michael Jackson * Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
Ohio Players * Love Rollercoaster
Amii Stewart * Knock On Wood
The Isley Brothers * Get Into Something
The Commodores * Machien Sun
The Miracles * Love Machine (Pt. 1)
Foxy * Get Off
Aurra * When I Come Home (Larry Levan 12″ Remix)

And finally, here’s the inspiration:

Final Four

Classic rock station WGRF in Buffalo is hosting its annual March Bandness competition, a head to head battle of the bands that is set up like a basketball tournament bracket. The graphic perfectly sums up where my head is at right now – split between hoops and music.

The question is: based on the bracket below, who’s in your final four??

Click below to see the full-sized PDF…
March Bandness - PDF

[Many thanks to James Cabral for passing this PDF along!]

*****

Here’s my bracketology-style breakdown of the regions, and how I see this epic battle of the bands shaping up:

NORTON REGION: This is by far the weakest region in the field. The top-seeded Eagles blow out loss to #16 seed ELO in the first round opens the way for a stunning run to the final four by the #15 seed, Steely Dan. The Dan’s first round matchup against #2 seed Aerosmith is by far its toughest contest in the region. But with their intricate motion offense (which features up to 16 players on the court at any given time), they finally best a game Aerosmith, whose ‘ram it in the hole’ spread offense is nearly unstoppable. From there Steely Dan romp, overcoming Eric ‘Slowhand’ Clapton’s four corners offense, and putting away the Peter Green-led Fleetwood Mac in the regional final, before succumbing to traditional powerhouse Pink Floyd in the tournament semi-finals.

RUSSO REGION: Another double-digit seed makes a deep run here: this time it’s #14 seeded Black Sabbath, who ride the punishing down-low game of Tony Iommi to big wins over Bob Seger (#3), David Bowie (#11), and Lynyrd Skynyrd (#2) before finally falling dramatically on a late rally by Pink Floyd in the regional finals. Floyd, meanwhile, use the simmering tension between feuding superstars Waters and Gilmour to fuel a run to the tournament final. But the Floyd’s great showing comes at a steep price: just after bowing to Jimi Hendrix in the championship, the group announce that they’ll never appear on the same court together again (unless Bob Geldof asks really nicely).

JP REGION: This is the ‘group of death’ – and not just because it contains the bands that once employed Brian Jones, Duane Allman, Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia, and John Lennon – it’s by far the toughest region in the field. Look for the #2 seed Rolling Stones to blow by The Guess Who (#15) and The Allman Brothers (#10), and just overcome #14 seed Bob Dylan at the buzzer to advance to the regional final. On the other side of the bracket, #4 seed Jimi Hendrix takes down The Kinks (#13), The Doors (#5), and – in a triple-overtime, instant classic thriller – narrowly edges the top seeded Beatles. Riding the momentum from that victory, Hendrix outlasts a game group of Stones to reach the Final Four, before taking down AC/DC and Pink Floyd to win it all.

SLICK TOM REGION: Van Halen and AC/DC blast through the bracket to meet up in a monster regional final. David Lee Roth and company blow out Peter Gabriel (#16), edge past Stevie Ray Vaughan (#7), and rough up Tom Petty (#3) to set up the big contest. AC/DC does their part by obliterating Triumph (#16), spanking The Police (#9), and just bettering a frantic Guns N’ Roses (#12), who play out of their heads until the final horn. In the regional final, Sammy Hagar gets Van Halen into foul trouble in the second half, sinking their chances against the plucky AC/DC – who, with no players taller than 5’8″, strike a blow for little people everywhere with their trip to the Final Four.

dk’s final four: Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, Steely Dan

Choose Your Own Adventure

I stumbled across this record in our stacks the other day (yet another Uncle Henry special) and decided that rather than trying to find out the history of this group, it would be infiinitely more fun to invent my own. I’ve never heard of The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, let alone listened to any of their music, so they present a perfectly blank canvas on which to fabricate a triumphant and/or tragic story of musical excesses, misunderstood genius, or flying monkeys.

Please join me in this endeavor: Using only the front and back cover art, the song listing (see below) and the lone clue that this album was released on Atco records in 1968, create an imaginary biography for this self-titled release. Want to use midgets, spacemen, and a dancing statue of liberty?? Super – the more out there, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Want to create a fake family history, where this was your mother’s favorite album, and she once had an illicit affair with the oboe player?? Excellent – you’ll probably end up on the NY Times Bestsellers list!

About the only thing discouraged here is the truth. Facts have their place, but sometimes it’s fun to just make stuff up…

Front cover:

Back cover:

Song listing:

[side one]
Sounds Of Time
Began To Burn
Monkey
Bach’s Trio Sonata No.1 In C Major (2nd Movement)
She’s Gone
Poor Pauline
Mr. Tree

[side two]
You Know Just What It’s Like
Studeao Atlantis
Pick Up In The Morning
The Seasons
a) Fall
b) Winter
c) Spring
d) Summer

[Prize alert: the most convincingly humorous and entertainingly ficticious write-up of this album (as selected by The P) will receive a special dk presents... prize package. Best liar wins, so get to scribblin'! Also, I will post my own 100% fabricated write up of this album at some point in the near future (check it out here), so please check back for the sensationalized history of The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble.]