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Archive for April, 2010

Day 68. James Brown.

Monday, April 5th, 2010

So, Mira’s gravity towards box-sets continues tonight with ‘Star Time’ by James Brown and the complete Columbia Miles Davis / John Coltrane box-set. As Mira pointed out, both are red. I’m saving the Miles Davis for tomorrow (I’m still working on the Bach box as well)… so tonight is about James Brown.

‘The Hardest Working Man In Show Business’ certainly could put on a show. At least that’s what I heard. I had three chances to see James Brown, and blew it each time. My dad saw him in the 70s, and told me about how he would be calling out directions to the group (catching their mistakes!) and dancing the entire time, only to finally crumple to the stage in exhaustion. Of course – this had long been part of the act. Someone comes off from the side, with a purple cape and drapes over the Godfather of Soul, who slowly begins to rise up and sing the word ‘Please’ over and over again before kicking off the end of the show. I would have loved to have seen that.

And while I ‘I Got You’ and ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine’ certainly deserve to pop recognition that these two songs have earned, it is ‘It’s A Man’s World’ and ‘King Heroin’ that I think are really two of the most important songs in his career… for very different reasons. ‘It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ with its soulful singing and string orchestration quite possibly is the foundation for an entire generation of R&B and Soul. Would there have been a Barry White without this song? Isaac Hayes? I imagine there would have been, but this song places a high bar for the artists who follow to reach for. And what is amazing is that they do… Where in most jazz traditions there is competition between choruses, competition (and pushing others to higher heights) often comes between singles. And I would be surprised if James Brown wasn’t conscious of this himself. The fact that ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’ is his second version of this song (the original was ‘It’s a Man’s World’… big difference) even shows that James Brown pushed himself.  The original would have been a great soul song on its own. But the addition of the larger orchestra and more fleshed out string parts makes the second version stand out. And James Brown often came back to his songs to try a different feeling with them. He recorded this one again on ‘Soul On Top’ (in a pretty amazing big band version), and there are multiple versions of ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’ and even ‘I Got You’. It’s great that this box set contains a few of these multiple versions so you can hear how his thinking changes as the times change (even if the times are only over a year or two!).

‘King Heroin’ is a different beast all together. It is dark. Really dark. And you get a sense that many of the horrors described in it are from personal experience. Over an bluesy groove James Brown personifies the evils of the drug, and what it can drive a man to do… he isn’t singing, he isn’t quite rapping, but he seems to be preaching. And while I’ve steered fairly clear of drugs and addiction (apparently Nancy Reagan’s appearance on a very special episode of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ did the trick for me), I have a feeling that hearing the four minutes of James Brown telling me what the drug can drive me to do until it leaves me dead would have worked pretty effectively. It is of course sad that James Brown’s last couple decades had him falling in and out of addiction, but I imagine I’m not the only one that is haunted by this song and the lessons it conveys.

My favorite song by James Brown of all time though is ‘Get It Together’. During the course of the song’s nine minutes, you get James Brown singing as strong as you’ll ever here him sing, the launch into director mode… he challenges the horns to keep up with his directions, pulls them out and brings them in one at a time to build up a groove, the finally you just hear him tell the engineer to go ahead and ‘fade it on out’ cause he’s ‘outta here’. The song gives the appearance of James Brown getting a group together to play the song, then spends two-thirds of it deconstructing not just the group and his dynamics with them, but even reveals the unmentionable: that there are other in the studio creating the song that we are hearing, and that even THESE people are under the control of James Brown. Of course, this is really the magical part of James Brown – here was a guy that was obviously a control freak. And he works it into his entire act. Yet the result almost always has a feeling of spontaneity and excitement. What his players had to practice wasn’t the exact musical parts over and over again – I imagine the hardest part about playing with James Brown had to do with the fact that you would’ve had to pay attention to him every moment. The sense that his players were ready for anything, and James could ask for anything, gave his music a level of excitement that is rarely seen live anymore, and is even rarer for the current state of the recording industry.

Day 67. Jimmy Smith.

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

I have a live Jimmy Smith disc on right now (‘Cool Blues’) and DAMN it is smoking. Art Blakey is on a few tracks, Tina Brooks and Eddie McFaden on others. And while I fell in love with Jimmy Smith the first time I heard him, hearing this kind of playing really reminds me why. This disc is from 1958, and it is just astounding how tight these guys are playing together. This is two years after he signs with Blue Note (and basically is introduced to the jazz world) and here he is playing with Art Blakey like they are old pals.

For those who don’t know Jimmy Smith’s music, his story is almost mystical. He starts off as a piano player until he hears Wild Bill Davis playing organ in the mid-50s or so. He goes out and buys an organ, rents a warehouse and basically locks himself inside for a year or so, then emerges onto the Philadelphia jazz scene. He is discovered almost immediately by Blue Note, and records over 40 sessions over the next 8 years (with the disc I am currently listening to among them). Many are live, and quite a few are in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio. But there is a consistency in the performances that reveals how hard he works.

The other thing that often surprises first time listeners of Jimmy Smith’s music is that, for the most part, there isn’t a bass player on any of the discs. He plays the bass lines mostly with the pedals of the organ or with the left hand of the keyboard. There is an amazing level of complexity in just HIS playing, that when the others come together with him it can hurt to think about everything that is being held together by just a few human beings. It’s better to just go with the groove, and the groove is what is the strongest element of Jimmy Smith’s music. It has probably one of the strongest shuffles for players from his generation, and it goes well with the toe tapping he has happening to play the pedals.

Tonight I ripped ‘Cool Blues’, ‘Open House’, ‘Prayer Meeting’ with Stanley Turrentine, ‘Home Cookin” and the companion discs ‘House Party’ and ‘The Sermon’ (which both basically come from the same sessions). I think ‘The Sermon’ is probably one of the top 10 jazz albums ever made, and the title track is a 20 minute tour de force that feels more like a jam session at points. Each player takes a pretty long solo, and seems to be outdoing whoever came before them. Most of the other tracks from these sessions are standards or Charlie Parker tunes which seem to be the warm-up parts. All the tracks on these two albums were recorded over two days, and I get the sense that there weren’t many takes of any of these… we’re just hearing what happened while the tape was rolling, and it’s good. These sessions also see Art Blakey and Tina Brooks playing, as well as Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller. All of these guys were Blue Note staples, and as I think I have mentioned elsewhere, certainly any of them could have been the headliner for their own albums or shows. It’s a shame that musicians (and the labels they are associated with) tend to keep much more to themselves now. Stax Records for instance got along for a couple of decade with a house band that brought in different lead singers for their albums, and Blue Note had a whole building full of jazz musicians that they could pull together to play on each others albums. Just doesn’t seem to work that way anymore.

Day 66. Frank Sinatra.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

While continuing on with the complete Bach set I ripped a couple of Frank Sinatra collections tonight. I don’t know what it is, but I tend to respect a business more if I occasionally hear Frank Sinatra playing in it. Our favorite grocery store has Ol’ Blue Eyes playing over the speakers every now and then, I always felt like I was cooler at Tower when Frank Sinatra was playing over the speakers, and I will always remember Rod at Wall Berlin singing along with ‘Witchcraft’ at 12:30am. Unlike a lot of the CDs I have done so far though, I can’t really think of a time that these have fallen out of playing rotation… even when the CD player was unplugged, these discs were probably in my computer at least once and listened to. Mira and Celia have both heard Frank Sinatra a good amount, and why not? So beautiful love ballads here and there, so up tempo swinging tunes as well. And I don’t think they can listen close enough to the words of ‘South of the Border’ for me to be concerned yet.

Around the time that Sinatra died, there was a joke I heard once that I modified a bit to make it seem more like a personal family story… it was something like:

“Ah – Frank Sinatra is gone, god-bless his soul… he saved my grandfather’s life once you know! Grandpa had run up a pretty high debt at a casino in Vegas in the 50s once, and the owner had him taken out and beat up since he couldn’t cover the debt… and Frank, god-bless his soul… steps in and says ‘OK boys, he’s had enough!”

If you know about the possibly shady sides to Frank’s past (and if my timing was right) this joke would get a very serious ‘Really?’ from almost everyone I told it to, followed a few seconds later by a pretty good laugh once someone realized they had been had. If you’ve been reading any of the other blog entires you might remember that I mentioned that my grandfather DID once say to me that ‘sure, if you’re Italian you have to like Frank Sinatra, but REAL Italians like Louis Prima more’. While I did hear much more Louis Prima and my grandparents house, Frank Sinatra was on quite a bit there as well (especially after they got their first CD player). So while I do associate Frank Sinatra with cool places to shop / have coffee, mostly I think of Frank Sinatra when I’m cooking since he was often the soundtrack at my grandparents as well. Frank on the speakers, red sauce on the stove… mmm…

Day 65. More Bach.

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Back to ripping some CDs finally, but sticking with the Bach box set in hopes of finishing it up this weekend and putting it away. Plus it is Good Friday, and while I am in no way a practicing christian, there is something I like about throwing on a recording of one of the Bach passions every year. So I am hoping I can get to those discs after I finish up these last few discs of cantatas.

I’ve tried to alternate between the two Bach passions every years since my Bach class at Berkeley with John Butt. I know both of those pieces pretty well, and there is something very enjoyable about how dramatic these pieces can be, and also how beautifully melodic. So I’m not sure why I am so surprised that the cantatas are as well. I haven’t listened to all the cantata discs by any means, but I have been having lots of fun this past week throwing random ones on. These are pieces that Bach basically wrote as part of his weekly duties to the town church, and were performed by the town’s musicians. And the writing isn’t dumbed down… these must have been some pretty talented musicians that got to work with Bach in his church. And the vocal writing is just beautiful. The passions are really the closest thing we have to a Bach opera, but the cantatas show a lyrical side of Bach that can be overlooked if all you listen to is his instrumental music.

My friend Don (also a composer) and I were talking just the other day about ‘melodic’ music, and were in agreement that writing great melodies has always been difficult. Some composers had no problem with this and would just turn them out like it was nothing. Mozart was like this especially – so much so that sometimes it seems like he would create a beautiful melodic line that wouldn’t get developed… sometimes just to connect two sections, and that was it. He could afford to – there were more waiting. Beethoven struggled melodically, and often turned to motivic development instead. Not that there aren’t some great Beethoven melodies, but in general once he hit a good one, he worked it and got as much out of it as possible. Today, I think most composers just don’t know how to deal with it (myself included). I fall back on texture and dramatic tension, but there isn’t much I write that is singable… and when there is, I don’t think it reaches the level of even the lowest level of acceptable melody that Mozart would consider. And I know this, and find other ways to compose. So it is really quite amazing to hear these weekly works by Bach… this isn’t the academic Bach (that put together ‘Art of the Fugue’, nor is it the flashy Bach of the Brandenburg Concertos (applying for a job). This is the Bach that sat down every week to compose music for his church. It wasn’t entertainment, but it was for the people he lived with, and I get the sense that they appreciated the work he did. What a gig.

More on Subsonic.

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

So – for the time being Subsonic appears to be the way to go. And to get it to organize the way I want it to, I figured out that in iTunes, setting the ‘Album Artist’ field places items into folders with that name. So, setting it to a composers name (for instance) will place all works labeled that way in a folder, then a folder inside that will have the albums name. I got through the composers tonight… tomorrow I will label other genres in the ways I want categorized. But streaming today (even with a couple people streaming at a time) worked like a charm!