Reviews by Arthur "LoveWhip" Shuey
Reviews by Arthur "LoveWhip" Shuey
Stan Kenton Orchestra
"Stompin' at Newport"
Pablo Records PACD-5312-2
It's no wonder he's been referred to as "the Mahler of Swing." Stan Kenton's arrangements were like soundtracks to movies from an extremely foreign land; maybe the Bizarro World. After establishing himself, largely through radio broadcasts, as a great dance band leader in the mid-Œ40s, Kenton went from mild experimentation to progressive jazz to indisputably avant-garde music and neo-Classical forays through the mid-Œ60s. Though he returned to updated forms of swing periodically, he never again captured the mass audience as he had in his early heyday.
However, looking back from all the extravagances to which our fads and high tech music toys have subjected us between that time and this, Kenton doesn't see so far out, besides which, we are not as likely to be adamantly seeking swing as our grandparents were. What this album gives us is all the eccentricity of today's experimenters, but with the unmatched power of an enhanced swing orchestra. Any of the 12 pieces on this album could be arranged for and performed by today's keyboards and effects units, but those tools cannot push air like real strings and horns, and the effect wouldn't compare to what was captured so well in this live, 1957 recording.
Remember, audiophile recordings are often not the records done with dozens or the best microphones available, but with one or two placed wisely in front of flawless players in full mastery of their material and instruments. I can think of no better example of this sort of audiophile product than this recording. It will be an eye opener and constant source of interest to anyone oF any age who has a genuine interest in musical expression.
Duke Ellington
"At the Alhambra"
Pablo Records PACD-5313-2
Most readers internalized Ellington melodies while still in the womb. When this record came out, he was still on the road, hammering that sound into America's soul. It is easy to tell from this release how Ellington's sound and attitude so heavily influenced every jazz act that followed him. It's fresh, it's fun, it's precise, and it's unlike any other music. This was the sort of insidiously free and mind-expanding jazz that Stalin made a point of banning from his Soviet Union.
I met an elderly man in an area hospital ten years ago who, from a start in a South Carolina reform school that gave vocational training in music, became a trombonist, then a bassist, and finally a pianist in Ellington's band, and I recall some of the Duke-specific eccentricities he shared with me on a small, electronic keyboard set carefully on the arm of his wheelchair. "...See, and then we'd go to the six," he explained, "and we called these 'stink chords."' Asked why those particular passages were so labeled within the Ellington organization, he explained, "because if you play 'em wrong, it stinks."
While these 13 live recordings from 1958 are certainly art, they are also comfortable and familiar to us, because we are on the other side of Ellington's tremendous influence. This record is an old friend you haven't thought about in a long time, but with whom, once you run into him and chat for a couple of minutes, you will want to keep in better, more frequent touch.
The set list includes "Take The ŒA' Train," "The Mooche," "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" and "Rockin' in Rhythm."
Laura Nyro
"Gonna Take a Miracle"
Columbia/Legacy (CK85762)
Eli & the Thirteenth Confession
Columbia/Legacy (CK85763)
New York Tendaberry
Columbia/Legacy (CK85764)
Laura Nyro died five years ago at age 49. While I have owned these three new Columbia reissues on vinyl since the late Œ70s, when I had a poetry-inclined wife helping me build my record collection, I had neglected them. The memory I should have had, of crystalline insights beautifully expressed in an unpredictable, alternately gritty and giddy vocal style was buried under images of platform heels and glitter.
How wrong I was. Laura Nyro, in the peak period represented so well between 1968's Eli & The Thirteenth Confession, which was musicians' musicians' music and 1971's Gonna Take a Miracle collaboration with Labelle, which took the whole sugar chiffon aspect of Motown and reoriented it for adults, was a prophet whose visions are still coming true before our eyes. Back when Mick Jagger still looked younger than Dick Clark, Laura Nyro wrestled with the task of re-molding the music of teen rebellion for adult restoration.
Personally, I have no desire to work toward this goal, but I can certainly see it as a tremendous challenge and respond to Laura Nyro's phenomenal success in not only defining, but achieving it.
Eli contains some of the Nyro-penned tunes that did so well for The Fifth Dimension, Barbra Streisand and others &Mac246; "Sweet Blindness," "Eli's Comin'" and "Stoned Soul Picnic." New York Tendaberry flirts with the revolution via "Save The Country," but largely affirms her consistent choice for Art over Message, a choice which continues to inspire musicians and lyricists today. Gonna Take a Miracle sounds almost commercial in comparison with the other two, but, again, stops short of pop danceability to bring out the enduring lyrical and musical potential of R & B and light soul classics like "Ain't Nothin' Like The Real Thing," "Natural Woman," "Up On The Roof," "You've Really Got a Hold On Me" and "Spanish Harlem."
Miracle is the most accessible of the three reissues, emphasizing Ms. Nyro's vocal skills on familiar tunes rather than balancing vocal, arrangement and lyrical facets is her wont elsewhere on record. I would advise those unfamiliar with her work to audition Miracle in a record store where one can hear new releases and take it from there.
Johnny Winter
"Best of Johnny Winter"
Columbia/Legacy (CK 85926)
Many years ago, "Guitar Player" Magazine published a series of interviews with famous players about their string choices. I think Jeff Beck somehow managed to use seven different brands and gauges for a six-string guitar, and that John McLaughlin and Yngwie Malmsteen were equally tedious to the layman. Then I got to an earthier portion of the article. "The first thing I do," confided Johnny Winter, "is count the strings on my guitar. If I find less than six, I put some more on. If I find six, I play the guitar. If I find more than six, I count again." It's never been a technical thing for Johnny Winter; but a sensory one, revolving around vibrating strings, sweat, bandstand air compressed by big, thumping speakers, and that little pathway cleared between the dressing room and the stage for the frail, pale figure who drapes that guitar strap around his neck and is instantly transformed into the biggest, most out of control monster any real rocker could ever want to meet.
In fact, Johnny Winter's music is like a test. If someone comes to your house and claims to like rock, put on some Johnny Winter. If your guest objects, then he or she is lying about those music preferences, because Johnny's sound is undiluted rock, as much as that of Chuck Berry or Little Richard. He even goes beyond some of the legends who preceded him by dojng ballads and making them rock, too. Then he did the same thing with blues. The man is a rock and roll monster in ways neither Keith Richards nor Lou Reed can touch.
Another mind-boggling fact is that Johnny Winter's heyday occurred when rock was weakest. The material on this "Best of" release comes from 1969-1979, so he peaked between the flower people's spiritual crisis at Altamont and the time when New Wave and punk from the clubs and new tools in the studio revived the genre's potential. I personally saw "Rock And Roll, Hoochie Koo" blow four sets of car speakers during it's 1971-ish radio play peak, which peer tunes like "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Two Divided By Love," "Cracklin' Rosie" and "I Am Woman" never did. If you wanted real rock in those days, when even the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker were flirting with disco and Fleetwood Mac doing whatever that was, Johnny Winter was one of the few people you could trust.
Blues fans owe him a huge debt for promoting and producing Muddy Waters in his latter years as well as for his own firsthand contributions to the form. Half of the songs on this record are blues. All, however, are rock.
Maria Muldaur with Carrie Lynn
"Animal Crackers In My Soup"
Music For Little People MFLP78179
Normally, I detest children's songs sung by children, believing in general that no one of any age wants to hear that. Due to wise and tasteful usage of the eight-year old and to a fantastic backing band, however, this record is an exception to my rule. It's a children's record that's more a swing background record than a children's record.
Okay, I can gripe about this record. A few times, the band sounds too Dixieland for my ears(I think Dixieland was the punk rock of the Œ20s), and tap dancing works about as well on record as ventriloquism does on radio. In general, though, what we have here is the lovely, expressive voice of Maria Muldaur singing clever, sycopated songs with a small combo Benny Goodman would have enjoyed working with.
Billie Holiday
"Lady Day Swings"
Columbia/Legacy (CK86579)
"Blue Billie"
Columbia/Legacy (CK85977)
Billie Holiday & Lester Young
"A Musical Romance"
Columbia/Legacy (CK86635)
Due in stores July 23rd, 2002
Let's begin by briefly explaining, for the young or square, who Billie Holiday was. After her death, her discoverer and longtime producer at Columbia, John Hammond, could not bring himself to listen to another chanteuse until Aretha Franklin came along.
Since the first bandleader altered a score by the first composer, popular music has been like a stew constantly simmered, seasoned and stirred. Only when an unmatchable genius lifts the stew above the other chefs' reach is the process temporarily slowed or halted. Billie Holiday helped build a new stove. Arriving on the recording scene just two years after the invention of the juke box, with radio still spreading into poorer homes and smaller communities, she did so with a limited yet unique toolbox.
Columbia producer John Hammond believed in the rough, haunted girl with the cornet-like voice, and his faith and vision went far in creating the enduring "Lady Day" image. He did what he could. He brought the best palyers from whatever bands happened to be in town at the moment into the studio for her. He worked hard in many ways to blend Park Avenue and Harlem, thus increasing live audience size for musicians from both realms.
What he couldn't do was give her a budget adequate for rehearsals, arrangements or great material. Though she was busiest in the time of America's greatest songwriters, much of the material she recorded was second-rate crap, saved from absolute lack of merit only by the treatments it received from her head, heart and throat.
Her knack was narrative. As the backing players, no matter how good they were, went through usually formulaic, softened versions of formerly syncopated melodies, she built stories. Her songs got happier, or sadder, if appropriate, verse by verse, and they did so in the voice of an ethereal "Tinker Bell" whiskering in listeners' ears.
Billie's mission statement, from a 1956 interview, was, "I wanted Louis Armstrong's feeling and I wanted the big volume that Bessie Smith got between the two of them, I sort of forgot the melody." Held to melodies through some inherent musical principal similar to gravity, she at the same time exhibited a Teflon-like coating that kept her from sticking to that melody too closely. Thus, she explored within her phrasing, sometimes within her briefest syllables, possibilities for jazz tangents that would have challenged the boldest instrumentalists. Trying to sing one of these songs in the style of Billie Holiday is instructive. Few people can come close to delivering so much as one word as she did.
Sharing these distinctive strengths and weaknesses, these new reissues are largely interchangeable in appeal, but A Musical Romance deserves separate attention, for it documents Lester Young as well as Billie Holiday, as well as the dialogue that they had and that only they could have had. Billie "Lady Day" Holiday and Lester "The President" Young gave one another their nicknames. In that and many other ways, they remained always in tandem, racing neck and neck toward some goal mutually expressed on and off the bandstands they shared on and off for a quarter of a century. Despite a lengthy period of disaffection patched up shortly before their deaths in 1959, they supported each other in utilizing a degree of improvisation rare for swing, yet less private than the esoteric language of later be-bop. It was a "scene," if you will, that they invented, that they bolstered, and that they took to their respective graves. That Columbia has recaptured it and made it available once more through this reissue is more than significant.
Charlie Christian
"The Genius of the Electric Guitar"
Columbia/Legacy
Arrives in stores September 17th, 2002
Les Paul told him, "You only play one goddam note, and you kill me!"
Christian died 3/2/42, 25 years old. His parents played trumpet and piano in a Bon ham, Texas silent movie theater. By 1934, he was soloing with a microphone held between his knees; Milt Hinton later recalled seeing him at the 1936 Texas Centennial with a "spider" microphone attached to his guitar with rubber bands. He acquired his first amplifier and electric guitar, a Gibson ES150, in 1937 and used it on all subsequent gigs. He drank little, but smoked marijuana in the back of Goodman's bus on tour.
His sound was a rare combination of urban and rural. Thelonious Monk said many years later that the reason he never used a guitar in his band was that no one could equal Charlie Christian. Some of the small combo sessions captured here can only be characterized as chamber jazz at its best.
Saxman Lester Young, though his long solo lines were a prime inspiration to Charlie Christian, voiced his opinion of the new, potentially overwhelming power of the electric guitar as, "Down with the Edison!" Young's plea to obey an older, more conservative generations sound standards precisely identifies a crucial milestone between recorded music's beginnings and today. Though compelling argument can be made that Charlie Christian at least anticipated be-bop and that the small Goodman combos in which he made his biggest mark almost perfected rock and roll, his roots were in swing jazz.
Swing jazz emphasized a rich slang so pervasive and popular that Cab Calloway annually updated the "Dictionary of Jive" during the genre's peak period. The "dolls," jitterbugs," "dishes," "'gators," "frails" and everybody else except the "squares" and "ickaroos" knew all of the bands' tools, the "belly fiddles," "gobstoppers," "plumbing," "spark jivers," "suitcases," "doghouses" and other instruments with which the "cats frisked their whiskers" both on "Armstrongs" and lower notes 'til "bright chimes," at which point they "trucked" down to a "main stem" "hash house" to "sink their pearly whites" into some "dicty chicken," unless they were "busted to their last pins" or "beat to their socks." In this parlance, any electrical apparatus, including Charlie Christian's primitive guitar amplifier, was still an "Edison," dubbed for the inventor and corporate chief of the world's first mega-power utility. For further information, grab me by the "Ameche(Don Ameche portrayed the telephone daddy in the "Alexander Graham Bell Story" film and thus became synonymous with the device in hip jive).
Thus, we hear the same volume complaint made so often by today's downtown Wilmington ickaroos captured on disc as voiced during a recording session by one of the hepcats first exposed to instrument amplification. This is just one of the significant musical moments captured on the new, four-CD set of 1939-1941 Charlie Christian recordings being reissued by Columbia Records. There are other milestones, as well, like small combo recordings featuring Count Basie with Benny Goodman and the fascinating joint participation of Charlie Christian's electric guitar and Freddie Green's four-stroke acoustic. Review copy to this point is intended to inform readers that this record is both important and entertaining, that it is "roots rock" to as great an extent as any of the early western swing releases and that it is mandatory for any serious record collection. All of this is true.
If the set has any flaw, it is that it is designed for the music historian and thus includes virtually every second of studio recording done with Charlie Christian (who died at 26) present. Though the four discs are organized as well as they can be for that special audience, for non-music historians and music historians who occasionally want to listen to music for the sheer joy of listening to music, Columbia might have included a fifth disc representing their idea of "Best of Charlie Christian." Possibly better yet, they might have included a blank CD-R so that record buyers could choose their own favorites from among the 98 cuts on the four CDs in the present set and make their own anthology based on individual choice. In short, if this release has any flaw, it is that it contains too much material, and that is probably the one flaw for a release to have if it has only one.
Reviews by Arthur "LoveWhip" Shuey