Jeff's Little Ship of Music

Allen Toussaint

2012-01-14T10:28:00.009-05:00

I am an unabashed fan of songwriters. It's been a lifelong interest: as a kid, I was already an avid reader of liner notes, and I always carefully studied who wrote the songs I enjoyed.

Today is the 74th birthday of Allen Toussaint, a living legend for anyone who cherishes joyful music that's firmly rooted in a musical tradition.

You can open up my links to read his biography. You'll be astounded by his songs that became monstrous hits for others: "Southern Nights" (Glen Campbell,1977); "Yes We Can Can " (Pointer Sisters, 1973); and "Working in a Coal Mine" (Lee Dorsey, 1966). You will also note how ubiquitous Toussaint has been throughout his career as a producer and supporting player for projects by many popular artists.

I first encountered Toussaint in the 1970s because I greatly enjoyed two songs of his that Bonnie Raitt and Geoff Muldaur had recorded. Raitt rendered "What Do You Want the Boy to Do? on 1975's Home Plate and Muldaur recorded 3 Toussaint numbers on 1976's Motion: the title cut, "Southern Nights", and "What Do You Want the Girl to Do?"

Turned out that Toussaint toiled for Warner/Reprise at the same time as both Raitt and Muldaur. Motion, his 1978 release produced by Jerry Wexler, is a treasure. It's with this album that you learn the Toussaint style: joyful numbers (like "Happiness", a song that never fails to lift me) mingled with smooth and seductive ballads ("With You in Mind"; "To Be With You"). Raitt and Etta James provide backup vocals for many of the tracks here.

Why Toussaint never made a name for himself as a singer is perplexing to me. But he didn't, and he was cast off Warners along with Van Morrison and Arlo Guthrie at the dawn of the 1980s. I fell out of touch with him then, not only due to his not releasing anything but because I was consumed with learning the Great American Songbook (courtesy largely of Sinatra and Fitzgerald).

In 1994 I spied his name on Crescent City Gold, a lovely collection in which he chipped in half a dozen songs. Then there was 1996's Connected - which gave me a chance to introduce my wife to his artistry. She liked it mostly, even though I enjoyed torturing her with these lyrics from "Computer Lady":

I met this lady while surfin' on-line
I believe she's a lady
she created that image in my mind
She came through as if she knew exactly what I needed
When she described herself to me my floppy overheated

She said she'd like the man who is so inclined
to had a strong imagination such as mine
and we could trip off when she could be free
to share some of her software with much of me

CHORUS:
Computer lady (c'mon)
make my night
drive me crazy
with your megabytes
I don't know if you're real
but until I do
Keep my modem hot, computer baby
Keep my modem hot, computer lady

Soon as I get inside, the very first thing I do
is boot up my you-know-what
and I look for you-know-who
and - whoo! - there she is just filling up the screen
with all sorts of sweet talk, just a little bit short of obscene
Saying things that we can do when face to face someday
or maybe some night based on the games we play

Just for a moment I sat back to breathe
and thought about how far we'd come from Adam and Eve

CHORUS

Computer lady, computer lady
visit without hesitation
Computer lady, computer lady
We've got a major situation

CHORUS

Keep it hot
keep it burnin'
keep it on fire
keep it hot
(repeat and fade)

Listening to this track again, I'm swinging along, feeling the happiness, and I'm also gently amused by his humor. Another reason I love Allen Toussaint is that he reminds me of a musician I knew in Chicago, a piano bar entertainer who was a beautiful player like Toussaint and who'd have surely performed this eye-rolling number. Your spirit lives, Les!

Around that time Lisa and I went to hear Allen Toussaint perform at a free concert at the bandshell in Boston. I recall sitting and waiting for the show to start and observing Allen walking alone along the Charles River. I could have easily approached him, but I thought better of it. The image will stick with me, though. Hey, it's better than the memory of saying something stupid!

Another quiet decade ensued, but then Toussaint's cherished city was leveled by a flood in 2005 and ever since then he's been working tirelessly. Prominent efforts include a collaboration with Elvis Costello (2006's River in Reverse) and actor Hugh Laurie (2011's Let Them Talk). He has subbed for Paul Schaeffer on Letterman and performed in residence at Joe's Pub in New York.

Allen Toussaint is your classic songwriter. He's little-known outside of serious musical circles, but his contributions to the field are deeply appreciated by any serious listener or player. You are in for a treat if you haven't heard of him. Come dip into some of my links and then keep your eyes out for his next project or when he sails through your hometown!

Here's Allen performing "What Do You Want the Girl to Do?". His opening remark about Bonnie Raitt will make you chuckle!

Here are the Pointer Sisters singing "Yes We Can Can". I know we can make it! Yeah!

Amazing photography in this YouTube video of "Working in the Coal Mine"

Great to have a clip of Allen singing "Southern Nights" on You Tube!

Irma Thomas had a hit with Toussaint's "It's Raining".

Are you a Robert Palmer fan? Enjoy this photo montage of him as he sings "Night People" by Allen Toussaint.

Tony Orlando

2011-11-12T05:14:00.007-05:00

An album that endures

Tony Orlando's inspiration

During my youth rock and roll supplanted my father's music. He took it in stride. Occasionally there was a small victory. Take Louis Armstrong's hit "Hello Dolly!" or the music of Bacharach and David. That provided some respite for the grownups. But for the most part the proverbial rug had been pulled out from under him. Until along came Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Tony Orlando was a song and dance man in bell bottoms. He first emerged as a hit maker with the Latin-flavored "Candida" and "Knock Three Times", but it was his partnering with two black women and their subsequent blockbuster "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" that sent them into the stratosphere in 1973.

Capitalizing on their popularity, CBS gave Tony Orlando and Dawn a variety show in 1974. My father adored it. Looking back, I can see how their show, like Sonny and Cher's, kept a traditional show business form alive. By the Watergate era, the variety show was in trouble. The Ed Sullivan Show had gone off the air in 1971, and Dean Martin and his Gold Diggers had fallen out of fashion. Sure, comedians like Carol Burnett and Flip Wilson could still get shows, but what about the singers?

Rock and roll was less dependent on TV to market its product. Instead it had the monster stadium concerts. Besides, these musicians were far less comfortable as traditional entertainers. Could you imagine James Taylor doing a standup routine, for example? That kind of presentation was viewed as utterly inauthentic and old school by the younger set. They'd rather retreat into themselves and acquire a Bob Dylan-like mystique, communicating very little with their audiences. (Why did they have to? At that time the kids just flooded the gates!)

So Tony Orlando and Dawn were an anomaly. Their patter before songs was of the standard-issue variety: Tony would say something foolish and egotistical, and the gals would roll their eyes and offer some sarcastic comeback. (Sonny and Cher followed the same model. Cher had one of the best eye-rollers in the business!)

My family watched this show together. It provided a nice bridge in a time of changing values. As kids, we delighted in how shows like "All in the Family" and "The Jeffersons" tackled racism and sexism. My parents must have felt besieged at times. But then there was Tony Orlando making nice. He had long hair and a thick mustache. He looked Hispanic - which indeed he was, with a little Greek mixed in. He was backed by black women, just like Ray Charles. But he had my parents' values.

I mean, Tony Orlando had Jackie Gleason and Jerry Lewis on his show. He loved the entertainers of the previous era. That was obvious in his hoary humor. What was most striking about him though is a quality that still draws me to him today: it was clear that Tony Orlando admired Al Jolson.

Jolie set the standard for entertainers who gave their all to an audience. Much of Judy Garland's repertoire was inspired by him. Jolson, who appeared in the first movie with sound (The Jazz Singer), was famous for leaving it all on stage (his slogan was "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet") and songs like "Mammy" and "Swanee" which recalled his early years in vaudeville doing blackface entertainment.

Al Jolson wanted to be loved every time he hit the floorboards. I love his persona and I was delighted to find Tony Orlando aping it. (Of course, this insight comes upon reflection.)

Tony Orlando and Dawn's New Ragtime Follies (1974) made the connection clear. Here was an old-time show committed to vinyl, complete with a prelude and postlude. I still love to listen to it - and I can get eye rolls from my wife when I do! "Say Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose?" and "Steppin' Out (I'm Gonna Boogie Tonight)" and a host of other songs would lift my father's spirits the moment he touched needle to vinyl.

This album is paid homage by a site called All Music. I hope that you'll take the time to read their remarks. Looking on Amazon, I see that this album was finally digitized a few years ago and has received 8 breathless customer reviews that place it on a well-deserved pedestal.

"You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet" until you purchase this release!
_______________________________

Here's Tony Orlando and Dawn singing "Sweet Gypsy Rose" on their show.

Enjoy this clip of Tony Orlando & Dawn accepting the "Best Musical Group" award at the 1976 American Music Awards show. (I love the moment where George Burns says to him, "And I want to kiss you!")

Art Garfunkel

2011-11-06T05:02:00.006-05:00

Every morning I check out the celebrity birthdays in the newspaper. Yesterday was Art Garfunkel's 70th. My thoughts have lingered upon him.

Although Art has released some fine albums and acted in at least one great film, he is mostly a sad and slightly comic figure in mind--and it's not just the hair that prompts this comment. (The hair was indirectly memorialized in So I Married an Axe Murderer. Check out Mike Myers telling his kid to put his noggin down.)

I'm also thinking about Art Garfunkel claiming that he's read over a thousand books. (They're dutifully cataloged on his website.) Or perhaps it's the image of him walking across America, or across Europe (as he's currently doing, apparently). Here's a famous guy who has always struggled to assert himself as an artist.

In regards to his acting, Garfunkel's best was his first: Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge. Sharing the screen with Jack Nicholson is definitely a career highlight, even though his departure from the studio to work on this film led directly to the breakup with Paul Simon. (Think again about the song "The Only Living Boy in New York" from Bridge Over Troubled Water and the lines "Tom, get your plane right on time/I know you're eager to fly now". (Tom was Garfunkel's name when he and Paul first started out as the duo Tom and Jerry.)

Garfunkel's acting career fizzled after the 1970s. His performances weren't embarrassing and his films were well-received: witness Catch 22 and Bad Timing.) But it seems he simply dropped out in the 1980s. That's when the walking and the writing poetry began in earnest.

His departure from the pop scene was spurred not only by the dismal sales of his solo releases in this period, but also by the suicide of his long-time girlfriend. His thoughts during this period are captured in Still Water, a collection of poetry that you can enjoy on his website. (It's pretty good, although there are some embarrassing moments.)

There's no middle ground in regards to liking his music. You either think it's unbelievably wimpy and begin immediately to ridicule it, or you fall into it because you're a sucker for soft sentimental sounds. I fall into the latter camp.

My favorite albums are 1975's Breakaway and his collection of Jimmy Webb songs that followed it, Watermark.

The former features outstanding versions of "I Believe When I Fall in Love" (by Stevie Wonder) and "Rag Doll" (by Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys--who would later pen Barry Manilow's immortal classic, "I Write the Songs").

Breakaway was initially a commercial flop. Columbia pulled it from the market and fortified it with a single ("What a Wonderful World" with Paul Simon and James Taylor providing backup vocals) before rereleasing it and enjoying a better outcome. I simply love Jimmy Webb, and there are great versions of his songs on this album, especially "Crying in My Sleep", "All My Love's Laughter" and "Marionette".

Art Garfunkel has always worked with people that I admire. Kenny Rankin provided vocal backup for him on 1988's Lefty. Richard Perry, whose name as a producer appears on many albums in my collection (since he worked with Carly Simon and Ray Charles), has produced Art Garfunkel. Why, even when Art chose to try his hand at songwriting in 2003, he selected a contemporary singer I adore, Maia Sharp, to work with him.

I've been a faithful follower of Art Garfunkel (although I declined purchasing his latest collection of standards, thinking such a sleep aid is unnecessary for me these days). I hope that he recovers from his vocal problems that may be partly due to smoking. I urge you to spend time checking out his work, as I've done for the past couple of hours it took me to put this entry together!

The Jayhawks Issue :: Paste mPlayer

2011-10-30T06:30:00.002-04:00

The Jayhawks make for quite a pleasurable listen. They hit the musical scene about 15 years or so ago and now have reunited for a new album on Rounder. Check them out! The way their voices blend is unique. If you like melodic folk-rock, this may be a group for you!

The Jayhawks Issue :: Paste mPlayer

The Bronze Buckaroo

2011-09-24T08:33:00.004-04:00

Herb Jeffries turned 100 today. He's remarkable for many other achievements besides that one.

Here he is with the Duke Ellington orchestra singing "Flamingo". This song, which has sold an estimated 14 million copies over its lifespan, established Jeffries as a singer.

Looking at the video, I'm struck by how much he and Billy Eckstine sound alike. Also it's notable that there's a certain look that white audiences found palatable with these two singers as well as with the Duke: snappy dresser, copper-toned, gelled hair, and a mustache.

Except, as this promo makes clear, Herb Jeffries had trouble at first finding an audience. Turns out that he was too white for black audiences, and too black for white listeners.

After passing himself off as a Creole and finding an audience with Ellington, Herb Jeffries did something even more remarkable: he became the world's first and only black-singing cowboy, starring in five westerns in the late '30s.

Here he is as a cowboy in a 1938 short. Terrific song, wonderful harmonizing: man, I am a sucker for that lone guitar and a song on the prairie!

I found out about Herb Jeffries in my usual way, by rifling through CDs in a used music shop and taking a chance on a release entitled Herb Jeffries: The Bronze Buckaroo (Rides Again). It must have paid $3 for it, and I haven't listened to it much, but in honor of him I'll listen to it now.

You might want to check this recording out: backup singers for this recording include Take 6, Sons of the San Joaquin, and the Mills Brothers. Herb (who's 84 at the time) duets with Michael Martin Murphey (remember "Wildfire"?) and a host of other singers.

Lou Rawls

2011-09-05T11:52:00.006-04:00

I knew him first as a lounge singer. "You'll never find," the rich baritone intoned, "a love just like mine/that can love you/the way that I do." Now here was a song that crossed boundaries! My father loved it and - though I wouldn't admit it at the time - I found it arresting too.

He was a presence on the TV screen with his campaign for the United Negro College Fund. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" was the slogan. I'd see him host telethons for this venture. The tux put him squarely in Sinatraville.

I didn't think much more of Lou Rawls until I was in a restaurant and heard his duet with Phoebe Snow on their sound system. (The song: "A Lover's Question". The CD: 1993's Portrait of the Blues. It was my first of many Lou Rawls albums.)

Lou Rawls synergized many of his predecessors. He had the smooth and liquid delivery of a Nat Cole or Brook Benton. He could perform a blues howl and holler that recalled Joe Williams in his prime with Count Basie. Given the time when he was making a name for himself, he must have provided inspiration to singers like Otis Redding. I mean, this guy delivers a lyric!

I've been grooving in my car to a 2-CD set that Capitol reissued in 2006. Black and Blue and Tobacco Road were Rawl's third and fourth albums released in the mid-1960s, and they present two strikingly different styles. On the former he dips and dives through a program on blues classics like "Kansas City" and "Trouble in Mind". He hits you hard with Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday" and Fats Waller's "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue". It is a stunning set that I guarantee will hold your attention, despite the singularity of musical style.

The latter album features swingin' Lou. It's a finger-snapper from start to finish. I especially recommend "Ol' Man River" and "Rockin' Chair". My spirits are lifted immediately when listening to this one.

Sweet Lou - I am so glad that I found you as I matured as a listener. You were one of a kind!

Memorable Music Biographies

2011-09-03T19:07:00.010-04:00

I have three music documentaries to recommend to you. Two are about subjects who led troubled lives. One is about a singer who is much more together.

First to get to our troubled subjects. Let's start with Phil Ochs. I loved There But for Fortune. Ochs was a "topical" folksinger who for a short while was head-to-head to many listeners with Bob Dylan before Dylan went electric. His songs are overtly political: ripped right from the day's headlines, as one of his albums titled All the News That's Fit to Sing puts it. Ochs's music survives today because of its startling directness, and the singer's warm, somewhat nasally delivery. There has really been no one quite like him since.

I loved watching footage of him singing songs that are seared in my memory: "There But for Fortune"; "Love Me, I'm a Liberal"; "Draft Dodger Rag" and "When I'm Gone". As the documentary proceeds and Och's great cause (ending the Vietnam War) is realized not with a bang but a whimper, you can see his enervation and frustration showing.

His drinking accelerates and debauched travels begin. Ochs's friends movingly describe his decline and descent into paranoia. It went on for around 5 years until his suicide at the age of 35. The film ends with Dave van Ronk performing "He Was a Friend of Mine" at a memorial concert. Quite moving.

I regret that Ochs didn't continue the direction he had forged when he moved to California in the late 1960s. Check out The Pleasures of the Harbor if you want to hear an idiosyncratic but powerful development as a songwriter. He would have traveled a fascinating road had he survived.

My second tragic tale is of Harry Nilsson, surely one of the most talented pop tunesmiths of the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. It's ironic that Nilsson's hit gold with "Everybody's Talkin'": it's one of the few songs that he sang that he didn't write! Perhaps you also know him for "One" (is the loneliest number that you'll ever do) or "The Coconut Song" (you put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning) or "Living Without You".

This guy had a way with melodies that made the Beatles envious. He was good buddies with John Lennon and a big drinking buddy of John's in the '70s when John was estranged from Yoko. Nilsson cranked out albums through most of the '70s, but the dawn of disco really spelled the end for him. After working on the score for Robert Altman's movie version of Popeye in 1980, he was through. No more work came from him. One assumes he drank heavily and suffered a crisis of confidence for the remainder of his life. (He died of heart problems in the early 1990s).

Nilsson's body of work is justly celebrated by anyone interested in writing moving and memorable pop songs. He was playful at times in his music and then he can slay you with a love song or a ballad of regret. He sang with a lovely voice that drove every word home. I never tire of listening to him.

I enjoyed the documentary, especially the extensive footage showing Harry recording A Touch of Schmilson in the Night. This was an album of standards that he recorded in 1973 with the great Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra. I must say, that album is a desert-island disc for me!

My last documentary is about Bill Withers (Still Bill). What a wonderful guy he is! Withers hit the top of the charts during Nilsson's time with songs like "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Grandma's Hands". The documentary covers this hectic period in his life and then reveals how he stepped away from the limelight in the early 1980s never to return again. But no drinking and no tragedy here! He was just done. He wanted to enjoy his marriage and raising his kids.

I loved Bill's journey back to West Virginia to visit where he grew up, and I was especially amused by the obvious deep admiration displayed by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West as they drop by to visit him. Bill Withers comes across as one cool cat. I was deeply moved by his character and basic decency.

Music documentaries are hit and miss, but you won't go wrong carving out 90 minutes to view any of these works!

Reaching Back

2011-08-25T21:53:00.005-04:00

What would a popular singer perform today if he or she were hewing to how Peggy Lee and other performers chose their material in the late 1950s and early 1960s?

This question came to mind as I enjoyed two 1958 sets by Lee: Things Are Swingin' and Jump for Joy. As I listened, I considered how songs on the albums were at least a quarter of a century old at the time she was recording them: "Alone Together" (1932); "Back in Your Own Backyard" (1927); "The Glory of Love" (1936); "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street" (1924): "Four or Five Times" (1927); "Cheek to Cheek" (1935); "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" (1932); and "Ain't We Got Fun" (1921).

What singer today executes a program with hit songs from the mid-1980s? Hey, what would you choose anyway? What are the "standards" from that time?

This CD is just a marvel. I've been singing along in my car for days now. Mixed in with the previously mentioned gems are songs that were merely a decade or so old, like "Old Devil Moon" (1946); "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (1945); and "I Hear Music" (1940).

I think as contemporary as Peggy gets on these sets in when she sings "Alright, Okay, You Win", a hit for Joe Williams and Count Basie in 1955 and "Music! Music! Music!", a big seller for Teresa Brewer in 1949.

So again, I'm wondering: what singer today reaches that far back? Seems to me that it just isn't done that often, at least by anyone considered a popular singer. It's a shame because great songs remain frozen the past now, no longer informed by a contemporary sensibility.

Anyway, take a trip back to popular song of yore with the sublime Peggy Lee!

If Love Were All

2011-08-24T10:04:00.006-04:00

Oh, my thoughts are with the songwriters presently, given the recent obituaries for Jerry Leiber and Nick Ashford. (The latter who with his wife Valerie Simpson wrote such classics as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing", and so many more).

I reflect upon their impact in my life and how their words stay with me. I wonder about the permanence of a great song. I also shake my head at how indifferent I am to whatever passes for popular music today. Is it as good as the music I enjoyed growing up? Perhaps my silence is judgment enough. Or perhaps I think it best to not speak about something I know little about.

I'm happy to see that Barbara Streisand pays tribute to Alan and Marilyn Bergman on her latest release What Matters Most. I'm thrilled to see the title track revived. (I first heard Kenny Rankin perform it on his wonderful album After the Roses.) I look forward to hearing Barbra's version of "What Matters Most" along with other songs in the Bergman canon.

I caught Streisand on PBS last night performing at the Village Vanguard in 2009. This was a highly exclusive show that was chock full of celebrities like Bill Clinton and Sarah Jessica Parker among the 132 witnesses. I enjoyed it deeply. I am a sucker for nightclub performances, and this one had all the trappings: a tightly assembled audience, a rich red velvet curtain as backdrop, a trio that caressed every melody, and a singer who brought the lyrics to life.

What makes me sad was how dismissive I felt that New York Times critic Stephen Holden seemed in his review of Streisand's What Matters Most. Here's what he wrote. (Italics mine.)
_______________________________________________

...Barbra Streisand yearns, sighs, and cries through lyrics by her longtime friends and muses, Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Beyond the therapy-enlightened depictions of relationships at various stages is an unquestioned faith that the traditional happily-ever-after fade-out at the end of a romantic melodrama is an ideal worth pursuing...

"What Matters Most" epitomizes a venerable but failing genre that I like to call the Big Swoon.
______________________________________________

All right. I know it's bad out there. But are you telling me that true love is passé? Or that I should rethink my definition of what constitutes true love?

Here's to any songwriter and singer willing to keep this "failing genre" alive!

Lordy, there's only so much change a fella like me can take!

Jerry Leiber

2011-08-23T16:32:00.007-04:00

Jerry Leiber died recently. Together with Mike Stoller, he crafted a slew of early rock-and-roll classics. ("Hound Dog", "Stand By Me", "Jailhouse Rock", and "Yakety Yak" to name a few.) Then, after Peggy Lee made a hit of their song "Is That All There Is?" in 1969, the duo decided to write exclusively for adults.

"The earlier market of swing and Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and Duke Ellington was pretty much gone," Leiber told The New York Times in 1995. "We liked that kind of sound and wanted to imitate it." He added: "In a way, we had helped kill it with what we had done."

I'd really like to recommend their work in the more adult, "artsy" vernacular, specifically two albums: Peggy Lee's Mirrors (1975) and Other Songs by Leiber & Stoller (1978) sung by Joan Morris.

It is on these albums that you can bathe in Leiber's poetry. Take the opening track on Peggy Lee's album, "Ready to Begin Again". In this song an old woman is dressing in front of a mirror.

When my teeth are at rest in the glass by my bed
And my hair lies somewhere in a drawer
Then the world doesn't seem like a very nice place
Not a very nice place anymore

Wow! What striking images! The song continues with a gradual build.

But I take out my teeth from the glass by my bed
And my hair from a drawer in the hall
Still the world doesn't seem like a very nice place
Not a very nice place at all

Well, at least you're moving, right? Teeth and hair in hand! We continue.

But I put in my teeth and I put on my hair
And a strange thing occurs when I do
For my teeth start to feel like my very own teeth
And my hair like my very own too

That is strange. Yet, as fellow human beings, we can understand. Now we proceed to the song's bridge.

And I'm ready to begin again
Ready to begin again
I'm reaching for the soap
My heart is full of hope
Again, again

I'm ready to begin again
Feeling like I've just begun
Now I'm not afraid
To raise the window shade
And face the sun

The song is heading into high gear now as we return for the last verse.

I put on my bracelets and brooches,
My rings and my pearls and my pins
And as the new day approaches
As the new day begins

Then back to the bridge and the final killer line.

I'm ready to begin again
Looking fresh and bright I trust
Ready to begin again
As everybody must

Peggy Lee is just perfect for this material. Nearly a decade earlier she'd scored a hit with Leiber & Stoller's "I'm a Woman" and their sassy number "Some Cats Know" had been a part of her repertoire too.

This album is gorgeous. Leiber's lyrics are transcendent. Take the words that Lee recites at the start of "Tango".

Oh, the Tango is done with a thin black mustache
A wide scarlet sash, black boots, and whip
Oh, the Tango is done with Seafarin' trash
Reelin' from hash, fresh off true ship
Oh, the Tango is done it's a dangerous dance
A treacherous step and if one should trip
The frail body breaks with a snap and a twist
And a gold watch slips onto a thick tattooed wrist
And a gray merchant ship turns black in the sun
As it heaves to the east when the Tango is done

Whew! A long way from "Yakety Yak /don't come back", wouldn't you say?

Joan Morris, recording three years later, offers her own take on many of the songs, but adds some terrific new numbers. (My personal favorite is "Humphrey Bogart" which was also sung memorably later by Jackie and Roy on Bogie, a desert-island disc for this listener!).

I'm going to keep the soundtrack to Smokey Joe's Cafe on my shelf and instead turn to the comfort of listening to Lee and Morris. I am so glad that in his 40s Jerry Leiber turned to serious songwriting. It's durable music that will always stand the test of time!

Old Friends

2011-07-13T09:20:00.006-04:00

Greg Brown Freak Flag Album Cover | Greg Brown Album Covers

My approach to following music is to basically find a performer I like and then stick with him or her. Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of this approach because (let's be honest) any performer has a limited bag of tricks that, once you're familiar with it, they will keep repeating from recording to recording. Paul Simon will always be acoustic with some interesting rhythm, for example. His lyrics will always be humorous.

Why do I keep purchasing the work of someone who I've followed for decades? Is it some obsessive-compulsive need to collect a history?

In the case of Paul Simon, when I hear a new work I always feel like I'm checking in on an old friend. His words and outlook have been in my head all those decades; there's a weird kind of conversation that's been going on. Sure, I wish it weren't one-way. I'd love to sit and chat with him. But it would be on a level quite different from his polished communication in song. Perhaps less satisfying.

So I've got shelves full of friends: singer/songwriters, some of whom I've followed very intently, others who I've attended to with half a mind. Greg Brown fits in the latter category.

I "invested" in Greg Brown years ago because of his bold difference. I mean, someone who dedicates an album to putting William Blake's lyrics to music has my attention. That's when I first checked him out.

In 1986 he was already 4 albums into his career. He'd founded his own record label (Red House) and appeared on The Prairie Home Companion.

The William Blake album didn't grip me, but I gave him another chance, and took a shine to 1992's In the Dark with You, which features the catchy "Good Morning Coffee" song.

I will bring you your good mornin coffee, will you smile
If not now then have a sip or two and maybe in a while
I love you I love you in the good mornin and in the night
Every day I wait with you wherever we are it's all right
Here's your coffee, it may still be too hot, it is freshly brewed
I'll just pour myself a cup and then I will crawl in with you

There's no one quite like Greg Brown. He's got a low drawl of a voice, but it's quite supple. He swings, he slurs, and he can glide into a falsetto--whenever the mood hits him. He's a true "Americana" artist: you'll find all the classic forms on display in his catalog (blues, jazz, gospel, country, straight-ahead folk).

His lyrics are fabulous too. I must confess that I'm unable to commit them to memory, but whenever I listen to his work I find myself thinking about how simple and direct they are.

My wife and I think of Greg Brown fondly because we saw him in concert several times when we started dating. He's a good storyteller in person, and the music is always engaging. He usually tours with guitarist Bo Ramsey, who has produced or co-produced and played and vocalized on practically half of Greg Brown's recorded output. (He's presently married to Greg Brown's daughter Pieta, 22 years his junior, which I find a little creepy.)

In the late 1990s Greg Brown began to tour less, and my interest fell off. I would dutifully continue buying his work, but didn't listen to it much. At some point I stopped--even obsessive-compulsive music buffs have their limits!

But here's the great advantage of being a collector. I took a chance and recently purchased his new CD, Freak Flag, and I absolutely love it. It displays all of the attributes that diehard fans love: a complete command of musical vocabulary, a rich voice that seems to shift with every song, and lyrics that are so arresting that they ARE staying in my mind.

Now I'm back playing my Greg Brown records and admiring his talent. It's definitely a pleasure that will endure. I'm glad Freak Flag reactivated my interest.

There's a nice description of the CD on his label's website, so check it out and then give some of my choice YouTube cuts a look and listen. Then get out there and support one of this country's great songwriters!

For a nice interview with Greg Brown, click here.

Here Greg Brown talks to Performing Songwriter about Freak Flag.

You Tube links: "Blue Car";"Who Woulda Thunk It";"Canned Goods";"You Drive Me Crazy"

Blood on the Tracks

2011-05-30T16:42:00.006-04:00

My journey to appreciating Bob Dylan was interesting. When I first began formulating my musical taste in the early '70s, I clung fast to singers with a real pop sensibility. I loved John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I always read who wrote the songs that I enjoyed, and I loved the Dylan songs that P, P, & M performed, but I simply could not get into Dylan's sound.

Plus there was the way that critics were declaring him a genius. I just thought a lot of his rhymes were nonsensical and that secretly Dylan must have been laughing at people for taking him so seriously.

Still, being my earnest self, I recall going to the library and reading up on Dylan--even taking notes on what were considered his major songs! Yep, a geek before the word had even been coined!

Anyway a complete change of heart came over with Dylan's Blood on the Tracks in 1974. Wow, did this album have distinctive songs, and his singing was intelligible and even arresting. The lyrics made sense--they told stories I could understand.

After this album, I was all set regarding Dylan. I've enjoyed his work ever since. Recently I watched a fantastic DVD on Blood on the Tracks. The critics (all British) provide a terrific context for understanding how this album fits in the Dylan canon. The stock footage of Dylan at this time is fantastic. Check it out!

And--oh yeah--Happy 70th, Bob!

Moon Tunes

2011-05-28T00:02:00.004-04:00

As a teacher, I like to start my day by commemorating "this day in history." I always share an anniversary with my students and then tie in some video. This week marked the 50th anniversary of JFK's address to Congress in which he challenged the American people to make it to the moon by the end of the decade.

Funny thing was, I was listening simultaneously to a collection of moon songs that Mel Torme recorded only a year previously to JFK's address. I have been grooving on this CD much more deeply since, and I'd like to share my enthusiasm for this project as well as for Frank Sinatra's 1965 effort on the same theme.

First to Mel Torme. I admire him so much as a singer. My word, how this guy put it together! Besides being as supple a song interpreter, he was also a terrific drummer in his own right. (He was good friends with Buddy Rich.) Mel loved to swing, and never is it more evident than in this effervescent collection.

Torme was a songwriter too (you know, "chesnuts roasting on an open fire"?), so the man appreciated clever wordplay. He kicks off this set with his own composition, "Swingin' on the Moon". All I can say is, dig these lyrics!

Are you tired of summer nights in Maine?
Do you yawn when they speak of sunny Spain?
Could you live without seeing old Rangoon?
Then come with me, and let's go swingin' on the moon

Have you had enough of London fog?
New York snow and California smog?
Would you say arrivederci to Rome in June?
Then fly with me and let's go swingin' on the moon

Let's have a honeymoon on the moon, honey
Far from the bustle of the crowd
And if your mother asks "why the moon, honey?"
Just tell her your feller has gone interstellar

Grab your hat and we'll head up in the blue
In a little rocket built for two
Baby we're goin' to blast off and before we're through
We'll leave the cares that we know
On terra firma below
While we go singin' and swingin' on the moon

Let's have a honeymoon on the moon, honey
Far from that noisy Earth below
And if your folks ask about our house, honey
Tell mater and pater we live in a crater

We're really going to enjoy a life of ease
Livin' on moonlight cocktails and green cheese
Mr. and Mrs. Space Commuter, if you please
And in a few years we might
produce our own satellite
while we go singin' and swingin' on the moon

As the song closes, Torme fades out by singing out every song title on the album to follow. Ah, the virtuosity! Then it's on to another song redolent of Mad Men and the spirit of that specific period of time. It's called "Moonlight Cocktail", and it's a dandy. Sit back and enjoy these lyrics. It's love 1960-style, baby! Roll out that cocktail wagon!

Couple of jiggers of moonlight
add a star
Pour in the blue of a June night
and one guitar
Mix in a couple of dreamers
And there you are
Lovers hail the moonlight cocktail

Now add a couple of flowers
A drop of dew
Stir for a couple of hours
Till dreams come true
As for the number the number of kisses
It's up to you
Moonlight cocktails

Cool it in the summer breeze
Serve it in the starlight underneath the trees
You'll discover tricks like these
Are sure to make your moonlight cocktail please

Follow the simple directions
And they will bring
Life of another complexion
where you'll be king
You'll awake in the morning
and start to sing
"Moonlight cocktails are the thing!"

The liner notes to this collection by Benny Green are precious. He rhapsodizes about the moon, citing sources as varied as Shelley, Byron, and Debussy. "The day that first rocket lands (on the moon)," writes Green, "these songs will become sociological curiosities. But I believe Torme's great skill in interpreting them will always commend them!"

Why, of course! But I can't agree on the songs. Much more than curiosities--as Will Friedwald recounts in Sinatra! The Song Is You, these songs have a rich pedigree. In his account of Sinatra's penultimate recording session with Nelson Riddle, 1965's Moonlight Sinatra, the author points out that many of the moon songs originated in Bing Crosby's catalog. ("Moonlight Becomes You", "I Wished on the Moon", "The Moon Got in My Eyes", and "The Moon Was Yellow")

On this 10-song set, Frank overlaps Mel four times. His additions to the theme are masterful: the album opens with his voice soaring as he renders the opening lines to "Moonlight Becomes You":

You're all dressed up to go dreaming
Now don't tell me I'm wrong
And what a night to go dreaming
Mind if I tag along?

Yep, you as a listener are gripped immediately as you tag along and nestle in the sumptuous Riddle arrangements and Frank's rich and warm baritone. I have sung along to the songs on this collection for years. It's a proverbial overlooked gem in the Sinatra oeuvre. A highlight includes lovely lyrics to Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade". Such beauty!

It's depressing to read in Friedwald's account how the relationship between Riddle and Sinatra degenerated after this project. Nelson still had around twenty years left in his career after Moonlight Sinatra but, after following it with Strangers in the Night the next year, he was done with his most famous collaborator. Although he and Frank worked again intermittently, they never released another complete project.

You can sense Friedwald's disappointment. I share the sentiment. Don't miss this account in his fine book, an indispensable reference book for any Sinatra lover.

If you'd like to luxuriate in some of the finest pop and jazz singing from the last half century, you are hereby encouraged to purchase these two outstanding collections. I promise that you'll be as moonstruck as yours truly!

Ron Sexsmith faces his doubts - Music Features - Providence Phoenix

2011-03-26T06:01:00.002-04:00

Ron Sexsmith faces his doubts - Music Features - Providence Phoenix

Here's a terrific portrait of a singer-songwriter who deserves to be more widely known. I've admired his work for years. I recall his appearance on Elvis Costello's Spectacle show on the Sundance Channel. Check Ron Sexsmith out!

YouTube segments:

Ron performs his lovely ballad "Secret Heart"

Ron performs Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" with Elvis Costello and Sheryl Crow

The Perfect Ending

2011-02-20T13:46:00.005-05:00

If you have HBO, don't miss Eugene Jarecki's documentary on the occasion of Dutch's 100th birthday.

It's got wonderful clips of Reagan's movies interlaced with the talk of politics. His son Ron is at poolside in Dixon, IL to provide commentary on his father. Very interesting to hear his take on some of his father's actions in office.

Anyway, I always listen for the soundtrack, and this film has a good one. It went from good to great on the closing credits, though, when they played "Seasons in the Sun"--as performed by the Ray Conniff Singers!

First of all, very clever--the link between "morning in America" and this song title. But even more so, picture perfect--the link between the Ray Conniff Singers and a view of the world that is dismissive of any harsh reality.

I know the Ray Conniff Singers so well from my childhood. How my father loved to play them--it must have been the perfect antidote to all the cultural upheaval occuring during the 1960s.

Groups like Ray Conniff's don't exist anymore, to the best of my knowledge, although I'm sure the need to trip out on soporific harmonizing is still completely present. Wonder what folks turn to these days...

George Shearing

2011-02-15T17:59:00.005-05:00

A major figure in jazz died recently at 91. George Shearing was a blind piano player known for "the Shearing touch". How should I describe it? I don't play the piano, so I'm not comfortable talking about the block chords that are brought up in his obituaries. No, I associate it with elegance and nuance and sophistication. Sir George invented cool in the midst of the bebop era. He integrated vibes in his most famous composition, 1952's "Lullaby of Birdland" and was always a treat for the careful listener.

I value his work with great singers like Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and (most memorably) Mel Torme. But there are two other singers who recorded with him memorably. I'd like to recommend these works to you.

First, in 1980 Carmen McRae recorded Two for the Road with Shearing. What a delicious set!--just that wonderful smooth deep voice cradled by warm piano on top-notch songs like "More Than You Know" and "What Is There to Say" as well as lesser-known gems like "Ghost of Yesterday" and the title track. Why, we're even treated to George singing on "Cloudy Morning"--the man was as smooth singing as he was playing!

Over two decades later, in one of his last works, Shearing worked with Michael Feinstein on a collection of Harry Warren songs, Hopeless Romantics. It is a constant joy to listen to if you're a singer and, if you're not, it will bring you endless peace as you go about your daily toil.

Boy, this has been a tough year--first Margaret Whiting, and now George Shearing! But both artists leave behind a rich catalog for listeners to mine.

Click here for George with Gerry Mulligan and Mel Torme

Click here for George and Carmen McRae performing "My Gentleman Friend"

Wilfrid Sheed

2011-02-06T06:00:00.004-05:00

Last month Wilfrid Sheed died. He was the writerly equivalent of my kind of singer-songwriter: his work isn't easily classifiable. I was drawn to his last work The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty. After reading in his obituary that Sheed wanted the following etched on his gravestone:

He wrote some good sentences.

I decided to go back to his book and find some, which I easily did in his essay on Indiana's Hoagy Carmichael.("...a geographical anomaly who just seemed to write generic American that sounded just right regardless of where you were--even in New York.")

Sheed fixes on Carmichael's wandering spirit, and the way he stayed balanced between worlds of the hip and square. Here are some of his prose gems on this point.

Hoagy Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if you could just find it. In fact, you'll still see him on Greyhound buses, either hoping to change his luck in the next county or heading back after failing to...

Hoagy was bewitched by the currents of jazz that carried out to Indiana over his radio in the 1920s. It was

...a force at large now that could take him a million miles away anytime he wanted it to, while--and this was the curious part--leaving him back home when it was done.

Yes! This sense of "home" is what informs so many Hoagy songs that I love: "Memphis in June" and "Rockin'Chair" being my favorites in this regard. (Let's also not forget "Georgia on My Mind" of course). But also there is that wandering that Sheed alludes to that informs other great songs in his catalog: "Stardust" and "Hong Kong Blues" come to mind immediately here.

Carmichael, a Midwesterner, straddled two worlds in popular music.

...part of him would stubbornly remain a square in the world of Hip...we would find him actually squaring off, in the other sense, with Humphrey Bogart over a matter of politics, an Indiana Republican versus a Hollywood liberal, 'Put up your dukes.' (Fortunately their womenfolk easily restrained the two bantamweights.)

Sheed is excellent in describing how Hoagy developed as a songwriter. "Stardust" was his first composition, and it failed at first as a jazz song. But it was written when popular music was pivoting from "hot jazz" to a more contemplative, less dance-oriented style of jazz. Irving Mills, Hoagy's publisher, advised him to slow down the song, and paired him with Mitchell Parish, who wrote the dreamy immortal lyrics.

Sheed writes:

And just like that "Stardust" would prove that Hoagy could actually make money being himself, keep his integrity, and eat his cake too. With one song, Hoagy became both our most and least commercial composer. And meanwhile, he had become too set in his ways to sell out, even if he'd wanted to. Before he had a hit, he had a style.

And what a style! It is so singable, so hummable. "How Little We Know", "My Resistance Is Low", "I Get Along Without You Very Well", "Lazy River", "Lazy Bones", "Two Sleepy People" and "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening", of which Sheed writes.

To my mind he clinched the title 'the great American songwriter' (if there is such a creature) once and for all with "The Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"...the whole laid-back essence of this country can be found in the multiple cool of this song.

Take up Wilfrid Sheed in this terrific collection on our great songwriters. You will be in your easy chair listening and humming for hours!

Click here to watch Hoagy sing "Hong Kong Blues" in the 1939 film To Have and Have Not

Don McLean's "Addicted to Black"

2011-01-26T18:42:00.008-05:00

Don with his mother and father

I've been a Don McLean fan for well-nigh forty years now. He always represented the total package for me: a first-rate songwriter and lyricist with a beautiful voice and a forthright, confident delivery.

He won a huge audience with "American Pie" but his moment, like that of most singer-songwriters of the period, passed quickly as disco was ushered in. McLean soldiered on, scoring a hit in the early 1980s with his version of Roy Orbison's "Crying". But throughout his career he bounced from label to label, much like Loudon Wainwright III (another songwriter hero of mine).

In his mid-40s McLean married and built a home in Maine where he and his wife (a photographer) have raised two children. Now 65, he has called his latest release, Addicted to Black, his last. Say it ain't so, Don!

It's his first album of original compositions since 1995's River of Love and it's a knockout. Don opens, like he usually does, in a rollicking style. Enjoy the lyrics while you watch Don perform by clicking here.

I'm addicted to black
addicted to black
Addicted to wearin'black on my back
It was good enough for Cisco
good enough for Lash
good enough for Hoppy
good enough for Johnny Cash

Yeah, I'm addicted to black
addicted to black
addicted to wearing black on my back
You'll be as black as the bird
Where none is the word
It's easy to hide
with black as your guide

Black makes me look thin
It makes me look "in"
It makes me look down when I'm not (it's hot)
On the odd holiday
Well, I might try some gray
But I always come back
'Cause I'm addicted to black

Black makes me look bad
It makes me look mad
It hides all the dirt and the dust (it a must)
If I'm happy and a light
Well, I might try some white
But I stay right on track
Because I'm addicted to black

Black makes me look wise
It brings out my eyes
It always insures I have flair (do your hair)
If my girl is in pink
Well, that might cause me to think
But I stay right on track
'Cause I'm addicted to black

Next comes the energetic "Run, Diana, Run," about Lady Di and the paparazzi. ("The camera always shot her everyday/In fact it shot her dead/It never really touched her/Just took her soul instead") followed by fun word play about being in love in the brisk "Beside Myself."

After that there are surprises: "Mary Lost a Ring" (zydeco!) and "Lovers Love the Spring" (lyrics by Shakespeare!). McLean then gets his country on with "Promise to Remember" before launching into a song that brought tears to my eyes. It's "The Three of Us", in which Don reflects on his long-departed parents and thinks about his own mortality.

See the picture that I'm holding
a picture of us three
standing in the summertime
at Quogue down by the sea
we stood there just a minute
Quogue is an Indian name
there were no cars back then
there were no cars back then
when the Indians came

We never traveled anywhere
we never did a thing
compared to them I guess you'd say
I'm some kind of travel king
We lived near manaramay
that's an Indian name
there were no houses then
there were no houses then
when the Indians came

When the Indians came
There were no private schools
no traffic cops
no highway rules
When the Indians came
the word alone can outlast stone
The Indians lay in holy ground
The place my parents now have found

They're buried on a hill of stone
Rocks of ages stand alone
Their names are carved for all to see
but no one knows their names but me
I remember in that picture
my life had just begun
Now the three of us are fading
The three of us are fading in an Indian sun

What a gorgeous song--if for no other reason, buy the CD for this one!

McLean continues on this theme in "I Was Always Young" before moving to the unusual but stirring "This Is America (Eisenhower)". (The song put me in mind of Phil Ochs's "Power and Glory").

This is America
a land where dreams can be
a land where hopes are strong
and men are free
this is America
a land of bluer skies
a land of brotherhood
where mountains rise
from this glory
from this power
came a man called Eisenhower

McLean ends with "In a Museum"--a contemplation on the expiring and taming of the artistic spirit.

I'm in a museum
I'm already there
They copied my features
They copied my hair
They copied my music
They copied my voice
I'm in a museum
There's no other choice

In a wide-ranging recent interview in New Zealand, Don McLean gives an insightful take on our current political malaise and holds out the possibility that he might record again if anyone were interested in working with him.

Oh, please--let's rescue this American treasure from the wilderness! If you'd like to end by watching Don McLean interviewed by the BBC about a year ago, click here.

Sinatra and Jobim

2011-01-26T05:50:00.006-05:00

In 1967 Frank Sinatra was in the throes of figuring out his place in contemporary pop music. His audience was in their 50s (like the singer himself) and the music of this generation was quickly becoming irrelevant. Where could he find inspiration?

At his creative peaks, Sinatra had innovated. There was the break from Tommy Dorsey and the resultant elevation of the singer in pop music. There was the swingin' collaboration with Nelson Riddle in the '50s, a decade full of refreshing reinterpretations of music from his catalog of a decade earlier. There was the establishment of his own label, Reprise Records, at the dawn of the'60s, and a flurry of work with Count Basie and old favorites like Billy May and Gordon Jenkins.

But he'd fallen into a rut. There was no locus of new material, no composer or composers who met the same standards as writers like Cole Porter had done for him earlier. Despite hits like "Strangers in the Night", "My Way" and "That's Life" (songs heavy on shlock for many listeners) he had to be wondering how influential he could remain.

In this professional chasm he reached for Antonio Carlos Jobim. The Brazilian composer was only 30 at the time, but thanks to the appeal of bossa nova to adult listeners in the early part of the decade, he had a stable of tunes that were known world-wide: songs like "The Girl from Ipanema" and "One-Note Samba".

Sinatra enlisted arranger Claus Ogerman to create charts and orchestrate a program of Jobim's bossa nova, along with bossa nova interpretions of three standards("Change Partners", "Baubles, Bangles, and Beads" and "I Concentrate on You") in that style. The result was a smashing artistic success. It's some of my favorite Sinatra singing.

Will Friedwald, in his definitive history of Sinatra's studio sessions (Sinatra! The Song Is You), asserts that working with Jobim required a reversal of what had become Frank's signature style.

"...Sinatra uses the form as the vehicle for some of the softest singing he had ever done...As he says in the album's notes 'I haven't sung so soft since I had the laryngitis.' All twenty bossa nova ballads feature Sinatra's sensual, supple, and super subdued vocals atop sensitive strings, understated brass...and gently undulating Brazilian rhythm, as expressed by Jobim on guitar...Sinatra offers his most uncharacteristically reverential singing here, devoid of Frankish interjection and the familiar swagger."

All of these tracks are now available, and I strongly encourage you to purchase them. You will never tire of these songs. I can only imagine how beautiful the lyrics are in their native language: their translations are so intimate and romantic. Here's Gene Lees, the translator of "Quiet Nights", writing about another song, "Dindi" in Stereo Review.

"A Jobim song called 'Jingi' (phonetically correct) sends chills up my arms and back. Sinatra's reading of it is one ofthe most exquisite things ever to come out of American popular music. It is filled with longing. It aches. Somewhere within him, Frank Sinatra aches. Fine. That's the way it's always been: The audience's pleasure derives from the artist's pain."

In Sinatra 101: The 101 Best Recordings and the Stories Behind Them, this sidebar ends the entry on "Dindi".

Sinatra was still in 'Jobim voice' when he recorded a duet with his daughter Nancy at the conclusion of his last session with Jobim on February 1, 1967. The song, "Something Stupid," became Sinatra's biggest American hit of the sixties. When the tune was later dubbed 'the incest song,' Sinatra was not amused.

I should say! By the way, Jobim was a fine singer in his own right. If you'd like to check him out, I recommend 1980's Terra Brasilis.

Don Kirshner

2011-01-25T05:17:00.003-05:00

Don Kirshner with Carole King and Gerry Goffin

On January 17 a key person in pop music history died. Don Kirshner, a rock promoter and music publisher, presided at the crossroads where the Brill Building met the Beatles. He helped develop the songwriting careers of Neil Diamond, Carole King and Gerry Goffin. He provided music for The Monkees--and The Archies! Later, on his show "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert", he helped bring acts like Billy Joel and the Police to a broader audience.

As his Guardian obituary makes clear, Kirshner was very cagey when in 1963 he sold his company's music catalog to Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia.

In 1963 Kirshner and Nevins sold their Aldon songs catalogue to Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, for $2m, and Kirshner was also installed as Screen Gems' musical director. The timing was shrewd, since the era of songwriters creating tunes for singers was under threat from the arrival of artists who wrote their own material, notably Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

It is a crying shame that this man is not in the Rock and Roll Museum! May this oversight be corrected ASAP!

Oh, and by the way: a happy birthday to Neil Diamond, who recently turned 70!

Margaret Whiting

2011-01-12T07:03:00.004-05:00

A shining star in the singing firmament went out. Margaret Whiting has died at the age of 86.

When you read her obituary, you'll learn about her distinguished lineage and her long friendship with Johnny Mercer.

I became a fan of her work in the 1980s. She recorded for a label called DRG. I have many records from this company, including releases by Johnny Hartman and a wonderful set of Hoagy Carmichael songs with Bob Dorough and others.

My favorite album is 1982's Come a Little Closer. Such a smart lineup of songs from the familiar (Cy Coleman, McHugh and Fields,Porter) and the emergent (Rupert Holmes, Peter Allen)at that time. Everything is delivered with that incredibly warm tone that her voice had, and crisp and always well-stategized but deeply felt singing of the lyric.

This record is a "go-to" for me when I want to be moved and need to be inspired to sing.

Click to hear Margaret's duet with Dean Martin

Click to hear my favorite song from Come a Little Closer, "I'd Rather Leave While I'm in Love"

Steve & Eydie

2010-12-23T05:07:00.005-05:00

They first met on The Tonight Show when it was hosted by Steve Allen. (His composition "This Could Be the Start of Something Big" would forever after be a staple of their concert performances.) He had already made a name for himself with the 1953 single "Party Doll".

His original name was Sidney Leibowitz. He was the son of a cantor and house painter. She was born Edith Gormezano, the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish immigrant parents, her father from Sicily and her mother from Turkey. Both Spanish and English were spoken at home.

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme were married on almost the last day of 1957. At the start of their marriage Steve's music continued to chart well in the United States: "Pretty Blue Eyes" (#9 in 1959), "Footsteps" (#7 in 1960),"Portrait of My Love" (#9 in 1961) and--his biggest hit of all--"Go Away, Little Girl" (#1 in 1962). Eydie hit the pinnacle of her solo success the same year with her song "Blame It on the Bossa Nova".

They first appeared on stage as Steve & Eydie in October of 1960. The country was about to change in deeply significant ways soon afterwards, and the music industry too. Already they must have felt the shift with the emergence of rock and roll years earlier. (Steve made a stab at appealing to the younger set in 1958 with "Uh-Huh, Oh Yeah".) They set their course and never wavered: Steve & Eydie were traditional pop entertainers, singing standards and guaranteeing a husband-wife shtick wherever they performed.

Throughout the 1960s they recorded together and separately in prodigious fashion. Their albums were well-loved but didn't sell well. Eydie had some success with her Spanish-language albums. She even hit the mark with singles like "If He Walked into My Life" (Grammy for Best Female Vocal Performance in 1967) and "What Did I Have That I Don't Have". They had success on Broadway in 1968 in a show called Golden Rainbow (which spawned the hit "I've Gotta Be Me" for Sammy Davis, Jr.)

They made regular appearances on TV variety shows during this period. But at the end of the decade this format was drying up. The 1970s found them, like most of their peers, struggling to reach an audience.

It was during this period that they reached their greatest artistic achievement with TV specials and albums dedicated to great pop songwriters like George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Our Love Is Here to Stay: The Gershwin Years

In terms of radio play, they had long been blackballed by virtue of being associated with a dead style. In fact, they had to change their names to Parker and Penny to get airplay and chart with their last "hit", a song called "Hallelujah" in 1979.

They met with tragedy in 1986 when their 23-year old son died unexpectedly from a heart condition. (They were performing in Atlanta when it happened, and Frank Sinatra sent his private jet there to take them to New York to meet their other son.) After a year's hiatus they were back performing and reached their last peak of high visibility when they joined Frank Sinatra on his Diamond Jubilee World tour in 1990. Of them Sinatra once said, "Steve and Eydie represent all that is good about performers and the interpretation of a song."

I grew up listening to these two. I once saw them perform in the late 1980s at the Chicago Theater. Eydie had an incredible voice; Steve was more of standard-issue crooner, but he was funny. They're both still around, although Eydie no longer appears in public. Watching them on YouTube for this blog entry has been a deep pleasure.

Check out this 1967 TV appearance on the Hollywood Palace.

Also don't miss their tribute to the Gershwins.

Songwriter Bob Merrill

2010-12-23T04:35:00.006-05:00

Among Merrill's credits: the score to Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol

When I first began developing my taste in music, I gravitated to the singer-songwriters and then simply songwriters (once I began my exploration of the Great American Songbook). It's an endlessly fascinating topic to me: the life and craft of a songwriter.

I'm a lifelong ardent reader of liner notes and song credits. Recently I was safely nestled in the dark morning with my newspapers (yep, old school, baby!) listening to a jazz vocal collection I'd recently purchased. Great music for those minutes before dawn. Anyway, a song called "Make Yourself Comfortable" had me running to the liner notes because I found it so catchy and amusing.

It was written by Bob Merrill, a prolific hit songwriter who at the time of this song (1954) was already known for Patti Page's"How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"(1952) and "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've a Baked a Cake"(1950).

1954 was a very good year for Merrill: that year he also penned Rosemary Clooney's "Mambo Italiano".

The other big year in Merrill's songwriting career was 1961. That's when he wrote the music for the stage version of Funny Girl. Yep, he's the guy who wrote songs like "Don't Rain on My Parade" and "People".

Back to "Make Yourself Comfortable". It's a novelty tune much like "How Much Is That Doggie" or "Baked a Cake", but it fits into a niche I've always loved--let's call it the "Why don't ya come up and see me sometime" Mae West niche. Here's some verses.

I've got some records here
to put you in the mood.
The phone is off the hook
so no one can intrude.
I feel romantic
and the record changes automatic, baby.

Sweetheart, we hurried through our dinner
hurried through the dance.
Left before the picture show was through.
Why did we hurry through the dinner
and hurry through the dance?
To leave some time for this.
To hug a hug and kiss a kiss now.

Take off your shoesies, dear,
And loosen up your tie.
I've got some records here.
Let's try one on for size.
I'll turn the lights low
While you make yourself comfortable, baby.

The most famous song in this niche has to be "Baby, It's Cold Outside". I was also remembering a song by Steve & Eydie called "Cozy".

Cozy
'Spose he wants to get cozy
'Spose he says put your head on my shoulder
and starts to get bolder
and my resistance is low?

My research on "Make Yourself Comfortable" led me to Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormie and a flood of memories on You Tube. So let's end with my original inspiration. Check out these links pertaining to "Comfortable".

Bette Midler's doo-wop flavored rendition

Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme version

Andy Griffith parody

Helen Forrest

2010-12-19T15:36:00.004-05:00

I've been enjoying a 2-record set on Columbia featuring Helen Forrest and her recordings with Benny Goodman in the 1940s. Out of curiosity I read her biography of Wikipedia, then I clicked on a reference to an article about her in 1972 in the Oakland Tribune. The reviewer was discussing a radio show called "40s Sounds Return to the Radio" and his dismissal of this music was abrupt and so emblematic of the time. Here's how it went.

This...visit to the 1940s might interest almost anyone. If you're of the rock generation you might want to hear the music of your parents--if nothing else for how they became the obsolete sentimentalists they are.

Yep, this attitude is what my father's generation had to endure. He would have been around my age now when he was hearing it.

Fortunately my father lived long enough to observe me fully appreciating this "sentimental" music. He'd be pleased today to learn how well it has endured.

Back to Helen Forrest. Irving Townsend in his liner notes to the album pays her a tremendous tribute.

The dream of every young singer in the late thrities and early forties was to sing with a name band...For one girl, Helen Forrest, the dream came true three times. She sang first with Shaw, then with Goodman, later with James. She must have been the luckiest girl in the world.
And yet, Helen Forrest was not the luckiest of singers after all, because it was her misfortune to make her mark as a singer before singers were in fashion. She was up there, the professional who had arrived while Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee were still dreaming the dream. She was the singer in a musicians' era, the only girl on the bus, the girl every girl envied while it seemed that Helen Forest had gone as far as a singer could hope to go. Her timing was unfortunate, for Helen Forrest, the madonna of the middle chorus, was and is one of the finest singers ever to sing a popular song. that is why she got there. But the first chorus still belonged to Benny...
These, then, are the songs and the sounds of the precarious period when the beat, the brass, and the bravura of the thirties was giving way to a time when words were to catch up with the music, when the singer took over the band.

She's completely deserving of these words. I cherish this album as much as I do my 2-record set of the recordings of Ivie Anderson and Duke Ellington.

Give Helen Forrest a listen! Here she is singing "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" with Benny Goodman and "I Only Have Eyes for You."

Comin' Home Baby

2010-11-27T12:12:00.009-05:00

I loved the movie An Education. Set in 1962, it captures period details in such a picture-perfect manner. What a fascinating time that was--the year before the Beatles hit America and the music landscape changed for certain!

Ray Charles's "Hit the Road Jack" won a Grammy for Best Rhythm & Blues Performance that year. It was also the year that Mel Torme recorded my favorite song on the soundtrack to An Education: "I'm Comin' Home".

"I'm Comin'Home" by Mel Torme

Hearing the organ in this song, I was reminded of how it almost instantly makes a song cool or hip. Why don't you hear it more often? Frank Sinatra got the shot of hipness he desperately needed after the Beatles landed when Nelson Riddle inserted an electric organ into the 1966 arrangement for "That's Life".

"That's Life" by Frank Sinatra

"Cmon' Home" was first a Herbie Mann instrumental. He played jazz flute--another instrument that adds a terrific flavor to a song. Sit back and enjoy his version of the song.

I'm glad that Michael Buble is around and opening the door to the Great American Songbook for generations of young listeners. Turns out he appreciates "I'm Comin' Home" too.

Michael Buble version

When I was researching this song, I came across a hilarious staging of it on TV.

Here's "Comin' Home" performed by Mel on The Judy Garland Show. Dig the boa-feathered gals on the motorcycles and the way Mel shindigs. Priceless!

Also discovered in my research was a group called The Peddlers who employed the organ in their music and interpreted standards in an original contemporary way. Check out their version of "What'll I Do".

Mining a song is fun! I'm grateful to collections like The Leopard Lounge: Swinging Lounge Tunes from The Atlantic and Warner Vaults that inspire searches like I've just done. Consider buying it!

C'mon and Hear!

2010-11-07T05:28:00.004-05:00

I've resisted listening to Michael Feinstein for years. You'd think I would love him. Over the years he's released songbook albums dedicated to the masters like Gershwin and Porter and lesser-appreciated talents such as Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone. My sister loves him, and she'd openly wonder why I didn't listen to him, especially given my long-standing admiration for Bobby Short.

It's just that whereas Short was always effervescent and passionate when he sang, Feinstein always seemed to me to be cool and highly mannered. He'd sit at the piano with this constant angelic grin on his face and listening to him I felt nothing. So the guy helped the Gershwins' work, gaining the confidence of Ira in the late 1970s. It's a nice story. But he's still boring!

I warmed up to him,though,when he released a collection of Jimmy Webb songs. The sweeping orchestrations lifted Feinstein's vocals and brought a hyper-dramatic tone to Webb's lyrics. I was starting to be moved by what I was hearing.

Feinstein further gained my respect with the 3-part series, Michael Feinstein's American Songbook, which aired recently on PBS. If you love the history of popular music as much as I do, this is a DVD that you may have to put on your Christmas wish list. It's on mine!

What makes the series so remarkable is its clarification of Feinstein's life mission: to preserve the popular music of yesteryear through fastidious archival work and to insure its vitality through performance.

So we're treated to the sight of Michael Feinstein with a mask and rubber gloves on as he rummages through the mold-ridden garage of a sheet-music collector. We shake our heads in amazement as he visits Joe Franklin, New York's longtime late-night talk show host. Hey, most people would call Franklin's surroundings a shining example of the hoarding illness depicted on TLC. But that's all about saving things that aren't essential. Franklin's digs are a gold-mine to any music or pop-culture lover. Hope you got Joe to sign over his belongings to you like Ira did, Michael!

We see Feinstein in the basement of his home, digitizing old tapes and discs of radio shows that he's acquired by visiting "hoarders" like Joe Franklin. An especially moving moment is when he visits an elderly Margaret Whiting and plays her an old radio show on which she appeared. Looking into her eyes as she listens, we can only imagine what she is feeling, but we know it must be deeply pleasurable.

The series also tells the history of twentieth-century popular song. We learn that the invention of amplified sound in the form of the microphone was a watershed event, and we're treated to outtakes of many great performers like Al Jolson, Lena Horne, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. Figures such as Ethel Waters (who Feinstein posits was more influential on singers than Louie Armstrong) and Alice Faye (who introduced much of the popular songbook in film) are also given their due.

A rich calvacade of musicians--Paul Whiteman, Mitch Miller, Duke Ellington and man more--are placed in historical context by Feinstein. I was furiously taking notes.

I can't wait to get this DVD on my shelf next to the books in my musical history library. Rent it on NetFlix and get hooked like me!

Is the Hit Parade Over?

2010-09-06T11:49:00.005-04:00

"The reliance on album sales is very 20th century."
--Cliff Chenfeld, owner of indie label Razor & Tie

I remember when I was in fifth grade my friend and I used to quiz one another on the top 10 hits of the week. We'd list them on a blackboard down in her basement. Guessing the label the single was on was part of our game.

Of course, this is back in the day when I probably also carried around my 45s in a neat plastic canister or carrying case. Ah, such innocence!

I'm sorry in a way that my children will not have the same pleasure. As an article in The New York Times made resoundingly clear, there are many revenue streams to consider before you can honestly declare a single a hit. It's all very complicated. I imagine Billboard Magazine has expanded their lists to accomodate every scenario.

It's funny, though, that vestiges of the 20th century metric still remain. According to the Times article, album sales are still an industry shorthand for success. Makes me think about what I read about the movie business in the paper this morning. It's another industry that is too heavily wedded to the old metric. Films like Kick-Ass are declared flops based upon their opening weekend box-office take, when in reality if you look over the long-term they return handsomely on their investment.

Also, in today's Times is an article about a song introduced on YouTube that's racking up sales as a single.

It's a fascinating time for the music business. I marvel at how quickly someone can now have a "hit". I wonder openly how much longer anyone can have something even remotely able to be called a career.

Glen Campbell: A Voice I Can't Forget

2010-09-04T19:07:00.010-04:00

Glen Campbell has always been one of my favorite pop singers. He delivers a lyric with such clarity and authority. Recently I've been revisiting a 1974 album he did of mostly Jimmy Webb songs. It's a majestic collection, and there's something about his voice that is timeless. I've been thinking about his career lately.

Many people first got to know Campbell through his first hit, "Gentle on My Mind" (written by John Hartford). Once he'd scored with that song, the hits just kept on coming from 1967 to 1969: "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman" (all Webb songs). Let's not forget "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" either, or his wonderful album of duets with Bobbie Gentry. (Check out "Little Green Apples)".

As these hits rolled out, Campbell also had a successful variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. He also co-starred with John Wayne in True Grit. Quite a heady time!

In the 1970s Glen Campbell managed to record two best-selling singles: "Rhinestone Cowboy" and "Southern Nights". As the decade closed, though, it was clear that his 15 minutes had passed.

Somewhere around this time I heard of Glen Campbell in the tabloids--mainly about his troubled relationship with Tanya Tucker. Apparently Glen had abused alcohol and drugs. Looking up his biography on Wikipedia, it's clear that his personal life was a royal mess. He's been married four times. (He's been with his current wife for the last 28 years.)

Glen Campbell recorded many terrific albums for Capitol, but he left the label after a disagreement over Jimmy Webb's "The Highwayman", a song he recorded and thought (quite rightly) should have been released as a single. Several years later he put out an album of Jimmy Webb songs on Universal that I adore. If you want to revisit Glen Campbell, I cannot recommend enough Still Within the Sound of My Voice.

He returned to Capitol in the late 1980s and put out a string of wonderful albums. You can't go wrong purchasing any of them. But somewhere in the mid-1990s he seemed to have dropped out. I don't know, maybe he was recording for the Christian market, or maybe he was working hard at his theater in Branson, but I didn't hear of him.
I did get to see him, though, at Foxwoods Casino. (That's as close to New England as he'll probably get!)

A couple of years ago Glen Campbell put out a new album of material, Meet Glen Campbell. It was a stellar collection of songs by rockers such as Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and Travis. At 72 he was still in superior voice. I hope the release met his expectations, and that he'll record again.

So here's to Glen Campbell! An incredible singer and guitar player with a storied career that dates back to rock's early days. Lend him your ear once again!

Click here for Glen's interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air".

Right On, McCue!

2010-08-26T19:10:00.007-04:00

It seems that every summer my wife and I discover someone new and exciting. This year is no different. Allow me to introduce Anne McCue to you.

I knew of her work by virtue of her CDs being inexpensive at my local used CD store.

I'm willing to take a chance on an artist if the risk is minimal. In her case, her CDs were priced at $3.99 (promotional copies). My interest was piqued because she looked interesting--a blonde wielding an electric guitar. It seemed like she wrote most of her material, and I liked the song titles. So I was ready for more.

I enjoyed the CDs well enough, but they were retired to my shelves until I noticed her name on the bill at one of my favorite clubs in the Boston area, Johnny D's. Then my wife and I began listening again to the two releases I owned. Acclimated to her material, we eagerly awaited the gig.

Anne McCue was a wonder. She is tall and striking, and she was blessed with monster band at the gig. Oh, how I love to be in a club having that wall of sound envelop me! I find her work mesmerizing. She takes great pains to write good lyrics and tell a story, as well as playing the electric guitar for all it's worth.

I told her that I'm so grateful to know her material because she stretches me as a listener. I love her lyrics and her singing, but her guitar work educates me in the joys of high amplification and long improvisations.

She has a dry wit on stage, and her Australian accent will echo in your head long after the concert is over. She works closely with Jess Leary, who sings harmony and plays rhythm guitar. Great combo!

Her latest release is Broken Promise Land. Follow the links in this blog to learn more about this exceptional artist and, by all means, if you're lucky enough to have her appearing in your area, go to see her!

______________________________________

David Bowling, writing on the site BlogCritics, has this to say about Anne McCue's latest effort.

She improvises songs "in a manner that would have made Jimi Hendrix proud."

"For the album, she has wisely surrounded herself with a veteran rock rhythm section. Bones Hillman of Midnight Oil and drummer Ken Coomer of Uncle Tupelo/Wilco lay down a solid foundation upon which she builds her guitar sound. While some tracks add a second guitarist and some brass at times, I can’t help but think it is within the structure of a basic power trio that she is at her best. The focus there is upon her vocals and guitar, which is where it should be.

A blogger named Simon, writing on the No Depression site:

Described by McCue as “a tribute to some of my favourite bands and guitarists” at its heart is McCue's reverence to her musical influences on which she draws heavily without allowing them to dictate the end product - it's no generic tribute but a real sum of its parts, the writing, the vocals, the guitar work and production, keeping control of all aspects McCue has put together the album she wanted to make - there’s no for me this is her best yet, nailed on.
__________________

Check out Anne performing the single from the new CD, "Don't Go to Texas (Without Me)".

The Song Is Ended

2010-08-20T08:41:00.012-04:00

My heart is heavy right now. I've just finished Haunted Heart, a biography of singer Susannah McCorkle. In it author Linda Dahl lays bare how McCorkle struggled with mental illness. I never appreciated how deep was the emotional hole she lived in.

I fell in love with her singing in the late 1970s, around the time my consciousness of what constitutes great lyric writing was raised by the Ella Fitzgerald songbooks. At that time Susannah McCorkle had released several of her own songbooks (of the songs of Johnny Mercer, Harry Warren, and Yip Harburg) that introduced her to American audiences.

I was delighted by her work. These albums became a prized part of my collection, held in equal esteem with Bobby Short's songbooks and the Revisited series produced by the "incurable insane" Ben Bagley.

What I admire about these works is the light they shed on terrific songs by great composers that didn't make posterity's final cut. They gave me an avenue to pursue in my listening after I'd fully digested the "standards".

Many of these obscure songs were pickled in humor and vibrant wordplay. How easily my spirits were raised when I sang along with Susannah to Harry Warren's "I Take to You" (like a duck takes to water/like the Irish to a stew/like a lover to a night of dreaming/I take to you) or Yip Harburg's "Thrill Me" (let your kiss delicious/have a tinge of vicious/though it's all fictitious).

Susannah McCorkle was one of those special singers who made me remember a lyric upon first listen. I later learned that she was a fiction writer as well as a singer. No surprise there: she really "told the story" in a song, choosing to focus exclusively on the lyric.

It's amazing how many singers disregard this concept. Instead of communicating the lyric straight, many of them attend to the musicality of vowels and consonants, either bending or stretching them in order to contribute their voice as an "instrument" to the overall sound. You'll find this approach from many singers who, unlike Susannah McCorkle, studied jazz in college.

Susannah's inspiration was Billie Holiday. That's both a blessing and a curse. Early in McCorkle's career, her vocal similarity to Holiday undoubtedly brought her attention, much like it has for Madeline Peyroux today. Additionally, McCorkle's mining of lost gems from the great songwriters distinguished her, especially when you consider her work was in an era (the '70s) when jazz singing was at a nadir.

Im my memory Holiday rarely, if ever, scatted or had long instrumental solos in her songs. They're all very tight, running 2 to 4 minutes. It is all about story-telling with her: you are gripped by her words because she seems to be baring her soul, as if the song was written for and about her. This is the trick of the great singers.

In Haunted Heart, Linda Dahl explains that McCorkle was often criticized for the constraints she put upon the musicians who played behind her. Considering that she was paying for their time, I have little sympathy for them, and I regret the hard time that they gave her. I know it led to a less than enjoyable creative experience, but respect must be paid for what McCorkle was trying to achieve: unrelenting focus on the words and emotion of a song.

The Songbook series gained Susannah McCorkle notice with mainly the cognescenti in Manhattan. Her 1982 album The People That You Never Get to Love showed her moving a new direction. Linda Dahl notes:

(The People That You Never Get to Love was) a new departure for her, an album she hoped would take her career to a younger audience...(it) stressed contemporary material...Susannah set herself against the trend of that time. While pop singers were "crossing over" (here Dahl cites Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt), Susannah was going in the opposite direction, from standards to pop.

To characterize the music on this album as pop is a real stretch. The title track, written by Rupert Holmes (of "The Pina Colada Song" fame) is the only number that might appeal to a non-jazz audience.

No, the only change here is that McCorkle is widening her net. She chooses individual songs by jazz songsmiths--once again, as with the songwriting masters, she selects obscure songs that deserve revival. What impeccable taste McCorkle displays!

But that's not the major reason why these songs were selected. Songs like "I'm Pullin' Through" were chosen because they directly reflect a painfully familiar emotional state for Susannah. I can only imagine how difficult this song (about thanking people who have lifted you out of a depression) is to hear for anyone who knew her well.

I'm pullin' through
and it's all because of you
If your turn came
I hope it never will
'Cause I've been through the mill
I won't forget this debt
I'm pullin' through

In a way, the only audience McCorkle sought to satisfy was herself. Singing was a release for her, one of the few ways she found happiness. She chose songs that told her story, undoubtedly believing that they would be the best songs to sing because her heart would be fully into the lyric.

I completely understand this point of view. I heartily recommend this album as the one Susannah McCorkle release to own. The emotional pallette presented is complex.

There's the wistful regret (a signature emotion for Susannah) in the title song and in her rendering of Blossom Dearie's "Bye Bye Country Boy". There's nostalgia expressed in Neil Sedaka's "The Hungry Years" and "I Have the Feeling I've Been Here Before". There's aching desire in "Alone Too Long" (written by Arthur Schwartz/Dorothy Fields). There's acceptance of sorrow in "Rain Sometimes", an outstanding song written by Arthur Hamilton of "Cry Me a River" fame.

Still evident is Susannah McCorkle's sprightly side in Dave Frishberg's "Foodophobia" and Burton Lane and Frank Loesser's "The Lady's in Love with You". As a listener, I found these upbeat songs a welcome relief from the ponderousness of most of the album.

As I write, I'm looking at Susannah's signature on my album. I heard her live for the first time at Rick's Cafe in Chicago. I recall her sitting for a while at my table. My friend and I found her very sweet and engaging. I hope she took some encouragment from the fact that a young guy like me dug her music.

The next time that I saw her was in a 1983 show called "Songbirds of Jazz" with Maxine Sullivan and Carol Sloane. I enjoyed my exposure to Maxine Sullivan, who had a sweet, swinging style (minus Susannah's intense emotional engagement). Sullivan was straight-ahead in her delivery, much like Susannah, and unlike Carol Sloane, who scatted much more like traditional jazz vocalists will do.

I still followed Susannah as time went on, but I became gradually disenchanted with her work. I loved the appearance of one more Songbook (Thanks for the Memory: Songs of Leo Robin), but that was the last truly energetic release. From then on her releases were too heavily weighted with sad, slow numbers.

Take 1985's How Do You Keep the Music Playing? as an example. She slows down what should be a stirring anthem ("There's No Business Like Show Business") and remakes it almost into a dirge. (Dahl reveals this is due to McCorkle learning that Irving Berlin, like her, possessed a "dark edge of depression".) I found it practically unlistenable. I was also displeased to see old familiar standards like "A Fine Romance" and "Check to Cheek" on the album. "Been there, done that," I thought as I listened and heard nothing new being brought to their interpretation. (Although, thankfully, they weren't slowed down!)

Still, McCorkle was worth listening to for me because of finds like "While the City Sleeps" and her deft handling of Brazilian songs like "Outra Vez". (A fluent speaker of Portuguese, she was soon to release Sabia, a wonderful collection of bossa nova numbers in both English and Portuguese.)

I found 1986's Dream, worth skipping, save for her rendition of Paul Simon's "Train in the Distance". This album starts to show record label pressure being applied to her selection. (How else to account for old familiars like "Bewitched" and "All of Me"?) Great photos of Susannah as a child on the back cover, however.

I still collected her music, although with less eagerness than before. I was glad that I could always count on a discovery, some song I'd never heard before. But these numbers were always sandwiched between the old familiars.

I continued to hear Susannah McCorkle live when I had a chance. I know I saw her twice at Scullers in Boston--once by herself, and the other time on a program with Mark Murphy. I still enjoyed her. I had no idea of the turmoil she was experiencing, including the fact that she was insecure about her appearance.

The last time I saw her is when she made an appearance at a local Borders. It was a program expressly intended for children. Susannah's idea seemed to be that the standards had the ability to appeal to their born musicality. Anyway, I talked to her a bit then. She did strike me as being kind of low at the time.

I was devastated when I heard about her suicide a few years later. To me, the musical world really lost a singer of significance. Who has taken her place? I continue to search for other jazz singers that have a similar appeal, to no avail. The closest I've come is either Carol Fredette (who is quoted several times in Dahl's biography) or Mary Cleere Haran (whose eridition reminds me of McCorkle).

After reading Haunted Heart, I was so moved by her struggle, and her courage on a professional level. I find myself continually thinking of the deeper meaning of her art. Her complete dedication to the lyric left her vulnerable. Most listeners are not like me; they don't remember the words of a song most of the time. Most jazz listeners expect an interplay between singer and supporting players.

Susannah McCorkle always stood apart. A decade after her death, her work continues to raise the question: What constitutes jazz singing? pop singing? She was a hybrid and suffered enormously from not neatly fitting into either category.

I miss her so much.

Click here to see the only video I could find on-line of Susannah McCorkle. It's part of an interview with Charlie Rose.

Click here to listen to "Fresh Air" program that aired a week after Susannah McCorkle's death. Terry Gross was a passionate promoter of her work.

I also recommend David Hajdu's essay on Susannah McCorkle from his collection Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture.

The Second Time Around

2010-08-12T12:59:00.006-04:00

As you can tell by reading my blog entries, I am an enormous fan of the singer-songwriter. I've been writing about my favorites since I began this blog a couple of years ago. It has struck me that I've yet to write about the two giants in my esteem: Randy Newman and Paul Simon.

Perhaps I figure that there's not much to say. They practically created this musical category. Their music will endure because any future practitioners of the craft must study their work.

I was pleased to read in The New York Times today that Paul Simon's musical The Capeman is being performed again in Central Park this weekend. How clearly I recall his struggle to get the financing and get this work on Broadway in 1998! (He began the project in the early '90s. Basically, he spent almost a decade on it!) I made a trip to New York to see the show and loved it. I was crestfallen to then learn that it had been cancelled after only 68 performances.

Boy, Paul Simon must have felt so stung after that! I'm sure that he sunk some of his own personal fortune in it, along with his creative capital. In the years since, I've seen practically no discussion of this work in the press about the singer. Who knows? Maybe the topic is out-of-bounds!

Anyway, it is a typically terrific Paul Simon record, filled with sinuous rhythms and top-notch lyrics. The article in the Times suggests that perhaps this weekend-long revival is an opening step towards a re-introduction of the work on Broadway. (The argument is that audiences are now more open to it, given the success of shows like Fela! and In the Heights.)

I'm hoping that happens. As I also hope to one day again see Faust, Randy Newman's stab at a musical. I saw it at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and adored it. I was disappointed that it never made it to New York.

Both works definitely deserve a second look. If you've never heard them before, get listening!

Click here to watch Paul Simon sing "Bernadette" from The Capeman. Dueting with him is one of the stars from the 1998 show, Marc Antony.

Clikc here to watch Bonnie Raitt perform "Feels Like Home" accompanied by Randy Newman. It's from Faust.

Magic Merle

2010-07-27T10:10:00.006-04:00

I love programming my music when I travel South, as I did recently. I always make sure that I have one of my favorite compilations, Saturday Night Shuffle: A Celebration of Merle Travis, at the ready. I was drawn to this 1993 collection by the players on it: John Hartford, Vassar Clements, and Buddy Emmons were the names that popped for me. I also knew that Merle Travis was famous, but I wasn't certain why. Scanning the song list, I recognized "Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon". Certainly that was enough background to dive in.

I was immediately impressed not only by the songs, but by the level of musicianship on display. As I later learned, Travis was an innovator on the guitar, and it's quickly evident on this CD: there is some sweet picking here, unlike anything I had in my music collection. Travis was noted for his syncopated style of playing, and you can hear it right away.

Regarding the picking, among the masters regaling your ears here are Thom Bresh, a son of Merle Travis, and Marcel Dadi, who is credited with introducing the French to Merle Travis. Just listen to how smoothly Dadi renders the title track. I never tire of listening to this cut! And let's not forget that this collection also features the great Chet Atkins as a guest artist. He is credited with championing and propagating Travis's unique style.

But it's the singers and the songs that close the deal for me. I did not know that legendary fiddler Vassar Clements had such a fine voice. He kicks off the program with the swinging "There Ain't No Cow in Texas". It's a fun number that has this set structure where you keep throwing in the names of different states and what they're famous for. For example:

There ain't a cotton patch in Mississippi
There ain't a commercial on TV
There's not an orange tree in Florida
Or a guitar in Nashville Tennessee
Now Boston ain't got no more baked beans
And Michigan ain't got no Kalamazoo
There ain't a cow in Texas
Baby if I don't love you

Buddy Emmons takes the lead on this one on his steel guitar, and a delicious sax solo gets the program jumping. This song always gets me in a good mood.

The next song is one that is burned in my memory. I sing it to myself whenever I have the blues. "Me and the Doggone Blues" is just plain comforting. It's not a hoot and holler or a moanin' kind of blues, it's just softly melancholy. Nice to sing as you're just walking along somewhere by yourself.

Me and the doggone blues
We're together all the time
The blues is blue
And I am too
So we get along just fine
Ain't never been apart
So don't never expect to lose
So pal of mine
You'll always find
Me and the doggone blues

I just ride along on this collection. One tune leads naturally to another, and your journey is on clouds of beautifully picked guitars and sweet fiddle playing. The songs themselves are so beautifully written too. Ever hear the song "Nine Pound Hammer"? It's by Merle Travis. So is the wonderful "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)".

Travis was born in coal country (Muhlenberg County, Kentucky) in 1917. After playing on the radio in Cincinnati in the late '30s and early '40s and serving briefly in the Marines, he moved to Los Angeles and signed with Capitol Records. Two of his hits from this time are on the CD in a medley: "Divorce Me C.O.D." and "So Round So Firm". In the 1950s Tennesse Ernie Ford made "Sixteen Tons" a million-seller, and Travis has a TV show, along with appearing in several movies. (He's in From Here to Eternity!)

It's upsetting to learn that Travis had some deep personal problems. He drank too much during this time, and was involved in several violent incidents. He also suffered from crippling stage fright. What a shame! I mean, this guy had such talent: in addition to being a genius as a musician, he was a taxidermist, a photographer, a cartoonist, a prose writer, and an expert at watch repair.

Thanks to Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 1972 collection of roots music, Merle Travis was able to revive his career. His last decade or so was spent recording heavily. He died in 1983 at the age of 66.

By all means take a chance on Merle like I did. I just know that you'll get hooked!

Click here to see and hear Merle Travis perform "Cannonball Rag"

Here's where you'll find Merle performing in a 1951 "soundie". He's doing a duet called "Too Much Sugar for a Dime". (It's also on the CD.)

Finally, here's Travis in a cameo from 1953's From Here to Eternity.

Master of Melancholy

2010-07-20T18:54:00.022-04:00

I fell in love with Jimmy Webb after listening to his 1977 album El Mirage. I knew of him earlier before, of course, due to the fame he had achieved writing hits for the Fifth Dimension ("Up, Up, and Away"), Glen Campbell ("By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Galveston" and "The Wichita Lineman"), Art Garfunkel ("All I Know") and—how could you forget?—Richard Harris ("MacArthur Park" and "Didn't We").

El Mirage was my first exposure to him as a singer of his own material. I later learned that he'd been trying to make it as an act since at least 1970. (That year, as "Jimmy L. Webb", he'd released Words and Music on Reprise. Four years later Asylum—the label associated with Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and the Eagles— released his Land's End.)

Webb's voice is gravelly at some turns and thin and reedy at others. It's a taste I quickly adapted my ear to because the songs on El Mirage were so magnificent. There's the deep regret (a thematic hallmark) expressed in "If You See Me Getting Smaller I'm Leaving" and "Mixed-Up Guy". There's the utter poetry of "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" (a hit three years earlier for Judy Collins) and the elegiac "P.F.Sloan"(a redo from the Words and Music album).

Webb's melancholy songs were beautifully arranged, produced, and conducted by none other than George Martin. El Mirage is gorgeous, but it was released at least five years late. It slammed into the disco wave and fell on deaf ears—save for my grateful ones, of course.

Around this time I also enjoyed Watermark, Art Garfunkel's masterful collection of Jimmy Webb songs. (Give "All My Love's Laughter" and "Marionette" a listen.)

I didn't hear much from Jimmy Webb again until I enjoyed Glen Campbell's 1988 release Light Years. What a fabulous album! I was entranced by it during a train ride from Chicago to Boston. (Yes, I was listening on my Walkman!) If you haven't thought of Glen Campbell for a long while and are looking to pick up something by him, grab this album. It features magnificent orchestrations, crystalline vocals, and unforgettable songs like "If These Walls Could Speak", "Lightning in a Bottle", and "Our Movie".

Searching for more Webb in record shops, I found 1982's Angel Heart. It's wonderful (of course) with many songs sweetened by background vocals provided by such luminaries as Daryl Hall, Kenny Loggins, and Michael McDonald. Some of these songs would appear on other releases by Art Garfunkel. None of them brought him the acclaim that he'd earned in the 1960s.

Singers with good taste couldn't forget Webb, though. Linda Ronstadt was also an admirer of Jimmy Webb, and she featured several of his songs on 1989's Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, her last big album. Take a moment to sample her sweet interpretation of "Adios".

Four years later Jimmy Webb tested the waters again as a singer with Suspending Disbelief. (The early 1990s brought a renewed interest in the singer/songwriter.) After a decade or more away from the studio, Webb came back stronger than ever on this CD. It's chock full of his sweet melancholia ("I Don't Know How to Love You Anymore"), but it's also laced with humor ("Elvis and Me") and a song called "What Does a Woman See in a Man" that simply knocked me out. Check out these lyrics.

He stinks to high heaven—half-covered with hair
And grunts just like some old orangutan
While she smells of clean skin and a trace of jasmine
And speaks like a first rate librarian..

Doesn't she know that she's unique
Doesn't she know that he's just a freak of nature
Overbearing, insecure, wanting love but so unsure
Loving her because she's pure

And yet, dreaming of orgies in Vegas or Cannes
He preens and strikes poses Olympian...
He brags about knocking the world on its ass
But oh, when the shit hits the fan
She'll bail him out, she's the one with the clout
Only she knows how humankind ever began
What does a woman see in a man?

This release really sealed Webb's fate. He was destined never to have a hit album of his own. It's a shame that a wider audience has never become aware of his vocal talents. To this day, he's still insecure about his singing, but I think it's just fine. There are many who are much worse (hello, Tom Waits!) but have been overcome that obstacle.

Anyway, Jimmy Webb seemed to have thrown in the towel with 1996's Ten Easy Pieces. It's a lovely collection of his work from decades past done just with Jimmy singing and playing a piano. Very tasteful: it struck me as a CD you'd hear as you're going down for a meal at a bed and breakfast. I didn't expect to hear from him again. Still, I was glad to see that he began to make club appearances after this release. I recall a hushed and terrific evening hearing Webb solo in a jazz club during this time.

A year later Jimmy Webb produced Film Noir, a collection of saloon standards sung by Carly Simon. (She co-wrote the title track with him.) It's a gauzy and dreamy release that went nowhere.

In 2003 Michael Feinstein sang a program of Jimmy Webb songs called Only One Life. What a lush tribute! Jimmy Webb arranged the piano for all the songs and produced this masterwork. The crisp vocal renditions turned me into a Feinstein fan immediately. On the album he sings "Time Flies", a song that Rosemary Clooney had been including in her repertoire and that continues to be performed by cabaret artists.

The album was a complete triumph. Perhaps encouraged by its success, Webb returned with another collection of originals a couple of years later. 2005's Twilight of the Renegades is superb. Many of the songs on this collection were written over the past 15 years, and they're all winners. I especially recommend a song about Paul Gauguin that opens the set, and "Class Clown" about a boy from Webb's youth. But sweetest of all is "No Signs of Age".

But you show no Sings of Age, no sign
Still clear like a glass of good wine
The secret of youth
Surely is yours
Your beauty endures
And love never dies
It will not disengage
In my memory tonight
You show no Signs of Age

I hope this isn't the last collection of new songs from Jimmy Webb. Recently he's been doing publicty for Just Across the River, his latest release. I'll probably buy it, but not with great enthusiasm because it features all his old familiar work. It's like Ten Easy Pieces over again, but this time the trick is that Webb is joined by a cast of admirers: Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, Mark Knopfler, etc. Not a strong drink for a huge fan like me.

But Jimmy Webb is 63, and I'm hoping that there's much more music to come from him. I encourage you to take the time to enter his musical world. It is rich music made for grown-ups. You'll fall in love with it.

Click here for a recent NPR interview with Jimmy Webb.

Click here for an interview with him in The New York Times.

Boy Wonder

2010-07-19T18:49:00.004-04:00

If you're a guy who plays the piano in pop music, your predecessors loom large, because they are so few. Who comes to mind for you? Elton John in his high platform shoes? Billy Joel? Of course, I love Randy Newman (but don't expect his image to pop into many minds). If you're younger than me, perhaps you think of Ben Folds or Jamie Cullum.

I have been listening to a singer/songwriter piano player that may hit it very big one day. He's still in his twenties, and he has loads of talent. He recorded his first jazz album while still in his teens. A second one, filled mostly with standards like the first, was released soon thereafter. These releases brought Peter Cincotti acclaim in jazz circles but with his third release, 2007's East of Angel Town, it's obvious that he seeks wider attention.

His producer, David Foster, thinks he will earn it, and so do I, although this release didn't break him out anywhere near to the extent they'd hoped. But that's more due to a fractured musical marketplace than the music itself. Raw talent like Cincotti's will eventually have its day.

Cincotti wrote all the music on East of Angel Town, and song after song displays a strong, swinging sound that grabs you after its initial jolt. The music feels so operatic and over-the-top at times that my wife sung a great rejoinder after first hearing a couple Cincotti story-songs about women. "Her name was Lola, she was a show girl," she sang and, since I was early into trying to like this music, I must admit I understood completely where she was coming from! But still I pressed on.

I did because I've heard his first two releases, and I knew he was an excellent singer. Just check out how he handles standards like "I Love Paris" and "St. Louis Blues". What a nice, nuanced approach. It's easy to see why the guy must definitely get a woman's heart aflutter.

On this album his singing has changed. It's less subtle, and he's given to a vocal mannerism in which he kicks into a falsetto practically every song (often in the chorus, or in the transition to the chorus). Still, he has a powerful voice and I forgive him for his excesses because he is trying to part with the jazz world.

I think the guy may hit it big on Broadway someday. (Peter is VERY much in love with New York, his home.) He tells a good story with his music. He creates strong muscular pop music--catchy melodies with driving rhythms that create a lot of excitement. (Examples include "Lay Your Body Down (Goodbye Philadelphia)"and "Cinderella Beautiful").

My favorite on this release is a slower-paced song called "The Country Life". Amazing that this was written by such a young guy! Catch these lyrics.

Let's go back and find
the simple world we knew
I still want to live again
the country life with you

Don't let it be another thing
We always meant to do
Just let me live again
the country life with you

Such a sweet melody--it comes as no surprise to me to find a young fan performing a version of it on You Tube.

But I'd like to close by giving another reason why Peter Cincotti's going to hit it big: the guy has impeccable taste! I mean, when he chose to do a song from my youth, he hit it big with me by choosing one of favorite Carole King numbers: "Some Kind of Wonderful".

Long may you run, Peter!

Saving Grace

2010-07-09T07:44:00.009-04:00

Bassist Catherine Popper

Summer is a funny season for me. Sure, I'm glad for the respite from teaching, but I find it difficult to settle into a comfortable routine. Then there's the heat. It exacts a toll on me as the day proceeds. All the air is pulled out of my spiritual balloon. One solution is to take a swim. Another is to retreat to an air-conditioned environment. (How delicious those movie matinees are!) Another key strategy for me is to have a record that I can put on that is so energetic that my spirits are lifted instantly. Each summer almost miraculously I stumble across such a work.

Now I know that I could make a science of it. I could click on all the links that NPR Music gives me and find a rockin' new artist. But I bristle against having someone do the work for me. I take pride in serendipidity, and the sense that what I'm listening to is really a discovery for me. I took the chance, flying blind on some recommendation buried in my mind that flipped forward in my head as I held the CD in my hand at FYE.

Yep, holding a CD at a music store. Not even walking it to a listening station but instead thinking, "Hmm. I recall hearing something good about this group. I have no idea what they're about, but I'll pick this one to freshen up the other CDs of familiar artists that I'm going to get."

Oh, this is shopping the old school way. As I recall one analyst saying of older music consumers like me, "This is the way (I've) learned commerce."

I've now found my summer fun. Ladies and gents, allow me to introduce to you Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Grace is the principle songwriter and singer for this group. She's a belter who'll remind you of Bonnie Raitt at some turns and Janis Joplin at others. This album can and should be played loudly, and its hooks are so good that you'll be reaching for it as instinctively as you go for your cold drink.

I love the appearance of this group. Grace is a real looker: long-legged, blonde, and her female companion in the group, bass player Catherine Popper, also seizes a male's attention immediately.

Both gals love their high heels. There's no surprise then to learn that she revels in sexed-up lyrics and a bluesy sensibility. Take the album's opening track, Paris (Oh La La).

You got me down on the floor
So what'd you bring me down here for?...
If I was a man I'd make my move
If I was a blade I'd shave you smooth
If I was a judge I'd break the law
And if I was from Paris..
I would say
Oooh la la la la la la la

Potter delivers her lyrics in a bluesy style that grips your attention immediately. The harmonizing on the chorus is infectious. The lyrics are brief but clever and the power-rock template is set. You want to hear more.

See? Old-school, again! I'm proceeding from cut to cut!

Before I continue, let me dwell briefly on Grace's other Nocturnals. There are three guys in the band and I love their look: they look as if they're freshly thawed from the cryogenic chamber they walked into in the 1970s. I look at them and think, "Ah, isn't this funny? I ignored guys who looked like this in the 1970s. But now I get it. I have a taste--no, a need--for loud, long guitar solos. I'm too proud to go back and listen to the Allman Brothers. I don't want to feel that old. But here they are, these guys who will give me that rockin' flava, and they're teamed up with these total babes. I am lovin' the jarring juxtaposition: '70s hippies with these obvious Reagan/Bush-era type gals. Bring it on!"

The second number, "Oasis", features Grace doing her best Bonnie Raitt. I don't mean to diminish her singing. It is flexible enough that you can't call her a shameless imitator. It's just inevitable when you have ears like mine that have heard so many singers that such comparisons are made. I will say that Grace Potter's songwriting is terrific. Besides the wonderful hooks and the obedience to classic pop song structure, she tells a good story. She adheres to a single idea but there's a little mystery in the songs too for all the lyric watchers like me. (You know, the old-schoolers who sit back with the CD booklet like they used to with the album covers!)

Anyway, "Oasis" is acoustically-based, a welcome break after the jolt of the opening track.

The third track gets you rockin' again. "Medicine" tells about a bewitching "policy woman" (see, a little mystery?) who, with her rattling bones, magic stones, love potion, magnetic sand, and mojo hand is a-stealin' Grace's man.

Policy woman took the love from my lover
He's been in a haze since the day he saw her
She shook her hips and her long black hair
Now all my baby does is stare at that gypsy woman

You like the way she makes you feel
She got you spinning on her medicine wheel
She's crossing me with magnetic sand
She hypnotizes with her mojo hand

She got the medicine that everybody wants..

Terrific song that'll grip you from your first listen. Is this the track where Grace pants and screams? Or is it the one where the guitars are doing the screaming? Whatever! I just know that this is a great summertime CD.

I'm afraid Grace is totally successful working her mojo hand on me. I'm hypnotized, and thankful for it. Not that I had any misgivings about my own mojo, mind you, but just that I needed to have my spirits lifted.

Place a bet on Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. You won't be disappointed!

Hall & Oates Revisited

2010-06-29T12:08:00.006-04:00

I'm not one to complete my music collection with "Greatest Hits" packages. There was such a flurry of them at the turn of the century. I've never been much of a Hall & Oates fan either. So then, what explains my purchase of The Bird and the Bee Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates?

First of all, I'm a sucker for tribute albums, especially if it's for an artist or group that's not a part of my music collection. Although if I never heard a Hall & Oates song again I'd be fine, I was still interested in how they'd be interpreted by a modern sensibility. Plus there's the fact that it promised to be good ol' pop music fun. I know that's something I can always use on my CD platter, since I list towards the serious.

The Bird and the Bee are Greg Kurstin and Inara George. She is the daughter of Lowell George, the late great lead songwriter and player in Little Feat. Inara's sensibility is a little off-center: her first release was a collaboration with the go-to eccentric Van Dyke Parks and her subsequent release to the Hall & Oates tribute was a Lennon-Sisters style collection called The Living Sisters. So I bought the CD figuring I was in store for something completely different.

Except that it's not, save for the electronica/synth-flavored overlay on the songs. I must admit that I'm grateful that the Bird and the Bee don't go far afield. I don't mind hearing these songs again as long as they're done by someone else. So instead I hear Inara's pleasant voice (it will put you in mind of Jonatha Brooke) delivering those paper-thin lyrics. My wife and I sing along when it's playing in our car.

The funny thing is, Lisa would prefer to hear Hall & Oates singing. Anyway, I'd recommend this CD to you if you're in the mood for light-hearted fun.

Cut Down in His Prime

2010-06-25T08:57:00.005-04:00

Billy Eckstine is one of my favorite singers. I fell in love with him listening to the release Everything I Have Is Yours: The Best of the MGM Years. His voice and delivery is distinct and different from anyone else. He draws out a phrase and injects it with such lush romanticism that you can easily understand why women in the late 1940s were crazy for him.

His compelling story is told in David Hajdu's essay "Billy Eckstine: The Man Who Was Too Hot", the opening entry in the wonderful collection of pop music history Heroes and Villians. Hajdu has a knack for finding highly influential but largely forgotten figures in jazz and pop: his most famous book was a biography of Billy Strayhorn, a collaborator on most of Duke Ellington's most widely known music.

I'm originally from Pittsburgh, and so was Eckstine and Strayhorn. This fact drew me to these subjects, and I'm greatly enriched by spending time listening and thinking about them.

Hajdu explains how Eckstine was famous both as a bandleader and as a singer. As the former, he is credited with introducing the sound that became bebop in the 1950s. As the latter, his incredible sense of style and his handsome appearance made him highly desirable to MGM, who signed him to a million-dollar deal in 1947. (It was the first studio to launch its own record company.)

The story about how the photograph from Life in 1950 effectively destroyed Eckstine's career is told movingly by Hajdu. I will not recount it here in hopes that you'll purchase the book. It is a story of how swiftly the hand of racism can snuff out promise--and, believe me, it is a complete and utter tragedy when you consider Billy Eckstine's talent.

I'll leave you with some audio and video clips of this great man. Give him a serious listen. You won't regret it!

Click hear to see Billy Eckstine leading his band and singing "Prisoner of Love".

Here's Billy with good friend Sarah Vaughan singing "Passing Strangers" from the late 1950s.

You'll get a chuckle out of this music video promoting "The Prime of My Life", a number Billy cut when he was recording for Motown.

Finally, give a listen to "Everything I Have Is Yours", one of my favorite numbers by Mr. B.

Lyric Lover

2010-06-19T07:11:00.004-04:00

As a younger listener, when asked whom I liked, I always named Paul Simon, Don McLean, Loudon Wainwright III, and Randy Newman. These were the artists whose new releases I eagerly snapped up. I was invested in their music, and still am today.

I will never forget once having a new Paul Simon record and sitting my father down for a listen. Here, I thought, was surely music that would cause him to admit that my heroes were every bit the artist that his were. (You know, Frank Sinatra and his lot.)

Dad hung in there as I bubbled forth. Then, after sitting respectfully through one last song, he fielded my big question, "So, Dad, what do you think?"

"I think he sounds like Paul Simon," was the response.

I walked away shaking my head at his riddle but over time I finally figured it out. I needed to understand where Dad was coming from. Ella Fitzgerald and her songbooks was my first gateway artist to his music. My journey began in my junior year of college, and it has never stopped.

If asked now to name whom I like, I sometimes sidestep the question by saying, "I like anyone who can communicate a lyric. I admire singers who get you involved immediately in the message when they deliver a lyric. There are very few who have had this impact on me: when they sing, I remember the words afterwards. They move me on the spot."

The singer-songwriters that I mentioned at the outset did that for me. I will always treasure sitting down with their new releases, and listening over and over again, letting the lyrics sink in, feeling the rhythm and considering the production. (Yep, I studied those liner notes!) I still approach their music the same way today.

My father was saying, though, that they're limited because no one else can perform their songs. They have a distinct sensibility that begins and ends with them. Was my Dad right? It's a provocative point of view that I continually ponder as my boomer artists enter senior citizenhood. Will the songs begin and end with them?

Anyway, my stable of favorite musical artists expanded greatly once I started listening to Ella Fitzgerald. I immediately jumped to Frank Sinatra and completely understood what my Dad saw in him. Then I just continued onward, dedicating myself to finding these great singers.

Early on I fell in love with Bobby Short. Like Ella, he did a series of songbooks (some 20 years after the First Lady of Song). I loved how he did not only familiar songs associated with the great songwriters, but lesser known numbers. I drilled these songs into my head. It was so pleasurable singing along to them because the lyrics were so clever. I mean, someone like Ira Gershwin--you'll always find him reaching for the humor and clever rhyme.

This morning I slapped on some vinyl: an album called Bobby Short is K-R-A-Z-Y for Gershwin. I just had to hear "Come the Revolution" and sing along. (Was it due to the political talk show I had just been listening to?) Here's a patch of lyric from it.

Comes the revolution
Everything is jake
Comes the revolution
We'll be eating cake
When the streets and rivers run with red
I'll be underneath the bed
Butcher and the baker, undertaker too
Thank their Lord and maker
under skies of blue
Come the revolution
All is jake
And soon we'll be eating cake?

Anyhow, Bobby Short is one singer who gets the lyric across immediately. I can't tell exactly why. I know that a part of it is his arrangement. He always has a clever way to breathe life into a song.

If you haven't given Bobby a serious listen, try him out. Maybe soon you'll have your own personal listening revolution, as I had mine!

Hearing Mose Allison

2010-06-09T17:12:00.003-04:00

A few months ago in The Boston Globe I enjoyed this interview with Mose Allison. He's always been an artist in the back of mind: what little I knew of him didn't make much of an impression. I knew he was a hep cat from "back in the day" and that Van Morrison dug him. I enjoyed Van's tribute to him, although I must confess it is lost in the clutter of my cassette collection, and there is no one song from it that sticks in my consciousness.

Anyway, I brought Mose up in conversation with a friend and turned out her father was a monstrous fan and she had grown up with his music, So a date to hear him at a local jazz club was set, and I purchased his new CD, The Way of the World. (His first work in roughly a decade.) It's produced by Joe Henry. He's a name almost as revered in the music business as T.Bone Burnett. I like him principally because of his collaboration with my hero, Loudon Wainwright III. So I was curious about what he'd do for Mose.

I enjoyed the album well enough. Its opening number-- "My Brain"--is a familiar folk melody with Mose's wry observations about his "cool little cluster" providing the humor for which he's known. (I'll never forget this line from one of his famous numbers: "Your mind is on vacation/but your mouth is workin' overtime".) The rest of the program is enhanced by Henry's gentle introduction of some extra instrumentation that livens up the presentation. But really, it's all pure Mose--songs that amuse, but that don't really stick in the noggin.

In tandem with the new album I took a 2002 double-CD set of Mose live in London out of the library. Good listening, I must admit: love his piano riffs and getting a sense of much of his catalog. But I was troubled by the fact that I heard hardly any patter between the songs. Nope--just a simple "Thank you" and then on to the next one.

So the day of the show arrives, and my wife and I and our friends are planted off in the corner of the jazz room. Lovely view of the Charles River out the window. Mose Allison hit the stage immediately with his trio and launched into his first number. Oh no! Turns out we're in the equivalent of a right-field box at Fenway! The angle is all wrong--we can't really see Mose (obscured by the bass player) and the drums (the closest instrument) is drowning out the vocals.

Still, looking around the room, I was impressed with how full it was, and what devotion Mose inspired. So I tried to catch that current. But as the set continued, it got more difficult.

Take away those funny lyrics that we couldn't hear, and Mose lay revealed to our eyes as nothing remarkable. It was amazing how much each song sounded the same. (This was later pointed out in a review of the show in The Globe.) Plus, as my wife Lisa noted, Mose failed to do the one thing that might have salvaged the experience for us: talk to the audience! We did not get any sense of his personality, just a "Thank You" after each 2 and a half minute number and a swift movement to the next song. (We were amused to observe how they were all neatly numbered in Mose's supporting players' binder of lead sheets.)

He completed a tidy 70-minute set, and shuffled off the raised stage/platform rather nimbly when you consider that he's 82. The man is spry and has obviously stuck to his agenda throughout his career. He looks great. But there was no spotaneity, and the trio didn't get to stretch once.

On one hand, I can completely understand why his albums have never sold well. I know this will seem unkind, but it some ways he is a terrible bore. Why does he attract such devotion?

But then, I thought about his lyrics. He's really funny, and he is excellent at creating an Everyman from song to song, and giving his sarcastic viewpoint. In a way, Mose was a "singer-songwriter" long before it was fashionable. He makes a connection with his fans the same way that Loudon Wainwright and Randy Newman and so many others have touched me.

I'm still listening to him in my car. My opinion is somewhere between adulation and the harsh assessment of the Steve Greenlee, the reviewer in The Globe.

One thing you can say for sure, though: there can only be one Mose Allison! His voice is awful, but it's his, flavored with a good Southern accent. It does stick in your mind--the tone of it. Plus there's that tart wit, which is always worth checking out.

Of his contemporaries, though, I still prefer Bob Dorough. (He's the fellow who wrote much of the music for Schoolhouse Rock.) He's a bit more puckish, and his subject matter cuts a wider swath.

The Limits of Labels

2010-05-28T17:30:00.006-04:00

I hosted my first "house concert" a couple of weeks ago. This is an event where your home becomes the concert stage or coffeehouse. You sell the "tickets" and guarantee the recording artist a minimum fee. My maiden voyage was taken with Sara Hickman.

I've been a fan of Sara's over the course of her twenty + years in the music business. She's based in Austin, Texas and I live in Boston. Given that almost everyone I was inviting to the show didn't know of her, my first challenge was describing her music.

"Well," I'd say, "she's classified as a folksinger, but that label doesn't do her justice." (I wished to immediately dispel the idea that the concert would be a quiet, deeply pensive, potentially depressing experience.) "No, she does a little bit of everything," I continued. "She sings gospel, blues, jazz and--oh my!--she can rock like crazy!" (I felt like my pitch was weakening here.)

"I guess if I had to put a label on it," I concluded, "I'd call her a pop singer." (Instantly I would then check myself from launching into a discourse on that label!)

My pitch worked best when it was short and I simply infused it with my enthusiasm about Sara Hickman. I mean, who is going to walk away saying, "Yeah, I'm a pop music fan! Definitely coming!" But if I spoke from the heart about her music, it usually was persuasive.

I stitched together an invitation with song and YouTube clips to also communicate what Sara's music was like. Promoting her concert sure got me more in touch with how difficult it is to carve your niche in the music business. I must admit, just discussing labels makes my chin instantly sink into my hand. I've spent a lifetime loving musicians who circumvent them, at sometimes great commercial risk.

Of course, you need labels to buy and sell. I would hate to step into a commercial environment that lacked them. I bristle, though, at the limitations they impose. Much of my music can be neatly classified into folk, jazz, and rock, but there are many artists within these categories who wear the mantle lightly.

In my mind these artists are dismissed when they're given the code word "Pop" or "Easy Listening" or "Vocals". To me, these labels are no crime, but I know what many listeners think. It takes me right back to college. I recall telling people how I loved singers like James Taylor, Paul Simon, and John Denver. The response I'd inevitably receive was, "Oh, you like mellow music."

Mellow? That's it? Well, that's the way they processed it! I decided early on to give my love to the singer/songwriter. (By the way, that label didn't seem to gain currency until the late '80s/early '90s). I carved out my niche and stuck to it. Let others blast their rock music out those dorm windows! I was going beyond the obvious, being esoteric--but not in a snarky, rock-critic kind of way.

No, my favorites were often in plain sight. Just hanging out there, unforgivably uncool. In a way, loving Gilbert O'Sullivan like I do is truly loving underground music. Heck, I defined "alt" before that moniker came into style! I won't even call them guilty pleasures. It's just good music. Really--try out Tony Orlando and Dawn's New Ragtime Follies. It has aged so well and is still a terrific encapsulation of their smooth and winning style!

Many singers that I love are pigeon-holed into categories like "Pop" or "Easy Listening" or "Vocals". Most critics dismiss them because they lack a certain purity: not rootsy enough, not challenging enough--as if trying to appeal to listeners should not be a way of assuring any musician's livelihood!

Sometimes I simply cannot bear the snootiness of music critics. I rely on their counsel, but I tire of their attitude.

So, what is Sara Hickman like? Let's see if I can re-create my pitch.

"She is this simply fabulous singer who jumps boundaries. I am attracted most of all to her positive energy. She lifts my spirits when I hear her. She has folk songs in her repetoire, sure, but she's all over the map musically. There's nothing that she can't do: rock hard, lead a chorus on a spiritual with gusto, or improvise vocally on a jazz-inflected tune. Sara is a very funny person, and I admire her stagecraft. A real pro!"

Let me know if that had any effect on you!

The History of Popular Song

2010-05-08T08:25:00.004-04:00

My lifelong avocation has been studying what's commonly referred to as the Great American Songbook. I am passionate about what constitutes a great song, and wrapped up in the mystery of what makes it memorable.

May I recommend a tremendous DVD on this subject? It was made 7 years ago. The host for the nearly 3-hour presentation is Michael Feinstein. Perfect choice! When he was a young man, he worked with Ira Gershwin on the latter's archives. There is no doubting Feinstein's erudition on the subject. Put that together with the fact that he's a fine pianist and interpreter, and you know you're in good hands.

The DVD takes you all the way through the history of popular song, from Stephen Foster to Stephen Sondheim. There are rare clips of performers such as Bessie Smith, as well as complete presentations of songs, such as Dorthy Dandridge and the Nicolas Brothers performing "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". Looking back, I was pleased to remember that the only "talking head" in the movie was Feinstein, and he was narrating, not commenting. It is an exceedingly pleasant ride for the viewer.

I was struck by how popular music has a strong sentimental strain in it. It always seems to be referring to a more innocent time--perhaps I shouldn't be surprised because much of music is wishing and dreaming, isn't it? Anyway, this thought occurred to me especially when the film chronicled the music of the 1940s and 1950s--which was basically recycling songs from the previous 30 years.

Of course, what does that say about my musical passion for the Songbook? What time am I longing for? Perhaps I'm emotionally journeying back to my parents' time. I feel closer to them when I listen to the Songbook. I also feel closer to my own feelings, more sensitive and alive.

Yep, that's all part of what make a great song!

1962

2010-03-18T05:01:00.004-04:00

Michael Franks, proud graduate of "The Cool School"

OK, boomers, it's time to redecorate your cubicles!

I've been preoccupied with the early 1960s lately. I guess it's simply the density of entertainment I've enjoyed lately devoted to that period.

On TV you have the AMC series Mad Men, of course. Did you know that Mattel plans to issue Barbie dolls based on the show's characters? For half a second I'll confess being tempted. Then there are two films that received attention at this year's Oscars: An Education and A Single Man. The former lets you see the world through the eyes of a lovestruck teen: she's smitten with Edith Piaf and a night life lubricated with jazz clubs and martinis. The same mileu is present in A Single Man. Again, our eyes are treated to well-dressed people behaving in a sophisticated way.

The allure of the time deepened for me over school vacation when I dug a couple of 2-album jazz singing collections out of my archives. Listening to these records while reading the newspaper (Hmmm. Can't take the twentieth century out of this boy, eh?), the vocals repeatedly made me reach for the liner notes. Who was singing? I was awakened to the beauty of voices I hadn't fully appreciated till then: Eddie Jefferson, Jimmy Rushing, Al Hibler, Ann Richards, and Nancy Harrow (to name a few). When were these recordings made? Time and again, almost without exception, the answer was 1962.

I love to read liner notes, and I was especially taken by the Producer's Note on one album where a long list of singers the producer wished could have been on the 2 records is enumerated. Among the alphabetized names (which truly make a nifty listening curriculum for the months ahead) the name Michael Franks appears.

I adore Michael Franks, and I'll write about him soon, but for now allow me to share a twenty-first century story. There I was working with my I-Tunes playing on my computer when what should I hear but Michael Franks's song "Hearing 'Take Five'" (from his last release, Rendezvous in Rio). Oh, I had to write about 1962 after being inspired by these lyrics dedicated to that very year!

Life was good
It's hard to describe
How simple times were then
Just being alive
Was all the thrill we needed
I still remember the day
I heard "Take Five"

Before St. Frank
Had been canonized
Our parents bragged that their
Martinis were dry
And JFK was flying high
And on the top of the charts
You heard "Take Five"

What became of heroes?
Now it's ones and zeroes

For once pure genius
Also was fame
And once I heard it
I was never the same
Paul Desmond, Gene, and Joe, and Dave
Brought my Philco alive
Playing "Take Five"

Just a flash in time. The Beats had made their mark, but the Beatles were still a year away. Robert Zimmerman was newly arrived in Greenwich Village, settling into his identity as Bob Dylan and going off to visit Woody Guthrie. The Rat Pack was ascendant and the Cuban Missile Crisis delivered a Cold War chill. Deep societal change was about to occur, but in this year the "old world" (of the post-war period) peacefully co-existed with the emerging new world.

Before being overrun by rock, jazz was in a poignant flowering. Audiences were listening to great singers in their prime: Ella, Sarah, Anita O'Day, you name it. Nat King Cole was still alive.

Then it all changed, seemingly overnight. I was much too young to be aware of the seismic shift, but with the assassination of JFK and the escalation of the Vietnam War, America was entering a new, more deeply troubled, state of consciousness.

Looking back on his youth in "The Cool School", Michael Franks recalls the feeling of "cool", circa early 1960s.

Am I a dinosaur, yeah you bet
I grew up listening to Mose and Chet
Let others fume and fuss
Belabor the Obvious
Me, I'm a child of the Cool School
Me, I attended the Cool School

..If define "cool" you must
It's kind of ambiguous
Something you sure can't pretend
One way to tell you see is
When your inner harmony
Always turns blue in the end

May I be completely unaware of a positive seismic shift that's about to happen in our time. Perhaps our fascination with 1962 speaks to an inarticulate sense that change is going to come. That, just as the saying goes, "It's always darkest before the dawn."

Sentimental Journeys

2010-02-04T05:15:00.005-05:00

My uncle had a long retirement because of a disability he'd acquired during the Second World War. Often when I'd go to visit him, he'd be engaged in some home improvement project. Usually it would involve painting. One time it involved stringing stereo wire along the tops of walls so that a record could be amplified throughout one floor of the house. (Boy, don't I smile secretly now at this memory in our age of tiny wireless speakers!)

Anyway, he often had on a radio station that played what they called "The Music of Your Life". So the Mills Brothers or Helen O'Connell or the Ray Conniff Singers would be booming as I entered his home. He had a deep bank of musical memories to draw upon that I've come to appreciate since my twenties. I know he would have adored the collection I'm featuring today.

In 1992 Capitol Records began digging in their archives and issuing a series of CDs celebrating music of the great era of American Popular Song. I'm here to recommend a release in this series: a 2-volume set entitled Great Ladies (and Gentlemen) of Song.

Sentimental Journey: Great Ladies of Song is a delight, both in terms of the songs chosen and the singers selected to render them. It has 26 tracks stuffed on it (!) in a smart arrangement. (Each lady appears twice.) The CD booklet is gorgeous. Besides featuring the usual information on writers/recording dates/conductors, it also has archival images of the singers in the bloom of their youth.

So I hope that you can spend some time with this blog entry. Kick back and click on my links to the songs as I proceed through the collection.

It kicks off with Dinah Shore singing "Sentimental Journey". This song is well-trod to say the least, but Dinah freshens it up by personalizing the lyric in mid-song. She takes off running through the lyric once.

I want to go back home
way down to Nashville
Want to go home
Do you know why?
I miss the folks I know
Ma's home cookin'
I miss the black-eyed peas
etc., etc.

The song is cleverly arranged by Nelson Riddle. It opens with a trill from a flute, followed by pulsating bass notes from a string section reminiscent of the deep sound a bagpipe makes. Then the rhythm section slides in and, as inevitably happened with recordings in 1959, some male voices providing smooth back-up with their "All-Aboards!" as Dinah proceeds into the song. Of course there are different horns too, and a piano tinkling at certain intervals. All together, taken purely from an orchestral viewpoint, a lot to listen to and enjoy.

Here are some other voices on the collection that you might have little familiarity with:

Helen Forrest--her rendition of "I Had the Craziest Dream" (wonderful version, with the opening verse inserted in the center of the song like a luscious cherry)

The Andrew Sisters--"Well All Right! (Tonight's the Night)" makes you wonder exactly what wave these gals were riding when they were popular. In this version I'm surprised to hear strains of Cab Calloway, complete with the "hoy, hoy"s!

Mavis Rivers--just listening about a whistle calling the end of a work day signaled by a whistle ("Five O'Clock Whistle") makes you smile. The fact that Papa doesn't make it home shortly after only adds to the pleasure.

Martha Tilton--Lovely swing version of "And the Angels Sing" conducted by Benny Goodman in 1955. Tilton squeezes the juice out of some modifiers in the lyric, and stretches beautifully on other vowels. If you're a vocal connoisseur, she is a fascinating listen. Plus there's a great sinuous clarinet solo in the middle of the song.

June Christy--Backed by Stan Kenton, she swings with a number that jazz trios must salivate over: "Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy". This recording dates from 1945. Ah, back then loose and free jazz vocalizing was the order of business!

Ella Mae Morse--She sings "No Love, No Nothin'", a song by Leo Robbin and Harry Warren that I've only heard sung by one other artist. (Susannah McCorkle) It's emblematic of the smart, idiosyncratic choices in this collection.

Anita O'Day--She sings about a lowdown guy receiving his comeuppance in "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine".

June Hutton--I have always enjoyed "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" as a song of complete and utter prostration before the object of your affection. I was very pleased to find this on the collection. Frank Sinatra also memorably delivered a version on 1984's L.A. Is My Lady. Hutton also delivers a wonderfully hopped-up and energetic version of Hoagy Carmichael's "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief".

There are also well-chosen cuts from familiar voices like Peggy Lee (reminding you of her tremendous skills as a songwriter with "I Don't Know Enough About You"), Billie Holiday ("Trav'lin Light"), and Keely Smith ("I'll Never Smile Again").

I enjoy letting these songs snake through my head as I'm working. They are such a lovely representation of a certain time and place and attitude. This CD is a "must" for anyone wishing to improve their pop music literacy!

What I'm Listening to--Right Now!

2010-01-30T17:32:00.008-05:00

Oh, I just love it the thrill of discovery, and I've received it thanks to taking a chance on Smokey Robinson's new release, Time Flies When You're Having Fun. I've never paid close attention to the man, but he is one terrific singer!

I was drawn to this release when I saw Robinson interviewed on one of the musical segues (called the "Inspiration Sessions") that they feature on Elvis Costello's Spectacle show on the Sundance Channel. Not that he said anything especially interesting. It was just the setup: there Smokey was, talking about how he had an idea for song ("Love Bath"), and his two producers--these two young white guys--nodded and smiled as he told his story. It amused me. The song had no appeal to me, but I got caught up in the reverence being paid to Smokey. I mean, he is deserving of it, but I still thought, "So how did he snag this promotional opportunity here?"

So I gave the CD a try and oh my, from the first notes of the opening track ("Time Flies") I was a goner. This is a gorgeous ballad rendered so smoothly by Smokey. Allow me to share some lyrics.

Break of day
Why you comin’ so fast?
Go away
I don’t want to have to leave her yet
Here we lay
And we want it to last...

Like the old sayin’ goes
Everybody knows:
Time flies
When you’re havin’ fun

I'm glad that Smokey Robinson is still around to create this sound and feeling. If you wish to belittle it, you could call it "smooth jazz" or, even worse, the "quiet storm" kind of music so memorably lampooned by Garrett Morris on those old SNL skits.(You know, the one where he's swilling his "Ca-va-see-ay" and inviting you into his love nest. Hmm...just checked. Turns out Smokey coined the term when he released an album by that name in 1975!)

But over time this style of music has achieved a certain integrity. Furthermore, it's not like the Time Flies CD is besotted with it. Smokey digs in for some silky rhythmic soul numbers here ("Girlfriend") and shares the studio with some big names: Joss Stone, India.Arie, and Carlos Santana.

It's delicious, and it stands out. A diversion for me, and a welcome one at that. Trolling on the Internet, I was also reminded that Smokey Robinson took a swing at the Great American Songbook four years ago. After hearing his singing of "I'm Glad There Is You", I am totally motivated to check out the remainder of 2006's Timeless Love.

This is the kind of serendipity that keeps me in love with searching out and listening to music!

Here's another review of the album that's worth reading.

Sinatra Turning the Corner

2010-01-23T06:41:00.006-05:00

If you'd like to hear and see Frank Sinatra shortly before he terminated his career artistically, may I recommend the 4-CD/1 DVD package of live performances newly out this past holiday season?

Two of the CDs in this set and the DVD feature Frank in the 1970s. Back then even he had been steamrolled by rock, and he was troubled by his irrelevance. He retired, and then he came back in a concert at Madison Square Garden memorialized in The Main Event. He released a couple of albums in the early 1970s that Will Friedwald summarized this way in his indispensable guide, Sinatra! The Song Is You: A Singer's Art.

"From 1974 to 1979, Sinatra would venture into the record studios only occasionally: when he did, the results impressed very few at the time, and even fewer since."

Well, count me among the unimpressed at the time, because I was deep into Don McLean, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, etc., but when my ears turned to Sinatra in the early 1980s I must say I found his music from the previous decade interesting. I mean, he was searching for musical filet mignon in an Outback Steakhouse world, and he used all his power to assemble music that fit into his legacy. Looking back at it now, I am moved by his plight.

In this collection you'll hear him at an April 1974 date swing Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and sweetly deliver David Gates's "If". Now I like these songs all right, but I enjoyed reading Friedwald's total trashing of this material. Allow me to share some choice remarks of his about the 1973's Some Nice Things I've Missed.

"To start with the worst, (Don) Costa arranged five uptempo pieces that are so trite one is embarrassed even to mention the title...'Sweet Caroline'...'Tie a Yellow Ribbon', the ultimate hymn to the era of platform shoes...and the unspeakably shameful 'Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown.'...The pieces sound very assembly line...All in all, the charts, the songs, and the singer aren't even remotely in the same ballpark..."

Yes, I know what he's saying. This was the beginning of the period where poor Frank was becoming a parody of himself, as captured by Joe Piscopo in his Saturday Night Live skits.

I must admit to a fondness, though, for songs like "Summer Me, Winter Me" and "What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Life?"(by Alan & Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand) and "Let Me Try Again" (Paul Anka/Sammy Cahn/Michel Jourdon) which you'll hear well-rendered in this collection.

It's great fun to hear Sinatra talk between songs. You're reminded not only of the historic time by his references, but also of a brand of humor that marked performers of his generation. There's an electricity in the air when he's on-stage that's palpable not only the DVD but in the energy that you feel from the crowd on the CDs.

He pulls off some surprises in these sets that make them well worth the purchase: chestnuts like "Autumn in New York", "When Your Lover Has Gone", "Don't Worry 'Bout Me", and "I Can't Get Started". Rest assured that the most famous numbers from his catalog are included.

The DVD that concludes this boxed set is a treasure. Recorded in 1980, it features a newly-confident Sinatra riding the wave of his last gargantuan hit, "The Theme from New York, New York." It was during this time that he entered the studio for his last great album of torch songs, She Shot Me Down. It was to be his penultimate record of fresh material. Four years later, after his L.A. Is My Lady album failed to strike commercial paydirt, he stopped recording.

He was 66 years old, and he devoted himself exclusively to touring. There were to be many fine performances in his future (about a half dozen that I witnessed) before it became clear in the early '90s that he should hang his tuxedo up.

Pictures of Frank

2010-01-16T11:04:00.004-05:00

It's 11 years and counting since he's gone, and we still miss him. And yet, as Tony Bennett writes in the introduction to Remembering Sinatra, "(He) leaves behind a legacy of music, a legacy that will live forever." Frank is always with us. Listen for him as you go about your day. He is ambient--at work, at bookstores, at coffeeshops and jazz clubs.

This book is a lovely photographic work from Life magazine. I have an appreciable collection of books about my hero, but this work had many new ones, plus it has nice long captions that get you engaged with the subject.

Images of Sinatra boozing it up with Joe E. Lewis, Jackie Gleason, and Natalie Wood. Sinatra underneath his chair on the floor, shaking with laughter. A spread where he's peering back at then-girlfriend Juliet Prowse. ("It's so nice to have a Prowse around the house," I recall him saying at the time.) There's even a spread of a 1944 issue of Junior Miss, featuring the life story of our bow-tied protagonist up till that time.

And yes, there's the September through December of his years. Frank with the elfin Mia Farrow. Then the period I'm not crazy about. The conversion to the Republican Party brings us images of Frank with Nancy and Ronnie. Thank goodness this constitutes a small part of the text.

Put on your favorite Sinatra album and enjoy this phenomenal work, published on the tenth anniversary of his passing!

Twelve Nights Decades Ago

2009-12-30T04:42:00.004-05:00

For me, like for so many people my age, Ella Fitzgerald opened the door to the world of jazz. Although she is celebrated for her scat-singing, I fell in love with her more mannered vocals on the Songbook albums that she produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I adored the purity of her girlish voice, and I was knocked out by the beauty of the music and the intimacy of the lyrics.

With Ella, it was all about the singing. She was a working singer in the purest sense of the word. If you want to be schooled in how to sing jazz, just listen to her and Mel Torme endlessly. May I suggest that one of your primary texts be the newly released 4-CD set, Ella Fitzgerald: Twelve Nights in Hollywood?

Recorded in May of 1962 at a jazz club, it captures Ella at the height of her powers. Jazz singing is best experienced live: it’s thrilling to watch a singer surrender to a rhythm or a melody, and make decisions about delivery on the run. The interplay among the players is fascinating to follow. That’s one big reason why we must be eternally grateful for pianist Lou Levy’s stewardship on this set. He anchors a drummer, guitarist, and bass player. They set the rhythm in motion, and Ella sends it skyward.

The purity of this recording is astounding. You feel as if you’ve got a front table (and consequently you get quite irritated at the folks at the back of the club who chatter through the ballads). You can imagine watching Ella in the prime of her life. (She was 44, I believe, at the time. The Coke-bottle glasses were to come in the next decade along with the deep lack of security due to the ascendancy of rock-and-roll. My, but this moment was truly the calm before the storm!)

Fred Kaplan describes how the sets eventually got released in The New York Times. It's amazing to think that it took so long for this music to see the light of day!

Ella Fitzgerald was blessed with a girlish voice that never left her. It’s immensely appealing, but the woman’s got soul too. I’d never fully appreciated it until I watched an American Masters special on her called Something to Live For. It is here that you learn about her tough childhood, and her loneliness.

If you read Stuart Nicholson’s Ella Fitzgerald: A Biography of the First Lady of Jazz, you’ll understand how throughout her life Ella struggled with her weight and self-image.

She was not sexy like an Anita O’Day or Julie London. Any other component of who she was could not be visible given the racial attitudes in the world she inhabited. She was black, and that consigned her to an alternate world. I can’t recall any of her albums in my father’s collection. He didn’t really collect jazz singers. Instead he gravitated towards pop singers: Perry Como, Doris Day, and Frank Sinatra being prime examples.

I, of course, found all these people the very definition of being square. They were so out of touch with youth culture, so insincere and glitzy. No, give me the lyrical honesty of the folksingers and singer-songwriters. James Taylor, Carole King, Paul Simon—these people sang from the heart. My father’s favorites were frauds.

I maintained this attitude until my junior year in college. My family’s life was changing dramatically then: they were being uprooted from Pittsburgh to Chicago. Shortly afterwards we learned that my mother had cancer. Learning all of this from afar, I suppose I turned to the old songs to be reminded of my childhood home that had always rang with them.

That’s when I started with Ella Fitzgerald’s songbooks. From there Nat King Cole was a graceful next step. My father was extremely pleased with my appreciation for Frank Sinatra. It was the end of the 1970s.

The jazz and pop world began overlapping during a renaissance that began with the wholly unexpected popularity of Sinatra’s Trilogy album in 1980. (The 3-album set featured his last great hit “New York, New York.”)

Slowly but surely, the singers from a bygone era re-emerged. Mel Torme became a New York nightclub sensation, and his album Live at Marty's recorded the historical moment. Tony Bennett, who had been toiling in relative obscurity after being dropped by Columbia in the early 1970s, returned to begin a new and equally lengthy relationship with the label, thanks to the managerial acumen of his son Danny and the awareness that there was a hunger for the classic pop that predated the era of rock-and-roll. Jazz labels like Verve mined their archives and began re-releasing classic works.

I launched my independent study of Sinatra, memorizing most of his music. I also pursued jazz singers, expanding my record collection enormously with works by Bobby Short, Susannah McCorkle, Lena Horne, et al. I enjoyed making my own way, thinking bemusedly that I was truly listening to “alternative” music, considering my age.

Anyway, Ella Fitzgerald was my launching pad, and I will always love her for that fact. I’m grateful that this new release has re-ignited my admiration for her.

Click here for Ella in 1974. You'll enjoy her introduction to "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing").

Click here for an outtake from the American Masters special on Ella.

An Emotional Spectacle

2009-12-23T04:19:00.005-05:00

If you love songwriters, then you're undoubtedly pleased to know that Elvis Costello's Spectacle has been renewed and is currently airing On Demand and on the Sundance Channel. Last season had some wonderful moments--most memorable for me were his interviews with Tony Bennett and Rufus Wainwright.

This season is two episodes in (of 7), and already it's hit a peak for me. It occurred in a songwriter's showcase featuring Sheryl Crow, Neko Case, Ron Sexsmith, and Jesse Winchester.

I have loved Jesse Winchester since his debut album in 1970. Costello referred to that release as being equal in stature and achievement to other great albums of the time, such as James Taylor's Sweet Baby James and Neil Young's After the Gold Rush. Ah, Elvis! That statement alone endeared you to me (along with last season's confession that he is a monstrous Bing Crosby fan).

He asked Jesse what went into his decision to flee to Canada to avoid the draft at that time. Jesse admitted that it was a decision made by a young man and, if he had to make it now, he would at least give it deeper thought. Then it was on to the music.

Ron Sexsmith, a round-faced mopheaded Canadian, played "Secret Heart", a song of his that he said resignedly many people confuse as being written by Feist (since she had the hit with it--ah, the damned obscurity of the true talent!). Lovely song, delivered with Sexsmith's signature sweet tenor. (Later he was to duet with Elvis on "Everyday I Write the Book", a song the latter thanked Sexsmith for reviving his interest in.)

Sheryl Crow was seated next to Sexsmith. She was all teeth and bare arms. Don't get me wrong--I think she looks fabulous, and I do enjoy her music. It just doesn't stick in my ear, and the one time that I heard her live I was singularly unimpressed at her stagecraft. (Standing stone still through most of the show and not interacting much with the audience will not win this coffeehouse/nightclub frequenter's affections.) She sang "If It Makes You Happy". I enjoyed her admitting before singing that it's often the songs you like the least as a songwriter that turn out to be the hits!

Neko Case, the youngest songwriter among the five in the circle, was next. She won me over immediately by discussing her deep love of Harry Nilsson. She followed by singing "Don't Forget Me", a lovely ballad that features his strange and bewitching mixture of sweetness and sarcasm.

Then Jesse Winchester was up. Clearly the elder in this group, he was re-introduced by Costello, who mentioned how he was a big fan and adored Winchester's new release, Love's Filling Station. Jesse followed by playing "Sham-A-Ling-Dong-Dong" from that CD. The title refers to a song that lovers recall from their youth.

When we danced was not a dance but more a long embrace
We held on to each other and we floated there in space
and I was shy to kiss you while the whole wide world could see
So "Sham-a-Ling" said everything for me

And all the poor old folks they thought that we'd lost our minds
They could not make heads or tails of the young folks' funny rhymes
But you and I knew all the words and we always sang along
to old "Sham-a-Ling-Dong-Ding, Sham-a-Ling-Dang-Dong"

One of the wonderful things about Spectacle is, well, the spectacle of watching people--especially songwriters--listen. I love how they hunch over their guitars, letting the lyrics pour in and move them. To me, it's as intimate as television can be and with Jesse Winchester, who sings sweetly of kisses and faded youth, that is very intimate indeed.

A close-up caught Neko Case crying while listening to the song, and that sight triggered tears immediately in me. (They come easily--not just because of my faded youth, but my perpetual sleep-deprivation!)

Anyway, Jesse's song proceeds to cover the long course of his subjects' love, and how he bets that the old folks had their own "Sham-a-Ling" moment in their youth. Then he ends by summarizing the sentiment.

All those sweet old love songs
oh, every word rings true
"Sham-a-Ling-Dong-Ding" means "sweetheart"
"Sham-a-Ling-Dang-Dong" does too
It means that right here in my arms
well, that's where you belong
and it means "Sham-a-ling-dong-ding,
Sham-a-ling-dang-dong"

It's a remarkable song from an album that merits wide attention. I hope that Costello's support of Jesse Winchester brings it.

Zito's Zingy Stringy Legacy

2009-12-09T04:23:00.003-05:00

Torrie Zito, a musical arranger who worked with a lot of great singers, died last week. Reading his obituary got me thinking about the role of an arranger, and the impact Torrie Zito has had on my listening.

Since I'm a huge Sinatra fan, I can immediately hear Zito's string arrangements on two songs from a long-forgotten 1965 musical (Skyscraper): "Everybody's Got the Right to Be Wrong" and "I Only Miss Her When I Think of Her". The former is a nice swing number; the latter a ballad. Why are these songs planted in my memory? It is due to the combination of Sinatra with his impeccable phrasing and Zito with his arranging. No singer stands alone.

I'm preparing for a musical performance, so I can appreciate the communication that needs to occur between a singer and his or her musical arranger. A song is basically a template, and the pleasure of collecting countless versions of standards is discovering how they can be rethought and experienced anew through the filter of another singer and arranger.

If you're a Tony Bennett fan, you have heard much Zito in your aural pasta. His temperament is similar to Bennett's: although his style must ultimately be branded "pop music", there is always a strong jazz undercurrent. Reading an interview with Zito brought up a name from the 1960s that I hadn't thought about in years: Andre Kostelanetz. Oh, how my father loved his records (along with the Ray Conniff Singers). How I defined them as the quintessence of musical cheese! And how I've come to eat my words over the years! (Well, I appreciate Zito, anyway.)

Troll through a search for Zito on Barnes & Noble and you're knocked out to realize how many great performers he worked with over his career. He was a musical craftsman who honed a style that provided a platform that many singers found attractive.

Is Jazz Still Culturally Relevant?

2009-12-02T05:08:00.005-05:00

I love jazz. Like folk music, it's a style that can be hard to define. Many people visualize a horn or saxophone when they think about jazz. If you were in a band in high school or if you play an orchestral instrument, you're a potential audience for jazz. If you love singers like I do, then you are soon pulled into this world.

Loving jazz is like loving cowboys, silent movies, or long train rides. There's a sentimentality to it. Jazz has a small audience. It's typically over 40 and well-off. The music is taught in colleges and universities now (forget the romance of cultivating your love by frequenting nightclubs, like Nat King Cole did listening to Art Tatum). It's perceived as something that you have to "get" (and those who do "get" it are thought of as intellectual).

I was moved to blog this morning by a report on the BBC about a new website where you can hear performances from the Newport Jazz Festival circa 1959. In the report, they discuss how jazz was in its heyday 50 years ago when it was "culturally relevant." That phrase struck with me.

Why is jazz not relevant to our culture today? What made jazz relevant 50 years ago? Let's start with the latter question. 1959 was a "swing year" in so many ways. It was the end of the Eisenhower administration. The conservatism and repression long associated with this cultural time was being jostled by the Beats, and the jazz world was energized by the Bebop style. It was no longer just big-band music--like poetry or folk music (also rising at this time), jazz was highly individualistic and expressive. We were turning the corner politically and culturally in this country.

Are we at a similar juncture today? Perhaps not just yet. Fifty years ago it was much easier to get audiences to listen. Now it seems people are almost discombobulated by all the clamor and appeals for their attention. Jazz is not relevant because it makes demands on listeners. It's not glitz and fog machines on stage. It's a melodic line re-imagined inventively. It's the interplay of silence and sound.

The report concludes with a call to not let jazz become a "fetish about the past". Listeners are urged to go to a club and experience jazz live. It's there you'll capture its essence: how it's a spontaneous and creative music, and how a performance is molded from communication between the players.

Great advice. That's how my love grew. Jazz will have a future as long as there is a need for intimacy. In this clamorous, hyperkinetic world, you'd think the jazz tide would be rising. Maybe all those American Idol viewers and karaoke singers will grow a little older and find their way to the club. Here's hoping they do.

The Wisdom and Wit of Cheryl Wheeler

2009-11-29T05:32:00.005-05:00

If you have musical talent and fortune draws you to the life of a folksinger, you are destined to live quietly. Outside of the early 1960s when Greenwich Village spawned the "folk boom", this style of music has never sold well. The general listener finds it too mellow and uninspiring, and the need to focus on the lyric too burdensome.

I have always loved folk music. Long ago I identified with Woody Guthrie: the image of someone riding the rails and traveling the country with a guitar slung across his back was so romantic to me. Add to that the social consciousness of a Pete Seeger or Phil Ochs, and this nephew of mill-working uncles is totally in.

Folk is played in coffeehouses and churches. Its practitioners are schooled in stagecraft because of the demands of this intimacy. Many folk singers are warm and funny. They're good storytellers. Which leads me to this entry's subject: Cheryl Wheeler.

Cheryl Wheeler has achieved success in the hermetic world of folk music, yet few people know of her. Its partly due to the fact that her music is better known in recordings by luminaries like Garth Brooks, Bette Midler, Kathy Mattea, and Peter, Paul and Mary. It's also due to her undoubtedly meticulous standard of songwriting and the attendant long gap between releases: like Paul Simon or Randy Newman in their heyday, Cheryl Wheeler seems to be on a four-year cycle between albums.

Some of her music demands careful listening but, once you're engaged, you are awestruck at both her poetry and creative musical design. Cheryl Wheeler writes songs that bring succor when you're down. If you're inclined to be morally outraged, she'll produce a politically charged number that will appeal to you. If you just want to laugh, you'll have ample opportunity.

Wheeler's sheer talent makes her stand out from the crowd and her latest release, Pointing at the Sun, provides a glittering example of it.

It begins with the quiet, contemplative "Holding On". Over a rhythmic bass line whose regularity reminds you of a clock or a heartbeat, Cheryl asks her listener to keep the faith.

I won't let you fall. Hear me loud and clear.
I will not let go. I will be right here, holding on.

Later she weaves in some nature imagery.

And when some lonesome wind has hemmed you in
Don't you believe that sound
You will surely rise above these tides
To higher ground

It's a hypnotic number. Her voice is warm and embracing.

Wheeler then switches gears and delivers an orchestrated update of "Summer Fly", a song she first recorded in 1987. Looking back at that record, I noticed that her musical collaborator throughout her career has been keyboardist Kenny White. I also became aware that Jonathan Edwards (remember the song "Sunshine"?) gave Wheeler her start in the music business. On her first album he offered these words about her. Speaking of having her on his tour Edwards said:

..(it) was one of the most enjoyable and rewarding coast-to-coast tours I've ever done featuring, yes, Cheryl playing the bass and singing those high, rich, clear vocals....then came (her) songs. Songs of the here and now: intense, precise, skillfully drawn pictures of the life we all know but rarely appreciate until an artist like Cheryl wakes us up. A fascinating blend of melody and chords and rhythms and phrasing that actually compel the listener to get inside and become part of the stories and vignettes she sings about. Honest, sincere songs written from the heart and sung straight from the soul.

High praise, and richly deserved. My attention to liner notes have also yielded this additional fact: from the start, Cheryl has been hooked into Mary Chapin Carpenter and her players, namely John Jennings and Duke Levine. I love everything they do too!

Anyway, to return to 2009's Pointing at the Sun: this CD doesn't feature any overtly political songs (such as 1993's "Don't Forget the Guns" or 1999's "If It Were Up to Me") and its humor is not in the same vein as her immortal ode to a spud "Potato". Instead, Cheryl ends the CD with a suite of songs dedicated to a passionate interest of hers; the cat.

These songs really end the CD on a high note. It begins with a Calypso-flavored number called "White Cat". Shortly after the start of this piece, Cheryl drops into a rap. Here's a taste of it.

I was in the garden, taking the sun
Checking out the bugs, musta rolled on one
So I got this slug bug stuck to my fur real good
But I didn't really mind, just a little bit o'slime
I'll find it later, you know, scratching my back
Be glad I saved it, make a nice little snack

I simply adore Billy Novick's clarinet playing on this one, as well as Sonny Barbato's accordion.

Next follows a number with a Django Reinhardt flavor to it, "Cat Accountant" and finally we conga out to "My Cat's Birthday". What fun! Here's to Cheryl Wheeler, and to top-quality songwriters everywhere!

Click here for Cheryl's TV appearance with fiddler Mark O'Connor and fellow songwriter Michael Johnson:

"Is It Peace or Is It Prozac" provides an example of Cheryl's wit, stage presence, and rapid wordplay.

"Estate Sale" from 1990's Circles & Arrows (on Capitol Records!) is a favorite Wheeler tune of mine.

Nellie McKay: The Complete Musical Package

2009-11-21T04:07:00.006-05:00

Nellie McKay (pronounced Ma-kye) has all the trapping of what's regularly called "a gay icon". She has a high-pitched voice that on certain notes is eerily reminiscent of Blossom Dearie and immediately puts you in mind of Betty Boop. Her appearance is often decidedly retro.

She writes eccentric lyrics, as in a song about answering the door when you're sloshed because your cat died ("Ding Dong") or the following about performing at a gay club.

"Galleon"

Saturday night in the men's ensemble dressing room
Watchin' the fight in the men's ensemble lair
You may escape the cage
But then you have to share a stage, and tell 'em I'll be there
(It's Saturday night)

And now back to our new high school
And they got me wrong
Yeah, they got me wrong again

And although you're all talentless fools
Can't we get along
Can't we get along, my friends

I got to be free
I got to for me
And if you can't see, well, that's enough
That's all that I need to see you're all insecure, pedicured f**cks
(It's Saturday night)

(It's Saturday night)
And now's the time to vindicate
Tomorrow's just a matinee
And then we settle scores
(It's Saturday night)

She has dueted with Cyndi Lauper.

I suppose if you're cynical, you'd say that she's courted her demographic.

But there's another demographic she appeals to: anyone who loves jazz singing and smart lyrics. Witness a late night TV appearance on YouTube, and you instantly understand why fans of Dave Frishberg or Bob Dorough would take to her immediately.

NPR, on its "Project Song" series, explores the creative process for songwriters, and Nellie McKay's session with host Bob Boilen is a wonder to behold. Try carving out the time to enjoy it.

Anyway, it's clear that she is a phenomenon, like Melody Gardot. Blonde and lovely like her and a jazz singing/songwriting prodigy. Any song she writes is sure to include clever language play, often choosng just the write word for its meaning and musicality.

"David"

Just pour me a drink
Cuz I need a lie
I don't wanna think
I just wanna die

[chorus]
David don't you hear me at all
David don't you hear through the wall
Waitin' here not makin' a sound
David come around

[bridge]
Chaos pervades the world outside
Days offer spades of hurled outcries
Gone is the fair and five and dime
But he is there
He's so fine

Listen to her play
Has somethin' to say
Even has a rap
Clap clap clap
But click there goes the lid
Sorry 'bout the fib
I ain't got a grip on nothin'

Nellie McKay is a very funny person, but in her music she explores her darker moods. It ain't easy loving musical styles from yesteryear, wearing antique fashions, and playing multiple instruments (piano, ukuele, cello) at a young age. It's a recipe for an outsider.

"Real Life"

Cause if I had a real life
I could break the rules
And maybe feel life
Instead of foolish
As if I had a real life
Not a cruel and choking false reality

Nellie is a vegan and a political activist. This gal will not be pigeon-holed! Take this song about war.

"Toto Dies"

Yeah I'll have my coffee black
Hey look we're bombing Iraq
I guess that's the only way
Oh did I tell you we got Fifi spayed?
And when they get to work they hear drums
The boom fills all the empty space
They file papers lada-dee-dum
Trimming their shoebox with lace

Oh-ee-oh but there's somethin' a growin'
Oh-ee-oh through the bustle and hiss
Oh-ee-oh fuck the lawns that need mowin'
Oh-ee-oh there is somethin' amiss
Oh-ee-oh oh-ee-oh oh-ee-oh
Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh-ee-oh

Like most vegans, in addition to becoming one for environmental reasons, she chose to be one because she loves animals. Consider the following song.

"The Dog Song"

My life was tragic and sad
Yeah I was the archetypal loser
I was a pageant gone bad
Then there was you on time
And wagging your tail
In the cutest mime
And you was in jail
I said woof, be mine
And you gave a wail
And then I was no longer alone
And I was no more a boozer
We'll make the happiest home
And I said lord I'm happy
'cause I'm just a walkin' my dog
Singin' my song
Strollin' along
It's just me and my dog
Catchin' some sun
We can't go wrong
'cause I don't care 'bout your hatin' and your doubt
And I don't care what the politicians spout
If you need a companion
Well just go right to the pound
And find yourself a hound
And make that doggie proud
'cause that's what it's all about
That's what it's all about
That's what it's all abow-wow-wow-wout
That's what it's all about

Given this background, it's not surprising that Nellie's road led to Doris Day. Her latest release (Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day) is the reason that I've fallen in love with her music.

First of all, this CD does not dip into the familiar suspects for a Doris Day tribute. No "Que Sera Sera" or "It's Magic" here. Instead Nellie chooses Doris Day vocal renderings that speak to her and inspire her. So, once again, a listener is treated to the well-worn standards like "Sentimental Journey", "The Very Thought of You", and "Mean to Me". Her take on these songs is refreshing: sprinkling organ, synthesizer, and tympani certainly helps. Witness the use of her ukulele on Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Meditation".

What's terrific is that she broadens the tribute to take in great songs I've never heard before. There's Bacharach and David's "Send Me No Flowers"; Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Wonderful Guy"; Johnny Mercer's "Dig It"; and "Black Hills of Dakota" (hauntingly delivered with just a drums).

Then there's Nellie's take on some lesser-known Gershwin ("Do, Do, Do") and "Crazy Rhythm" (which sounds like Gershwin, but isn't). I've been playing this CD repeatedly in the car, and I can testify that my 7-year old has taken to these songs!

You really should buy this CD rather than download it. The booklet's design is such fun to look at. It harkens to the 1950s, and features Nellie in a variety of couture from the period. Get this gal a guest appearance on Mad Men! Also included are quotes from prominent writers and thinkers on animals and vegetarianism. Plus there's the most delightful dog.

You'll also be reaching for the booklet regularly to figure out what instruments you're hearing in a song. Her musical skill and creativity is truly breathtaking.

I hope you'll take the time to navigate my links and fall in love with Nellie--and with the great Doris Day.

Kate & Anna: A Dynamic Duo

2009-11-15T04:35:00.005-05:00

I check music out of the library a lot. Recently I had a chance to visit the best library in my system for music. I had no "wish list" (I have failed to maintain that indispensable guide in my wallet), so instead I just meandered in Hingham's incredible collection. It was like I was in a used record shop--except the consequences of picking up all those CDs wouldn't be expensive!

How thrilled I was to discover two old favorites of mine by Kate and Anna McGarrigle! I'd like to focus in this blog on Dancer with Bruised Knees, a 1977 release that I know by heart and love dearly.

Dancer was the duo's second album after their critically acclaimed debut. They were signed to Warner Brothers at the time. Linda Ronstadt had brought popular attention to them with her recording of Anna's "Heart Like a Wheel". This sophomore effort is lighter in spirit than their debut. I recommend it as an introduction to them.

The title track is a lovely harmonious ride with a distinctive chorus.

For years we had been one with the stars
A pas de deux of renown
I'd leap and he'd catch me on the fly
And gently he'd put me down

This song opens with a spoken passage, and ends with vocal "whoops". It's very catchy.

Kate McGarrigle was married to Loudon Wainwright--she is the mother of Rufus and Martha. I've always found it remarkable how similar her comic sensibility is to her ex-husband's. Take the ballad "Southern Boys".

Buttered grits is fare for breakfast
And if you like and your aim is good
Maybe a squirrel
Ten around nine we tap that moonshine
And it's on out to the porch for a moonlight swing
With me, your Northern girl

In this song the humor is tinged with melancholy (a hallmark of Loudon's writing). "I don't mind the hurt/cause the feeling's worth the fall" Kate later sings. Her contributions to this album are stunning. I love the gentle rocking pace of "Walking Song":

Wouldn't it be nice to walk together
Baring our souls while wearing out the leather
We could talk shop, harmonize a song
Wouldn't it be nice to walk along

As I type those lyrics I can feel the rhythm of Kate's piano playing. It goes on about all the subjects that Kate and her walking partner could discuss, and ends cleverly.

This song like this walk I find hard to end
Be my lover be my friend
In sneakers or boots or regulation shoes
Walking beside you
I'll never get the walking blues

Kate & Anna are Canadians, and their early years are satirized by Rufus and Martha on a You Tube birthday greeting. Setting is a strong presence throughout their music. Their sound is clear and clean, and their emotions baldly honest, as in Kate's song "Come a Long Way", the album's last track. It begins:

We've come a long way since we last shook hands
Still got a long way to go
Couldn't see the flowers when we last shook hands

At this point the listener might be thinking, "Oh, this is a relationship that's just starting out. Couldn't see the flowers? Well, that's because they're in the other hand and hidden behind the giver's back. Flower-giving. Another step on the road." But then the zinger quickly follows.

Couldn't see the flowers on account of the snow

Perhaps this song is describing a meeting with Loudon. Especially when talk of bearing a cross comes up.

What did you do with your burden and your cross
Did you carry yourself or did you crack?
We both know that a burden and a cross
Can only be carried on one man's back

This song was actually first recorded by Loudon on 1973's Attempted Mustache. Kate, in speaking about this marriage, talked about how their artistic competitiveness fed into the breakup. It must have rankled Loudon at the time because he was known as the singer of the novelty song "Dead Skunk" while his wife and sister-in-law were acclaimed as such terrific writers.

But talk about melancholy! Here's a passage later in the song.

Give me your hand for the parting touch
Fare thee well and thanks a lot
I know we promised to keep in touch
But you and I know that we both forgot

The music counteracts these dour sentiments. It's sweet and moves at a rapid clip. (Anna harmonizes and plays the button accordion while Kate plays the banjo.) As a listener, you sing along and it's enjoyable just on that level. It is only now as I analyze the lyric that I realize what an artistic triumph it is.

If you're a Rufus fan, you must get this CD for "First Born", a darling dedication to him written by his mother. It will also appeal to you if you know French, because any Kate & Anna album features songs in their native language. (This album features four!) If you're a lover of stellar songwriting they must be appreciated!

The album was produced by the infamous Joe Boyd. I love his work on Warners with Geoff and Maria Muldaur. Boyd has also worked extensively with Richard Thompson, a good friend of Loudon's and the McGarrigles.

Dancer with Bruised Knees probably marked the commercial apex for the McGarrigles. They released two more works on the Warner Brothers label, The French Record and Pronto Monto (featuring the terrific science song "NaCl") and then moved to Polydor for Love Over and Over. Linda Ronstadt continued to record their work, and Emmylou Harris has long been an admirer.

Their recording pace has slowed considerably, but whenever they do release something new, it's an event worth celebrating. Their music is fresh and timeless, and a deep listening pleasure.

Click here for a clip of Kate & Anna with a very young
Rufus and Martha.
Click here for a lovely song, "Better Times Are Coming", from the soundtrack to Ken Burns's Civil War series

Basia Is Back!

2009-11-07T17:54:00.006-05:00

What musical artist always gets you feeling good? For me, it would have to be Basia. She is a pop-jazz singer who hit it big in this country in the early 1990s. Her sound was distinctive--as I researched what to say in this blog about her, I culled some critics. Here are their adjectives to describe Basia's music:

an absorbing blend of R&B, jazz, classic American soul, and Latin flavours

global pop/jazz sound

Latin-tinged, effortlessly funky jazz-pop

Yes, all that, and simply put--it's music that you can't help dance or strum your fingers to. I'm not usually inclined to like material that might be classified as "smooth jazz", but Basia is much more than that. Kinda Gloria Estefan-like, but more expansive.

I've heard that her lyrics are good, but I can't get off the music long enough to focus upon them. Maybe it's her singing. It doesn't matter, though--there's that beat, and those chord progressions that are so memorable.

Take a look at some of her hits: "Cruising for a Bruising", Baby You're Mine", "Until You Come Back to Me", and "Time and Tide".

Reviewing these videos on YouTube, I couldn't help thinking how much she resembled a dancer in a Robert Palmer video with that exaggerated lipstick and porcelain skin. And yet, unlike the Palmer video dancers whose hair is slicked back, Basia's is flowing, and her face has a strong Eastern European physiognomy. Listening to the music, I recall another singer who broke about the same time Basia did, a Brit named Lisa Stansfield. Both singers have R & B underpinnings that undoubtedly appealed to an old Motown lover like me.

Basia has a new release out (It's That Girl Again), and it's only her second in the last 15 years, so it's time to celebrate. I had forgotten where I left my happy pills! She has the same hair and lipstick that she had all those years ago, but the face is more weathered (as all ours are, I suppose). The sound is miraculously the same.

Printed on the CD itself are these words: "Basia: It's That Girl Again. Saying All Is Good and Well. But Why Is She Looking So Pleased After All That Has Happened." I searched for the trauma on-line, but couldn't find anything but a nice nine-minutes of promotion. Ah, what's it matter! Welcome back, Basia!

The promo will give you a taste of her latest release, as well as a 2-part interview that she have to a "Smooth Jazz" station somewhere. If you are unfamiliar with Basia, I highly recommend this release. It is irresistible!

Boffo Bye Bye Birdie!

2009-10-30T04:54:00.007-04:00

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Inspired by its inclusion in one of my favorite shows (Mad Men), I recently watched the musical Bye Bye Birdie with Jason Alexander, Tyne Daly, and Vanessa Williams. I'm so glad that I took the time to do so. (Many is the the time I check a title out of the library and never get to it.)

This 1960 musical is the masterwork of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams. It originally featured Dick van Dyke and Chita Rivera as the music industry managers of an Elvis Presley-inspired singer named Conrad Birdie. The show was inspired by Presley's 1958 departure for a hitch in the Army. It depicts his time in the town of Sweet Apple, Ohio, where he's engaged in a publicity scheme: he's going to bestow a last goodbye kiss on a contest-winning acolyte before leaving the country.

Memorable songs from the score include "Put on a Happy Face" and "A Lot of Livin' to Do". I think the film version of the film is fondly remembered also--it memorably featured Paul Lynde as Ann-Margaret's father singing "Kids".

The 1995 version showcases the musical talents of Jason Alexander and Vanessa Williams. Directed by Gene Sacks, it perfectly captures the look of the time. I found my eyes engulfed in period detail, and completely impressed with how subtly it was captured.

You must find this movie and enjoy Jason Alexander twirling around a rail station lobby with his partner as he sings "Put on a Happy Face". (Or just click on my YouTube link!) He doesn't look like a dancer, but you'll revise your opinion after viewing this scene. He's perfect for the role as a Momma's boy trying to break free at the age of 39. Forehead slaps and rolling eyes abound--and George Costanza looks like he's from another time. I loved how his eyes looked longingly at his Latin spitfire and his mugging in general.

Vanessa Williams as the spitfire is a revelation. With her raven hair and deep dark eyes, she is hypnotic, as perfectly communicated in her main number performed at a men's club, "Shriner's Ballet". I was struck by the staging of this one. The adoring faces of the men as they hoist Vanessa and carry her down a dance line is hilarious, and her dancing--well, all I can say is I've put more Vanessa Williams movies on hold at the library. If you love her in the TV series Ugly Betty, you're going to fall head over heels for her here.

One last word. Tyne Daly as Jason Alexander's mother is an absolute hoot. With her long fur coat serving as a metaphor for the burden she's always been for her son, she delivers her lines with such verve and humor. This role could have been simply annoying in someone else's hands, but she nails it. I can't erase the image of her at the end of the film, falling over backwards into a pond as she realizes that her "little" boy is leaving her.

The show is currently being restaged on Broadway. I doubt that they can top what I watched!

An A+ Project

2009-10-21T04:55:00.007-04:00

Charlie Poole in 1930

There is no other singer/songwriter quite like Loudon Wainwright III. I've never heard anyone as baldly confessional as he is in song. His wry observations are always laced with wit and humor. You listen to Loudon's life story and continually marvel at how he crystallizes an emotional moment: losing your anger with a child, feeling sheepish at a playground with all the mothers there, preferring your solitude, and (for all you fame-seekers) groveling for notoriety.

What's especially interesting about Loudon's latest, and perhaps most ambitious, release (High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project) is how he steps back from the confessional and turns to the sentimental. Even while doing so, his feet are still firmly planted in both approaches.

Charlie Poole, a banjo player from the early 20th century, was a rambler, a rascal, and a drunk. He hailed from Spray, North Carolina, a cotton mill town. During Charlie's life, thousands of people from the hill country around Spray improved their existences marginally by coming to work in the mills. The hours were long and the work backbreaking. After punching the clock, these folks were ready to party, and Charlie and his group often provided the entertainment.

He had a magnetic style. Driven by a passion for music, Charlie made his first banjo out of a gourd. He would sneak out of the mill and play his banjo on a bridge nearby. So many of his co-workers poked their heads out of the mill's windows to hear and see him, he got fired. And then, because he continued playing outside and getting the same reaction, he was rehired and told to play inside the mill!

Charlie was a busker. (Weren't most folk musicians before they had festivals?) When Poole performed he would sometimes do somersaults, and leap over a chair, landing on his back, then continuing his dance on his hands with his feet up in the air.

One can appreciate his attraction to Loudon Wainwright. There is the attitude of devil-may-care recklessness evinced in the music associated with Charlie Poole. A big theme in Loudon's life story is his celebration of being divorced and alone--coupled with the guilt of disappointing the families he's left behind.

Loudon is also a terrific live act. Although he doesn't leap over chairs, he has facial and vocal mannerisms that keep you rapt in addition to the power of his singing and lyrics.

So Loudon can inhabit Charlie's spirit, and he does so brilliantly. This 2-CD set is structured like a play. If only Loudon, who acts professionally, were still in his 30s and could star in it! (Charlie Poole drank himself to death at 39.)

What's marvelous is that the most confessional singer-songwriter of his generation celebrates a man who didn't write much music at all. In fact, not one of the 28 tracks on this project are written by Poole. When searching to express his life story, the barely literate Charlie mined Tin Pan Alley and the traditional music of his fellow country folk. That's what makes this release such a lovely evocation of an era.

About three-quarters of the project are a labor of musicology. What wonderful songs are revived, and how beautifully presented they are! There's "The Letter That Never Came", written by Paul Dresser, the brother of Theodore Dreiser and author of "On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away", the second-best selling song (in terms of sheet music) of the nineteenth century. It is haunted by a simple question, so quaint to hear today: "Is there any mail for me?" There's a number by Harry von Tilzer ("Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie", "Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage" and "And The Green Grass Grew All Around") called "Moving Day" in which sweet harmonizing is done by Loudon's second family, the Roches. The lyrics of this one resonate today:

Landlord said this morning to me,
"Give me your key, this flat ain't free.
I can't get any rent out of you
Pack your rags and skidoo."

No, this song is not a blues. The attitude is more, "All right, well, let's sing as we pack." I love it!

Loudon, who was extremely close to his mother (his grieving memorably chronicled on 2001's The Last Man on Earth), is clearly moved by an era in which motherhood was often celebrated in song. "My Mother & My Sweetheart", which features just a violin, piano, bass, and Loudon's guitar, will move you to tears, I'm warning you.

The project is handsomely packaged to resemble a book. (Trim size of the case looks to be around 5.5 inches by 6.5 inches.) The interior of the case is festooned with photographs of Charlie and his family, along with images of sheet music and old music contracts. Included is a terrific booklet which surely will be nominated for a Grammy this year. In addition to the lyrics, it features liner notes by famous music critic Greil Marcus (whose 1975's Mystery Train placed rock and roll in a larger context of cultural archetypes like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby).

The project was produced by Dick Connette (who had also produced Loudon on The Last Man on Earth and Geoff Muldaur on his remarkable 2003 tribute to Bix Beiderbecke, Private Astronomy). He co-wrote four of the songs with Loudon, and wrote two others on his own, and they all seamlessly blend into the mood.

There is a warmth here that's absent from music-making and life in general right now. I expect this CD to be up for a Grammy this year, and, oh, if Loudon could only then go on stage and realize a dream he first sang of in "The Grammy Song" from 1982's Fame and Wealth.

Last night I dreamed I won a Grammy
It was presented to me by Debbie Harry
I ran up on stage in my tux
I gulped and I said, "Aw, shucks,
I'd like to thank my producers
and Jesus Christ."

Happy Birthday, Freddy!

2009-10-15T05:41:00.003-04:00

If you search through my archives, you'll find an entry in which I rhapsodize about Freddy Cole. Today is his 78th birthday. If you ever have an opportunity to hear and see him, seize it. His phrasing and timing are so smooth. A decade ago his voice would have reminded you very much of his brother Nat's. Now it's much huskier, but he still makes great romantic listening. Here's a link to a story about him from 3 years ago.

Long may your run, Freddy!

The Rich Soul of Williams and Rawls

2009-10-12T11:39:00.006-04:00

I'd like to celebrate two sensational jazz/blues singers in this entry: Joe Williams and Lou Rawls. By happy accident, they both wound up in my listening rotation recently. While I listened, I enjoyed comparing the arrangements and the vocal attack of each artist.

Both singers tackle a rich variety of material. On the Joe Williams albums, reissued by by Collectables Jazz, he sings standards like "Sleepy Time Gal" and "My Romance" as well as popular songs of the day ("People", "That Face"). But he also stirs in the blues upon which he acquired his fame with the Basie Orchestra in the 1950s. He sings "Rocks in My Bed" and "Kansas City". The orchestrations are energetic, and Joe swings effortlessly through, backed by top-notch musicians such as Clark Terry, Phil Woods, and Hank Jones.

The Lou Rawls collection--again, two albums on one CD issued by Capitol Jazz--features songs that Williams undoubtedly sang earlier with Basie: ""Goin' to Chicago Blues", "Everyday I Have the Blues", as well as a song that would soon become Rawls' signature: "Tobacco Road". In these sessions from 1962-1963, the orchestra positively cooks throughout. There is no way to sit still when listening to this music.

To think that the albums were issued just before the British Invasion. What a turn the musical world was soon to take! These albums were Rawls' third and fourth albums on Capital. He was 30 years old and still making a name in the business. A childhood friend of Sam Cooke, he had survived a car crash after an engagement (despite being declared dead on the way to the hospital!)

Both singers were from Chicago. It was Lou Rawls's birthplace, and Joe Williams moved there from Georgia when he was 4. When they were young both were trained to sing gospel, and both were exposed to the jazz influences of the time. For Williams, 15 years older than Rawls, that meant going to hear Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ethel Walters, and Cab Calloway. A young Lou Rawls would be influenced by Billy Eckstine, Arthur Prysock, and Joe Williams (!)

I first became aware of Joe Williams by listening to A Man Ain't Supposed to Cry, an extremely powerful set of torch songs and ballads that he recorded in 1958 after leaving the Basie band. His voice is so satiny smooth on this album. It's absolutely gorgeous, and reminiscent of Sinatra's best sides with Gordon Jenkins.

I have gradually developed a taste for the substantial blues in his repetoire, but I am more enthusiastic whenever he swings on uptempo numbers. Joe Williams's voice was so deep and rich. There was such complete command and authority. If you've never listened to him, you MUST!

People my age might remember Lou Rawls for his hit "You'll Never Find". Or perhaps as spokesperson for Anheuser Busch beginning in 1976. This association led to their sponsorship for Lou's efforts to raise funds for the United Negro College Fund. For years he would host a telethon to raise money for the Fund, even though he had never attended college.

I guess I'd always thought that Lou Rawls was a little cheesy, but when I dug into his tracks from the 1960s I completely revised my opinion. This man rocks and rolls with the best of the swingers! He's a terrific storyteller (in fact, his website claims he was "pre-rap" thanks to his talking/singing songs like "Tobacco Road") plus his phrasing is always inventive.
His vocal decisions always display nuance and subtlety, and he brings something new to everything he sings. (I especially love his swinging version of "Ol' Man River".) No wonder Frank Sinatra declared that Lou had "the classiest singing and silkiest chops in the singing game."

I recommend these CDs highly. They are representative of that last flash of jazz heat in popular music before rock and roll buried it completely. After listening, you will be inspired to investigate both singers much further, I assure you!

The Day the Music Died?

2009-10-08T04:43:00.003-04:00

I've experienced a strange concurrence of musical and cultural events lately that I'm still trying to come to peace with. Perhaps writing about it will.

Recently my wife and I were cleaning our basement. Spying my uncle's stereo, I impulsively decided to get it repaired and take it to my classroom. So I lugged the behemoth to THE store for stereo repairs (Audio Lab in Harvard Square) and, since the cost of the repair wasn't bad, went ahead with the deal.

I was all set afterwards to play my vinyl as I worked in my classroom, but I discovered I needed speaker wire. It necessitated a 20 minute or so drive north to a place called U Do It Electronics. What an anachronism! From its 1960s signage clearly visible from Route 128 to its salesmen in their shirts and ties, this store is a wonder. Aisles and aisles of cables and electronic gizmoes. How reassuring to know that my past is still alive in more than just my head!

What makes this experience strange is that the whole time I'm going through it I'm wondering about what music and memories are worth. I'm acting my age, for sure, as I stay wedded to the physical reality of a recording. Why can't I just move on? If I need music, just go to Rhapsody and play it from my computer, or download the album from ITunes. Why do I still need to touch the record, and to open up the CD booklet?

I need to have booklet in my hand. I want to read the liner notes, look at who wrote the songs, and check out the personnel. I probably could get this information online, but it's just not the same. Does the fact that young people are getting their music delivered digitally these days mean that fewer of them are looking up the background that liner notes provide? Ah, probably not--if they love the band/singer, they'll read about them online and discover much more than liner notes.

Yes, I'm entering senior citizenville. I feel an overwhelming emptiness when I shopped recently at an area Borders. I walked through their aisles, and I could not feel any excitement. The front of the store was devoted to display upon display of vampire books (the Twilight tie-in). Forget about literature being proudly trumpeted! Their music department had shrunk to what seemed like 10% of the floor space. They no longer seemed interested in making it look attractive. I noticed that they weren't even carrying Barbra Streisand's new CD, of which much ado was made in The New York Times. C'mon--the senior set will be looking for their Babs in the brick and mortar!

It's tough sledding finding a "new release" these days. The only music stores with any vitality in my area are the Newbury Comics outlets and, given my pedantic tastes, it's a crap shoot whether or not they even have what I'm looking for. But at least they have aisle upon aisle of music, much of it shrink-wrapped and fresh. At least in these environments, and in stellar second-hand music shops like Planet Records (Harvard Square), I can still feel the love--and feel the comfort that there's still a place for people like me who like to acquire their music in this way.

But time's winged chariot is picking up speed. Our dour economy may deliver the knockout punch to these retail outlets. Probably for the best--it'll lower my carbon footprint, and Lord knows I have enough liner notes to reread!

Audacious O'Day

2009-09-28T17:09:00.003-04:00

Anita O'Day at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival

I'm an enormous fan of jazz singers. I aspire to be one myself. My music collection is testimony to this passion. I caught the singing bug in the early 1980s. It was during this period that I devoted myself to studying the Great American Songbook. Drawn to this emotionally powerful music by my mother's death, I've never let go. I began by completely familiarizing myself with the repetoire of Sinatra, Bennett, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short. Over the years I've enjoyed many more singers, and I'm constantly on the lookout for ones I've neglected or didn't know about. Put Anita O'Day in the former camp.

Until I fell in love with her by watching the recent documentary Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer, I kept her at a distance because she struck me as a jazz critic's favorite, but not the People's Choice. From what I'd heard of her, she had a pleasant tone reminiscent of Chris Connor or June Christy, but she departed from the melody too freely for my taste, either by scatting or making her voice like an instrument. I never found it good storytelling, which to me is the sine qua non of excellent singing.

But now that I've heard her story, it will enrich my listening to her considerably. What a life! The documentary chronicles O'Day's rise as a singer for Stan Kenton and a soloist in the 1950s. The television clips from this period make compelling viewing: she is so completely in charge as a singer, giving color to songs and providing fascinating tonal interplay with the musicians accompanying her. The pinnacle of her career--an appearance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival captured gorgeously on film--has her tearing up the song "Sweet Georgia Brown". Oh, to look out at the audience digging her that day. A total Mad Men moment!

You'll learn that Anita O'Day had a 40 year or so drug-and alcohol-besotted relationship with her drummer, John Poole. You'll see her interviewed by Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder, and Bryant Gumbel and through it all looking and sounding marvelous despite her troubles. She is so completely no-nonsense and real. Lord, I'd have loved to slam down a few while talking to her!

The documentary is fast-paced with shifting and colorful graphics to compensate for the occasional grainy archival footage and the inevitable talking heads. I found it all mesmerizing. If you do too, may I also recommend a DVD showing O'Day at peak performance during the 1980s: Anita O'Day--Live at Ronnie Scott's in London.

I'll be looking for her vinyl in my used record stores. She was a treasure!

My First Big Musical Group

2009-09-17T19:17:00.007-04:00

Sure, the guys have suits on, but check out those goatees!

The last of Mary's four solo albums from the 1970s.

It is 1969, or perhaps 1970. I am 15 years old. My musical taste is still unformed. I had a weird period in sixth grade where I listened to the Monkees as well as the Doors and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. (My girlfriends and I used to buy strawberry gum so that we could cut out the strawberry images and paste them all over our notebooks.) But now I'm casting about, looking for a direction.

I have two older sisters with record collections. The oldest wasn't that much of a musical buff--I recall that she enjoyed the Beach Boys. But she's gone off to college. The one nearest to my age likes Barbra Streisand and some of my father's musical soundtracks (that's why to this day I have the scores of Fiddler on the Roof and Roar of the Greasepaint, Smell of the Crowd committed to memory).

It is that flash in time right before Carole King's Tapestry hits. The singer/songwriters have yet to storm the scene. My oldest brother has joined the Marines. I recall the night before he headed off to boot camp. The song played repeatedly on our turntable that night was Peter, Paul and Mary's "Leavin' on a Jet Plane".

I was drawn by their vocals, and I love the songs on Album 1700. There's "I Dig Rock and Roll Music", a jibe at the popular rock of the day and "I'm in Love with a Big Blue Frog", a song about an interracial romance. And then there is the haunting "Great Mandela" sung by Peter. I'm attracted to their songs because they seem to be about something. Their politics resonate with the times. I become a fan.

Loving Peter, Paul and Mary leads me directly to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. (I study the record label, and note who's written every song on the disc.) I buy some of their other records, and my love deepens. They are so strident, so authentic--oh, it hit my adolescent heart in the bull's-eye! I sing along to every song, harmonizing with them. I admire Peter and Paul's appearance--how I want to grow a Van Dyke when I'm older, and have an artsy beatnik look! I trust their taste in material completely. Although I can't bear to listen to Bob Dylan, their covers of his songs lead me to the library to read about him, and to try to understand why others think he's so great.

I am crestfallen that shortly after I've developed this love, they break up as a group. Paul goes off to explore religion, and Peter loses his bearings with an indiscretion with a young fan. So I'm thinking I'll never see them. All I have is a program that one of my sister's friends gave me. How sacred this book was to me. Turning its pages over and over as I continued to listen.

Each member pursues a solo career. Their debut albums are all sterling. I go to see them each individually in concert. I love them all for different reasons: Peter, for his amazing songwriting skill and musicianship; Paul, for his silky smooth voice and Bing Crosby-like composure and humor; and Mary, for her impeccable taste in what to sing, and for her completely unique voice. They continue to be my soundtrack into the 1970s.

Disco hits, and their careers quiet down. They decide that it's best to reunite, and I finally get to see my heroes in together in concert later in the decade. My musical tastes are soon to shift dramatically, but in the years that follow I still keep in touch and buy all of their releases.

Peter, Paul, and Mary were always classy, and one of a kind. Several years ago, when I'd learned Mary needed a bone marrow transplant, I sent a handwritten note to her expressing my love for her work. I was so relieved that she survived, and that I could see them one last time together with my wife.

I played Peter, Paul, and Mary to each of my 6th grade classes as they came in today. "It's a sad day for me today, kids," I said, and went on to tell why they are such an indelible and important part of musical history. I played "Don't Laugh at Me" and I could feel tears welling up as I thought about how they always stood behind the underdog. I sang along to "Wayfaring Stranger", feeling the power of its time-honored lyric. Oh, it was a regular hootenany!

"You know, " I said to my classes, "you probably aren't aware that you already know some Peter, Paul, and Mary songs." I invited them to raise their hands if they recognized the choruses I sang to "Puff the Magic Dragon", "If I Had a Hammer", and "Leavin' on a Jet Plane". Scattered hands went up--never a majority, but it was still reassuring to know that some kids would be carrying on. And heck, who knows what impact their brief exposure today might have!

Mary Travers was a wonderful singer and stylist, and I urge you to check out her solo work from the 1970s in which she skillfully bridges the gap between folk and pop music. I'll miss her enormously. She helped me develop my musical taste! God bless her because of all the pleasure she brought into this world!

Pay to Play

2009-09-07T17:17:00.005-04:00

Interesting story on NPR's Here and Now recently about how some musicians are mining their fans directly in order to bankroll production and marketing costs for new releases.

I don't know what to think of this phenomenon. At first sight, it all seems innocent and fun. But there's a claustrophobic tinge to it also. When an artist turns directly to the fans for financing, it seems as if the circle has closed. Sure, it's a passionate group ("the base") but what about expanding your audience? Is it all word-of-mouth from here on in because you can't afford the publicity that a major label would afford you?

Of course, one could argue that fan financing puts the pressure where it should be: on creating something that draws on your strengths, whatever it is that made you appealing to listeners to begin with. No more advice on image from the label, and stress to sell enough "units" to please a corporation.

It's a story that's still unfolding. At the end of the NPR piece, it's revealed that Erin McKeown's Internet fundraising stopped short of releasing her latest work on her own label. Instead, she chose to go with Ani DeFranco's Righteous Babe imprint. Smart move probably--there is much to be gained by association with a stable of artists and the market presence an established label has.

I am impressed with imprints like Appleseed Records, who have managed their company well enough to provide a vital stream of folk releases over the last dozen years. It was inspired by Pete Seeger's work, and in its catalog are several outstanding collections of Pete's work. But it also keeps issuing new releases by seminal figures like Tom Rush, Donovan and Buffy Sainte-Marie as well as promoting the more contemporary careers of artists like the Kennedys and John Wesley Harding.

I must admit, one criteria that I use to judge whether or not I'll purchase the CD is the label. If I have enjoyed their judgments before in whom they sign and promote, I'm willing to take a chance on someone new.

Yep, "brand" matters. It's just that when artists become their own label, they are the brand, and they'd better be distinctive enough to be one, or they won't sell enough units to stay in the game.

Looking Back at Jesse Winchester

2009-09-05T12:19:00.006-04:00

Jesse Winchester is one of my favorite singer-songwriters. He emerged in the early '70s and quickly grabbed listeners' attention with the song"The Brand New Tennessee Waltz" on his eponymous debut. Jesse had a compelling backstory too, having relocated from Memphis to Montreal to avoid the draft. Deeply respected by many singers and musicians, his songs have been well-covered.

His first album was produced by Robbie Robertson of the Band and engineered by Todd Rundgren, who got Winchester signed with Bearsville Records for the brunt of his output in the 1970s. His released one jewel after another. Third Down, 110 to Go in 1972 (featuring "Isn't That So?" a driving spiritual); Learn to Love It in 1974 (memorable for "Mississippi, You're On My Mind", gospel-inflected numbers like "Wake Me" and "I Can't Stand Up Alone" as well as the terrific traditional song, "Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt"); Let the Rough Side Drag in 1976; Nothing But a Breeze in 1977 (with the lovely "Bowling Green", "My Songbird", "You Remember Me" as well as the funny "Twigs and Seeds" and "Rhumba Man"); A Touch on the Rainy Side in 1978 (besides the title song, I also recommend "Little Glass of Wine"); and finally, his last release on Bearsville, 1981's Talk Memphis.

He himself never gained much notoriety. Perhaps that was due to the fact that he didn't start touring the States until 1977. By that time he had a wonderful catalog to draw upon but unfortunately musical styles had changed radically. He continued to record regularly until 1981.

I heard him a concert a couple of times when I lived in Chicago. The first time, at a bar directly across from Wrigley Field (the Cubby Bear), I chatted with him before he went on stage. I recall asking him what he preferred: performing or writing songs. Jesse told me that if he had his druthers he'd rather just be a songwriter, and mail his stuff out for others to record. It seemed to fit with his personality: he comes across as a shy guy.

I recall seeing him one more time in Chicago at a folk club called Holstein's. There wasn't much of a crowd for him that night, and I got the distinct sense that the management was taking a financial bath on his appearance. I felt bad for Jesse, because I admire him so much and think he deserves to be known more wide.

Anyway, the '80s and the '90s saw only one release each decade. They were fabulous--you can expect nothing but perfection from him. (Check out the lovely "I Don't Think You Love Me Anymore" from 1988's Humor Me.)Over the last decade he's released two albums, and he promoted his latest, Love's Filling Station, recently on NPR.

In the interview, he described himself as a "traditional" songwriter. That's absolutely true: his songs fit the classic verse-chorus structure that's found in most pop music. His roots are folk, but his sound can be gospel and country and rhythm and blues flavored. Jesse has a sweet soft high-timbred voice and his lyrics are impeccable. He has an intensely personal style: he does talk about himself in his songs, often self-deprecatingly, but he displays an almost Old World respect for women and he paints stories of small towns that seem to arise from his Southern youth.

I hope that you'll introduce yourself to Jesse Winchester. He'll win your affection quickly.

That Summer

2009-08-26T22:36:00.003-04:00

NPR's All Things Considered has a feature this summer in which they ask different musicians what their favorite song of summer is. This week they asked Tony Bennett. He chose a French song that he'd recorded in 1963, "It Was Me". I have always been struck by this song. It begins with a question.

Who's the one you would find on the beach every day?

Quickly the tension is established. Turns out the narrator is in love with someone at the beach.

Lying there on the shore while his friends swim away
Lying there on the sand only inches from you
Watching you everyday till the summer was through
It was me

A relationship gradually develops. The second stanza begins like the first, except with three questions instead of one.

Who would help gather shells for the bracelet you made?
Who would find you the cups for the pink lemonade?
Who was always beside you whenever you'd swim?
When you sat by the sea as the daylight would end
It was me, it was me

But was the love consumated? The song keeps you engaged as we enter the bridge of the song. Now suddenly summer is ended.

Now that summer is gone and the warm skies are cold
And the soft winds are crisp with their wintry chill
Do you ever think back on the night when we kissed?
Can you ever forget? I know I never will

All right, there was a kiss. It meant a lot to the narrator, of course. He's seeking confirmation that the feeling was mutual. The last stanza, describing perhaps an end-of-summer picture at the beach, provides the answer.

Who's the one next to you in the group photograph?
Who's the one with the face too unhappy to laugh?
Standing there looking down so uncertain and shy
Like a boy who's in love, so in love he could cry
It was me, it was me

And then, the zinger of a last line.

Me finding out it was you.

"Me finding out"--did all these questions begin upon the narrator's discovery of the photograph? "It was you"--yes, now I see you in this picture and I remember how young and smitten I was with you, I'd forgotten after all this time. As I gaze at the picture, memories return of being so in love and so young.

A fabulous song that I hope you'll give a listen. I'm glad that Tony Bennett chose a number that he discovered and recorded. This is a tremendous source of pride to him, as well it should be. He has always had the best taste in material.

The summer song that occurs to me that is equally as beautiful was recorded by Nat King Cole: "That Sunday, That Summer". Nat sometimes chose material of dubious quality as he sought a hit (cue "Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer"), but with this song he gives some imagery for a listener to luxuriate in.

If I had to choose just one day
To last my whole life through
It would surely be that Sunday
The day that I met you

Newborn whippoorwhills were calling from the hills
Summer was a-comin' in but fast
Lots of daffodils were showing off their skills
Nodding all together I can almost her them whisper
"Go on and kiss her, go on and kiss her"

If I had to choose one moment
To live within my heart
It would surely be that tender moment
Recalling how we started
Darling, it would be when you smiled at me
That way
That Sunday
That Summer

This song charted in 1963, reaching a peak position of #12 on the Billboard charts. ("Hazy Lazy Crazy Days" peaked at #6 the very same year--geez, what a year for summer songs!)

Anyway, two lush songs of summer that are favorites on my turntable!

Remember Gilbert O'Sullivan?

2009-08-22T18:32:00.010-04:00

Gilbert in 1971. O'Sullivan is his actual last name; Gilbert is a stage name referring to Gilbert & Sullivan. An apt choice, given his lyrical songs that are dense with words. Note the collegiate look inspired by a Buster Keaton film!

Gilbert's top-selling album of 1972. Although chest hair dominates on the cover, on the back he's shown in his "G" sweater again.

Still sporting the chest hair, here's his 1974 release with the notorious song "A Woman's Place"

Peggy Lee, an admirer of Gilbert!

Gilbert O'Sullivan was an oddity in a screwball time. When he struck gold in the States with "Alone Again (Naturally)" in 1971, it was not only his weird and verbose song that struck a listener. There was his clean-scrubbed appearance on the album cover: wearing a collegiate V-neck sweater with a "G" emblazoned upon it, he seemed to harken back to a more innocent time.

Hailing from Ireland, Gilbert washed ashore on the wave of the singer-songwriter craze of that era. It was decidedly uncool to like him or his music, but there I was, proudly bucking the trend. I found his approach to a song completely idiosyncratic and refreshing. He had a memorable way of writing lyrics. For example, on his second album Back to Front, he celebrates Spring by comparing himself to a mole.

Everytime a bird sings
Everytime a bell rings
I go beserk
I climb into my hole
And sit there like a mole
Playing in the dirt
Contradicting people who think of me as being
So soft and gentle
Very clean

This album, which features his second U.S. hit "Clair", is one of his best. As I scan the lyrics, the melodies jump into my mind--each one is distinctive, and pleasurable to experience over again. You can't help but be amused by how goofy Gilbert is, especially when he introduces Sides 1 and 2 of his album by singing:

Side 1 ("Intro")

For those of you leaving to join the hunt
The name of this album is "Back to Front"
And those of you staying the whole way through
The name of this song is
(seque immediately to first track...)

Side 2 ("Outro")
I'm not quite finished yet
I'm not quite finished yet
There's another side to go before I go
Thought I'd let you know...

Gilbert plays the piano, and his signature seems to be a rhythmic striking of chords that goes "chunk-chunk-a-chunk-chunk." This is not to say that his music lacks sophistication. He almost always has other instrumentation to power his melodies along--mostly a drum, some strings, and wind instruments. He is never boring.

His songs tell simple stories. Usually they're about loving someone, as in "That's Love" from Back to Front:

Once in a while out of the blue
I might appear somewhat rude
But don't be alarmed or get upset
Just say to yourself this I'll forget
And when I come home from being away
It might do me good just to hear you say
Darlin' don't move an inch, keep perfectly still
Now do with me what you will

Can you sense those lyrics' inherent musicality just by reading them aloud? Gilbert O'Sullivan is fun to sing along with, and I think he's a terrific writer because his words get planted in my mind when I hear them. Like a truly professional pop tunesmith, he weds music and lyrics well. The song's subject is not that interesting on its face, but how he expresses the sentiment can be striking.

In Gilbert's lyrical world, there's always a girl that you're courting. He often creates clever little dramas. For example, in "Matrimony" he and his bride are trying to get to the church on time; in "Clair" he's babysitting; and in "I'm Not Getting Any Younger" he's explaining his feelings about a gulf in age to a lover.

He achieved international fame in the early 1970s. In the U.S. he had a hit with "Get Down" in 1973 but after that his star fell quickly. (His recording of "A Woman's Place" in 1974 certainly didn't help out matters. Check out these lyrics: "I may be old-fashioned/so what if I am/I'm not any different/from any other man/I'm not one of those who look for blood from a stone/but I believe/a woman's place is in the home".) Gilbert only toured the States once during this time (although his website reports he's working with promoters to return after a 35 year absence!).

In the late 1970s and periodically in the 1980s Gilbert was entangled in court with his producer, Gordon Mills (whose daughter was "Clair"). He recorded less frequently, with none of his work being issued in the States after a contract with Epic expired. I've imported some of his albums from this time. I recommend Sounds of the Loop from 1993. It features a duet with Peggy Lee (Who'd have thunk she'd be an admirer of his work?) and also contains a song I promise you'll be unable to get out of your head after one listen. ("Are You Happy?")

Gilbert O'Sullivan's website is fun to cruise. You can watch video of his early years when, at the height of the rock's popularity, he appeared on stage wearing a tweed cap and high stockings. You can watch five different stagings of the song "Matrimony". (I was impressed with how he pulled off a version that required him to circulate around a crowd as he sang.) I recommend his radio interview in Israel this year. Gilbert's articulate about his craft, and you have to respect someone who continues to write out of the pure pleasure of being fulfilled artistically and entertaining people.

Melodious Maia Sharp

2009-07-09T08:11:00.006-04:00

Presently I'm filled with the enthusiasm that only an outstanding concert can bring. Maia Sharp, who is touring currently to promote Echo, her latest CD, gave a performance at Club Passim won't be forgotten. It was an awesome display of musical skill on so many levels.

Let's start with the songwriting. Most of Maia's songs follow a classic structure: verse to chorus to verse and then back again. She constructs choruses with words and harmonies that seize your attention. As you sing along, you're admiring her unique turn of phrase. Here are a few examples.

from "Willing to Burn"

Now we're living in a tinderbox
hosing down the roof
It's raging all around us
and we still refuse to move
There's a lesson we're desperate to learn
and we're willing to burn

from "The Reminder"

Get ready for the riot act
you so deserve to hear
you made lies of all your promises
then you disappeared
you took a heart so innocent
shattered it like glass
then you had the nerve to think
that you could leave that in your past
when you forget I'll be there every time
I'm the reminder

Maia is a terrific and supremely confident singer. You hear every word she delivers and, because she's so often telling the story about some romantic travail, you are captive. Her sound displays many colors. Mostly it's a country-rock feel, but you can detect a strong blues and jazz undercurrent. It's rhythmic and inventive. Last night she was accompanied by another guitarist and truthfully, that was all that was necessary to do justice to her work.

For the most part, Maia Sharp co-writes her songs. Prominent co-writers you might recognize are Kim Richey, David Batteau, and her father, Randy Sharp. It seems now, after 4 albums in over the last dozen or so years, that she's destined not to become a star, but to provide the music for the stars. It's become the Sharp family tradition.

Why she is not a star herself is completely beyond me. From her first release, Maia Sharp has been completely in charge and developed as a performer. If it were the early 1970s, there's little doubt that she would have shot into prominence along with Bonnie Raitt (who Maia has opened for, and who recorded three Sharp songs--"Crooked Crown", "I Don't Want Anything to Change", and "The Bed I Made"-- on her last release, 2005's Souls Alike).

I love listening for the "hooks" in Maia's songs. I don't play the guitar, but I can hear inventive chord changes, and she knows just where to put them in to distinguish one song from another. All her music has a dramatic structure that's backed up sonically. I love how she always returns to the chorus, and it's always sung with great feeling.

Her voice is very full and robust. She never seems to strain for a note. She's quite funny on stage, and spontaneous. Her intelligence shines like a beacon, as well as her authenticity. She is dynamic.

I was anxious for her in terms of how many people would show for her gig. I mean, it was the first stop of her tour, and she had flown across the country for it. Fortunately the club was about three-quarters full. Their applause was robust, and she left feeling as if she'd gotten off to a great start.

I'll leave you now with some choice cuts from YouTube.

from Echo: "Polite Society"; "John Q. Lonely"

from the Dixie Chicks: "A Home"

Interview with Maia on "All Things Considered"

That Thing You Do

2009-07-03T08:53:00.018-04:00

Melody Gardot

Madeleine Peyroux

Madeleine Peyroux appeared recently in Boston and received a horrible review in the newspaper. Since I'm a fan and own all her CDs, my initial response was concern for her. "How could a critic be so cruel?" I thought. And yet, after reading comments to the story and being honest with myself about her music, I must admit that I admire his honesty, and I agree that she has a fundamental problem.

The reviewer noted how the audience started leaving long before the concert was over. I must admit, that when I listen to her, I often leave mentally about a quarter or half way into the song. Her sound is pleasant and inviting at first, but the spell is soon broken. What could be the problem?

Let's begin with her song selection which, until 2009's Barebones, was always sprinkled with standards, be they from The Great American Songbook ("The Summer Wind"; "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter"; "Smile") or songs famously associated with other singers ("La Vie en Rose" (Piaf); "Lonesome Road"(Sinatra); "Everybody's Talkin'" (Nilsson); "(Looking for) The Heart of a Saturday Night" (Waits); "Walkin' After Midnight" (Cline); "(Getting Some) Fun Out of Life" (Holiday); "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" (Dylan); "Dance Me to the End of Love", "Blue Alert", "Half the Perfect World" (Cohen).

Before rock, it was customary for singers to have songs made popular by other people in your repetoire. Much of my music listening is involved in analyzing how different singers handle the same song. I'm searching for singers who have a trademark style, and yet are not entrapped by it. The great ones always make you ask as you look over the song list, "Well, I wonder what they'll do with this song?"

The answer with Madeleine Peyroux is: "absolutely nothing." Her renditions of these songs on her CDs are respectful, so much so that you're stunned by how she as an artist didn't feel it necessary to make them her own. Just because they're great songs is not a valid enough reason to perform them. (When she does perform them, she's less respectful, improvising in a directionless way. Listen to how she butchers "Smile".)

In a review written in a Boston alternative newspaper after her last appearance in Boston, Jon Garelick wrote, "When she sang a slow ballad like Fred Neil's 'Everybody's Talkin' or Charlie Chaplin's 'Smile', her phrasing fell apart...there was a mile between syllables, and nothing connecting them. Sometimes her pitch was off, or her voice thinned out to unsupported strings of notes. Was it a failure of technique, or a failure of commitment, as if she hadn't made up her mind which note to hit or when?" Excellent question! I suspect the answer is a little of both--she wants to break from sounding just like Billie Holiday, but she lacks an alternate technique. As a consequence, she gets into trouble, and lands on notes she never should have.

How do you "make a song your own" anyway? Now there's a challenge that encounters every singer and arranger. Acquiring a style, getting your listeners to attend to your words--oh, it's a tough business, and it's a mysterious process. Nothing that can be taught directly, I suspect. You need a great song, of course, but so much depends on the delivery of it.

One young singer definitely acquiring a style is Melody Gardot, a cohort of Peyroux's in the female adult music class. I'm very excited about her talent as a singer and a songwriter. Before I discuss her skill, though, just give a listen to how she renders "Over the Rainbow". Listen for how she puts her own stamp on this well-worn classic.

There's no doubt that Gardot attacked "Over the Rainbow" by asking herself, "OK, what can I do to this song to make my listeners think 'Oh, this is different, but I like it. In fact, I love it, because I'm tired of hearing it sung the same way all the time." It's a triumph for her. You marvel at her phrasing, and of the decision to cast the song in one of Gardot's favorite styles (bossa-nova).

Gardot has an incredible ear and intelligence. "She has a knack for the melodramatic but also for a kind of minimalism," writes Nate Chinen in The New York Times in a review of My One and Only Thrill, her latest release, "she knows the power of modest gestures and meaningful inflections."

Sure, Gardot's voice does sound like she may have listened too much to Julie London or Blossom Dearie, but she gets beyond the similarity and carves out a singular style due to her phrasing and--most importantly--the fact that almost all of her material is written by herself. What's terrific about her songs are that they're obviously crafted to possibly fit into the Great American Songbook. She has truly studied her writers! On Thrill, it's clear that she's delighted with "If The Stars Were Mine", and rightfully so. (The song is featured twice on the tracks!) It's upbeat, bright, and resonates with songs of yore in its celebration of being in love.

Other standouts include the "Fever"-like drive of "Who Will Comfort Me", the beautiful longing of "Lover Undercover", and the wistful "Deep Within the Corners of My Mind".

Madeleine Peyroux would only occasionally write songs on her albums, with mixed results. Her best written song was probably
"Don't Wait Too Long" from 2006's Half the Perfect World. "It's Alright" from her previous release was pretty good too. With her new release, she's gone into songwriting full throttle. No more standards. Just unadulterated Madeleine.

Peyroux favors the confessional approach in her songwriting. The title track on Barebones and several other songs concern her alchoholic father who died several years ago, around the time she returned to the music business after an eight-year hiatus. Here's how she saluted her father in her 2004 release: "(To) Mom, for everything, Dad, for our time together.")

It's clear that she's haunted by her father's depression. The opening song ("Instead") is an attempt to meet her own depression head-on. It's a light, lilting number that gets the CD off to a good start.

But then Peyroux seems to get grounded on the shoals of her own melancholy. She has a curiously sedate way of delivering lyrics about her father like "Watch me rage down this river of tears"; if there's anger there, a listener never hears it.

The biography on her website discusses the humor in her songs, but honestly, I couldn't detect much. When she writes well it's usually in a song that runs counterpoint to the mood created by the tone of her voice. (I'm referring to "You Can't Do Me", a bouncy number distinguished by its stream of similes such as "blewed like a Mississippi sharecropper, screwed like a high-school cheerleader (!)".

Her songwriting fails to consistently hit the mark, but at least Barebones marks a first attempt to shape a style and world view. I am sure that Larry Klein, who produces both Peyroux and Gardot, must be struck by the difference in these singers. He is infamous as Joni Mitchell's ex-husband and producer of her work in the 1980s and early '90s. (I especially liked his work on Turbulent Indigo, which gave a Grammy to Joni and a divorce to him.)

Gardot's first two releases are on the famous jazz label Verve, and she's a perfect fit. Her future looks extremely bright. Peyroux records on the Rounder label, and she may need a change of scenery. (They're more roots-oriented, and less hospitable to a purely singer-songwriter approach.)

Perhaps Larry Klein will back her up with a string-based soundscape on her next release, as he did for Gardot. In terms of what she sings, well, that's a big question. I would continue her to steer her completely away from the standards and encourage who to continue to record upbeat, playful material.

Right now, I suspect she's in a bit of a crisis in terms of direction, so it will be interesting to watch how it all turns out.

A Unique Sensibility

2009-06-13T08:24:00.009-04:00

I was saddened to hear of Kenny Rankin's death this week. He held a special position in my musical memory, largely due to two albums that my roommate and I listened to incessantly in college.

It was the mid 1970s: that quiet time just before disco stampeded the music industry. The singer-songwriters were ruling the Popular roost. I was weened on this acoustic music. Although I began my listening life as a Doors fan (along with the Monkees--hey, I thought Adam West was legit as Batman!), I soon shifted to folk music. My heroes were Peter, Paul, and Mary. I then branched out from them to John Denver, Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Don McLean.

At this time the label "singer-songwriter" didn't even exist. Perhaps that explains why Kenny Rankin's music was able to achieve a foothold. He played an acoustic guitar, but he had a decidedly jazz-based sensibility. But not exclusively so. He was actually quite versatile. Take the selections on 1974's Silver Morning. "In the Name of Love" was eventually recorded by Peggy Lee. "Haven't We Met" became a part of Mel Torme and Carmen McRae's repetoire. But there are also two Beatle covers: "Blackbird" and "Penny Lane". There's soul, with his cover of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready". Then there's the strictly "singer-songwriter" fare, co-written with his wife at the time, Yvonne.

The followup to Silver Morning was 1975's Inside. Kenny is all over the map again, with very pleasing results. He and Yvonne deliver a memorable version of Stevie Wonder's "Creepin'"; he skates easily through Jimi Hendrix's "Up From the Skies"; and he puts his stamp on Randy Newman's "Marie" and John Sebastian's "She's a Lady". Kenny Rankin was in peak form.

In addition to Nilsson's Touch of Schmilsson album (see previous blog), I credit Kenny Rankin's next album, The Kenny Rankin Album, as the work that introduced me to my father's music. Rankin "gets his Sinatra on" just as Nilsson had: on this album he is working with arranger and conductor Don Costa. Only two "standards" on this album, though: "Here's That Rainy Day" and "When Sunny Gets Blue". Still, a faithful liner note reader like me had taken note. I loved his eclecticism.

Kenny would recapture this magic with Costa once more in 1980's After the Roses. The album is incredibly romantic, as all of his material is, and it features two of my favorite Rankin songs: "What Matters Most" (lyrics: Marilyn & Alan Bergman; music: David Grusin) and "Regrets".

I noticed that I have his autograph on my copy of this album. I also see that I have a six vinyl releases of Rankin's along with three CDs. I had forgotten how much I loved him. This probably happened because he fell silent through most of the 1980s while I was stuffing my ears and brains with jazz singers and pop standards.

I reconnected with Kenny when he released 1988's Hiding In Myself. (Don't miss his version of Jimmy Webb's "She Moves, Eyes Follow" on this release!) After that, he would periodically release collections of standards that failed to grab my attention. (I thought this material had been much more memorably delivered by my father's singers--oh yes, the transition was complete!)

If there's one release from the last two decades that I'd recommend, it would be 1997's Here In My Heart. A collection of mostly Brazilian, bossa-nova flavored music, it is a warm and inviting album that puts you in a sweetly contemplative mood immediately. (Kenny works with some masters on this one, using Oscar Castro-Neves on support for several numbers by Ivan Lins.)

Kenny Rankin was destined to have a tough time in the music business. He couldn't be pigeon-holed. He might have been labeled "smooth jazz" if he'd been working more in the '80s (maybe not though, since he hardly ever employed a saxophone in his arrangements). He couldn't strictly be called a jazz artist because he played the acoustic guitar and never stuck exclusively to standards. What label can you apply to artists like Rankin, Michael Franks, Jimmy Webb, and Art Garfunkel? (Please, don't tell me "Easy Listening"—that sounds so dismissive! Makes it seem like music that won't require your mind, which is so far from the reality if you're really listening!)

He gained notoriety as an interpreter of Beatle songs (you'll find them on most of his releases). Helen Reddy had a big hit with his song "Peaceful". As Johnny Carson wrote in the liner notes for his 1968 debut, Kenny Rankin had "unquestionable taste" which he displayed throughout his career. Paul McCartney asked him to represent him and play "Blackbird" at the ceremony in which Paul and John Lennon were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987.

It is comforting to think that at the time of his death he was working on an album with 14-time Grammy award winning producer Phil Ramone, who has worked with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Paul Simon to Ray Charles. Kenny Rankin must have felt a deep appreciation of his work knowing that Ramone wished to work with him.

He was special, and I'll be listening to him again in the days ahead. Dip into some of my Youtube links to his work. Follow the links to Amazon and listen some more. I am certain you'll be captivated!

Melody Takes Hold

2009-06-07T09:02:00.005-04:00

It is with great pleasure that I report that my 8 year-old son has developed a taste for the music of Paul McCartney, and that it was developed by listening to him on vinyl!

1984's Give My Regards to Broad Street was "a big snooze" according to Leonard Maltin, and, after viewing it with my family, I'd have to agree. But we regarded it more kindly due to our two boys' enthusiasm for the music.

Some of the set musical passages are well-done in the film. Most memorable is a simple session in a hangar of some sort, where Paul and Wings perform "Not Such a Bad Boy." The delivery of "Ballroom Dancing" is also strangely fascinating, as dancers cavort and two very different musical audiences intermingle.

The most striking piece of '80s memorabilia is "Silly Love Songs". The number begins with Wings arising on a hydraulic lift, surrounded by smoke. They're all decked out in caked white faces and Mohawk wigs. As the song progresses, out comes a single dancer to perform a Michael Jackson shtick. He's ridiculously tall and thin, and he moves robotically as he glides in front of the band. My boys loved it.

Remembering all the abuse that Paul has taken over the years for being too commercial and unsubstantial lyrically has given me a greater fondness for "Silly Love Songs". It really is a direct response to that criticism, and the song is durable. It's got the elements of his musical virtuosity--the composing and the arranging of harmony, horns, and strings. Its message is undeniable--we will never have enough of "silly" love songs! Rhapsodize on, romantic moptop!

Watching and listening to Give My Regards to Broad Street helps you recall the era when McCartney and Wings were a popular stadium act. It's moving to see Linda, and to think about what a terrific marriage she and Paul had. One is reminded that the film was released only a few years after John's assassination. Perhaps it was an effort to relive the zany movie energy of Help!

It failed to recapture the magic, but it still makes for a great curiosity piece. Listening to my boys sing along to the Beatle songs, I think, "Man, wouldn't Paul be pleased to hear their song? There is no deeper satisfaction."

Like Porter, Gershwin, Berlin, et al, McCartney will be carried on. It's a tribute to someone who always ambitiously pursued his art. Yes, he was/is commercial--he wants the broadest audience, because that's a measure of the power of his melody, and his ability to reach people's heart and minds.

In a way, he has always been traveling "broad" street.