Tim Jarrett

Joe Farrell, Joe Farrell Quartet

Album of the Week, April 15, 2023

While we’ve heard a few different musical styles on our tour of CTI Records’ catalog so far, most of the bandleaders have been established musical names. Today’s record shows that not only could Creed Taylor boost the careers of already-well-known musicians, but he could also give a start to lesser-known musicians.

Joe Farrell (born Joseph Carl Firrantello in 1937) got his start as a twenty-year-old saxophonist in the Ralph Materie band and went on to record with a number of bands and small groups during the 1960s, most notably with Charles Mingus and Andrew Hill. His breakthrough during the late 1960s came when Elvin Jones, following John Coltrane’s death, formed a trio with Farrell and Jimmy Garrison; the trio recorded Puttin’ It Together and The Ultimate for Blue Note Records.

But Farrell is perhaps best known for his work with Chick Corea and his Return to Forever band, most notably recording the flute solo on “Spain” on Corea’s 1973 album Light As A Feather. On this recording, only the fourth to be released on CTI, we catch the partnership close to its beginning, with Farrell and Corea joined by frequent Corea collaborator Dave Holland on bass and the redoubtable Jack DeJohnette on drums. That the band is joined by fellow electric-period Miles associate John McLaughlin on two tracks would tend to suggest a certain direction for the sound of the album, and you’d be partly right.

Indeed, the opening track, “Follow Your Heart,” is a tasty post-Bitches Brew fusion classic, written by McLaughlin and powered by his guitar and DeJohnette’s drums, with Holland’s bass line providing a consistent heartbeat. Farrell begins with a statement of the tune and then slowly deconstructs it, in a solo augmented in its final verse with some light but noticeable reverb. McLaughlin’s solo follows Farrell’s lead, playing around the tune in two- and three-note groupings, again with the reverb, which Taylor seems to add expressly for the purpose of thumbing his nose at acoustic music purists.

“Collage for Polly” is a much more experimental track that, for two minutes, layers echoing washes of flute and saxophone sound over sound effects from Corea, Holland and DeJohnette. It starts out in the same vein as some of the more experimental tracks on Weather Report but spins out into a more unstructured jam, leaving one slightly relieved when it’s over.

“Circle in the Square,” conversely, would have been at home on most of Miles’ Second Great Quintet albums. Beginning with a repeated descending theme in the bass by Holland, A McCoy Tyner-esque statement of theme is followed by a Farrell solo on soprano saxophone over a free workout by Corea and DeJohnette that increases in intensity and ferocity throughout. The track underscores Farrell’s affinity for Coltrane-like modal workouts and is a slow burn.

“Molten Glass” switches gears as it opens the second side to a piano-and-bass driven melody, over which Farrell’s flute travels fluidly. Though the work is a Farrell original, it bears some affinity to Corea’s “Windows,” as memorably recorded in a group with the great Hubert Laws on flute (about whom, more later). It’s a sunny little workout and genuinely fun to listen to.

This track also gives us the concept for the cover, and we really should talk about the cover. The quiet black Helvetica on white background of the early CTI records that we’ve seen is well and truly gone, in favor of evocative, highly saturated photography (in this case, red glass apparently fresh out of the furnace). We’ll see a lot more of this, in less abstract ways, in the next few weeks.

The next track, “Alter Ego,” brings us back to the same concept as “Collage for Polly” — lots of reverb-y flute over a Dave Holland bass line. Points for experimentation but I wouldn’t call this track essential. By contrast, “Song of the Wind” is another duo track, this time with Chick Corea. Here the song sounds like a Chick composition because it is a Chick composition, but Farrell’s opening soprano sax solo and mid-tune flute solo are gorgeously meditative.

“Motion” wraps up the album with another full group (plus McLaughlin) workout that takes us solidly into free jazz territory. Here McLaughlin’s guitar chirps and groans over a screaming soprano line from Farrell and absolute chaos in the rhythm section: lots of high octaves in the piano contrasted against screaming arco bass and the most explosive drumming from DeJohnette of the record. It all ends with a descending glissando scraping the strings of the guitar. As free jazz workouts go, it’s invigorating in execution, if a little lightweight in concept.

This first album from Joe Farrell sees him staking a distinct corner that explores aspects of fusion, free jazz, and experimental noise making. Some aspects of those elements will follow him into his next albums for CTI, but first we’ll dive straight back into soul-jazz and the surprising career evolution of another Blue Note Records alumnus.

You can listen to the album here:

Freddie Hubbard, Red Clay

Album of the Week, April 8, 2023

We’ve heard one side of Creed Taylor’s new CTI label in the past few weeks as we listened to how he brought impeccable personnel and lush orchestrations to bear on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Wave and Wes Montgomery’s Road Song. What we will hear today is something else: a record with no strings, just five players in the studio stretching out into loose 7 to 12 minute long jams. And at the center is a player we’ve heard from before: Freddie Hubbard.

Before this point, we’ve mostly encountered Hubbard as a sideman, in some of the great early recordings of both Herbie Hancock (Takin’ Off, My Point of View, Maiden Voyage) and Wayne Shorter (Speak No Evil, The All Seeing Eye). But at the same time that these recordings were happening, he had a productive and prolific career as a leader, recording nine sessions for Blue Note, three for Atlantic, and two for Impulse! between 1960 and 1969. Most of these sessions are classic hard bop or post bop, with Hubbard’s fiercely precise tone at the center of them. But in January 1970, Hubbard entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio at Englewood Cliffs to make a different sort of session, his first for CTI. He was joined by a formidable lineup of players: Herbie Hancock on electric piano and Hammond organ, Ron Carter on bass, Joe Henderson on tenor sax, and the young Lenny White on drums.

White was no novice, having already appeared on Miles’ fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew, but he was only 20 years old and still getting started. He has noted that it’s something of a miracle that he was on the session at all; apparently Hubbard had originally called Tony Williams to do the record, but Williams begged off, citing Miles’ growing irritation at the number of players who recorded with “his” rhythm section to make their albums sound good. So White got the call. He would continue to record with Miles following this record (as we’ve heard on Champions), so apparently the decision was a good one for all concerned.

It’s hard to imagine the finished product without White’s drums at the center. The title track, which opens the album, is a funky jam that’s kept tight by Ron Carter’s insanely earworm-y bass line and at the same time kept loose by White’s drumming, which seem equally informed by Tony Williams’ inventions and Clyde Stubblefield’s “funky drummer” approach on the records James Brown was making at the time. The tune, supposedly based on the changes to “Sunny,” circles around the same changes for the entirety of the 12+ minute song, trading chordal complexity for the pure joy of the jam. Especially notable here are the solos from the two horns, with Hubbard hitting effortless highs and Henderson bringing a level of darkness and complexity to his solo that is reminiscent of some of his own early 1970s masterpieces. At 9 minutes in, the rest of the players and Carter and White take us into the engine room to unveil the heart of the groove. It’s a complete lesson in the power of the bass in funk-jazz music, and one that features prominently on my mix highlighting jazz bassists, “the low end theory.”

“Delphia” starts out as a ballad with a sensitive introduction by Hubbard and Henderson (on flute), but soon morphs into a swinging blues. Unusually, Herbie Hancock plays Hammond organ on the entirety of the tune, which includes some wonderful syncopation on the chorus and some attentive accompaniment behind Hubbard’s solo. Henderson’s flute, only heard on the opening and closing verses, is brilliantly sensitive here, as is Carter’s bass.

“Suite Sioux” opens with a riff by Hancock on the Fender Rhodes, leading into the opening statement of the theme by Henderson and Hubbard. This arrangement is notable for both the use of space—the dialog between Fender and horns is set off by ample beats of silence each time—and Hubbard’s eloquent solo. Hancock’s solo floats over White’s cymbal work until the drummer steps up to his own solo spotlight, highlighting one of the oddities of the recording: the bass drum, which has very little resonance and sounds as though it’s stuffed full of socks. Apparently the young drummer had brought his own kit, which included a bass drum that had been cut down from an oil can; while he preferred the resonant sound, Van Gelder couldn’t or wouldn’t get it to record in the studio, so they had to use another drum that White couldn’t stand but at least didn’t overshadow the rest of the band.

“The Intrepid Fox” returns to the fiery material of the opening for another extended jazz-funk jam. Another cut that would, like “Red Clay,” be a highlight of Hubbard’s live sets for years to come, this one is less groove oriented and more incendiary, and features a wicked groove from the bass together with a complex interlocking melodic statement from the horns. In some ways reminiscent of Henderson’s recently recorded “Power to the People” and “Isotope,” the saxophonist’s solo on this tune threatens to steal the show as he plays with rhythmic and chordal structures throughout. Hancock’s solo takes us into slightly more meditative territory, until Hubbard returns with a reprise of the melody.

The record as a whole was a hit for Hubbard and for the young CTI label, and helped to shape some of the sound of the coming decade. We’ll hear a lot more from Freddie in the coming weeks. But first we’ll hear from some other Miles-adjacent musicians exploring a slightly different side of the electric jazz future.

You can listen to the album here:

Cocktail Saturday: Aufersteh’n

He dared me.

When I made a signature cocktail for Holiday Pops one year, I shared some at the end of the run with our long-suffering interim chorus manager, and since then we’ve talked cocktails between performances. I saw Daniel at Symphony Hall while I was there to rehearse a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony with the Boston University Symphonic Orchestra and Chorus, and he dared me to craft a cocktail for the performance run.

Of course, there was no question about what to call the cocktail. And once we had the name, the inspiration for the recipe was equally obvious.

In the last movement of this Resurrection Symphony, we sing “Aufersteh’n wirst du, mein Staub” (rise again you will, my dust). The utterance is so legendary, coming completely unaccompanied after over an hour of galactically bombastic music, that you just have to mention the word to most singers and they’ll respond with their finest pianissimo: “ja, aufersteh’n!” I had just finished a run of this work the year my daughter was born, and I quietly sang these lines to her the first time I held her in my arms.

Once I had the name, the base recipe was inevitable. It clearly had to be a Corpse Reviver. (Pause for groans.) But what base spirit? Given that Mahler noisily flirted with vegetarianism in his early years, and preferred spinach and apples to meat, I used 100 proof apple brandy instead of gin, and replaced some of the orange spirit (I used dry curaçao — not blue! — instead of Cointreau) with artichoke based Cardamaro for a little more herbal flavor, and extra plants.

As always, here’s the recipe card for use in Highball. Enjoy!

Wes Montgomery, Road Song

Album of the Week, April 1, 2023

Though still technically under the banner of A&M Records, Creed Taylor’s CTI had already firmly established its visual identity by the late 1960s, as we saw with last week’s look at Wave. Today we explore some of the development of its sound by looking at the twelfth record in the catalog, a posthumous release from guitarist Wes Montgomery.

Montgomery had begun his career in the late 1940s with Lionel Hampton, having taught himself the guitar at night while working during the day for the milk company. When the big band gig didn’t pan out, he returned to working day jobs while forming a combo with his brothers and playing small clubs. He was discovered in 1958 by Cannonball Adderley, who recommended to Orrin Keepnews that he sign Montgomery to his Riverside Records label. Montgomery went on to record a well regarded string of albums on Riverside before leaving in 1963 for Verve to record with Creed Taylor.

Taylor saw the potential for Montgomery’s clean, melodic style to cross over into the instrumental pop market and recorded a series of albums that established him as a bankable star, beginning with Movin’ Wes and including the great Bumpin’, which featured the guitarist with one of the great over the top ‘60s pop string sections on the title track. The orchestra on this recording was arranged by Don Sebesky. We’ll hear a lot about Sebesky over the course of these reviews; for now I’ll just observe that this is the first name in this column that I first saw in a Boston Pops program.

So it was that, following a string of recordings for Verve that include some great small group sessions with Jimmy Smith and a lot of instrumental pop, Montgomery recorded several sessions for Taylor’s sub-label CTI, leading off the label’s discography with A Day in the Life and returning to Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio on May 7 and 8, 1968 to record this album. Just over a month later he was dead, having suffered a heart attack at home in Indianapolis at the age of 45. Was the final recording he made in his lifetime worthy of his legacy?

I think it kind of depends on how you look at it. A jazz session it’s not, and it’s not the best instrumental pop he ever recorded either. Sebesky’s arrangement on “Bumpin’” is so legendary that it led off a 1990s Verve compilation of “acid jazz.” The arrangements on Road Song, alas, are not quite so stunning. Montgomery’s guitar does not quite engage with the strings and horns and harpsichord(!) around him. But the band that Taylor assembled here is no group of slouches, with Herbie Hancock, drummer Grady Tate, pianist Hank Jones (that’s him on the harpsichord), and the great bassist Richard Davis joining the strings. The overall effect is pleasant enough, though it must be said that the main pleasures of the album are Montgomery’s legendary touch with the guitar and not the setting Taylor puts him in.

So far we’ve heard the more instrumental pop, almost easy listening side of the CTI label. We’ll hear a very different sound next time, one that would come to dominate the way the label was perceived—and change the course of jazz as it entered the 1970s.

You can listen to the album here:

Antônio Carlos Jobim: Wave

Album of the Week, March 25, 2023

We’re going to enter a new sonic space for the next stretch of this column. While it’s still jazz by most definitions of the word, some of the albums might be in a hyphenated genre. Some of them might even have strings and feel a little more like “smooth” than most of the recordings we’ve featured so far. That’s certainly true of the first recording from the CTI label that we will feature in this series.

Antônio Carlos Jobim was 31 when his music came to worldwide attention, through recordings made by the Brazilian singer/guitarist João Gilberto, but he didn’t become really famous until five years later, when Gilberto teamed up with saxophonist Stan Getz for one of the most famous albums of all time. I can’t overemphasize how pivotal 1963’s Getz/Gilberto was. Featuring a full slate of Jobim’s compositions, as well as the composer himself at the piano, two of the tracks,“Corcovado” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” became international hits. If earlier recordings like Vince Guaraldi’s Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus and Getz’s Jazz Samba had lit a small flame beneath the kindling of America’s appetite for Brazilian music, Getz/Gilberto blew on the fire until it became a roaring inferno. The trend was not lost on the producer of Getz/Gilberto, Creed Taylor.

We’ve met Taylor before, and have talked about the first label he founded, the seminal Impulse! Records, as well as the work he began at Verve where he recorded Bill Evans as well as Getz and Gilberto—and Jobim. By 1967 Taylor was beginning to take increasing creative control of the recordings he issued at Verve, going so far as to start a sub-label, CTI (for Creed Taylor Incorporated) at which he could exert a significant amount of influence over everything from the graphic identity (always a priority for Taylor from the earliest orange and black days of Impulse!) to the sound.

The CTI graphic identity changed slightly over the years of the label, but the foundations—strong typography (initially, Helvetica), use of white (or black) space on the cover to set off striking photographs, heavy gatefold jackets with more photos (usually black and white) inside—remained consistent throughout the label’s run. I’ve made a point to seek out CTI recordings in used record shops and they always have a substantial-ness to them that anticipates the solidity of modern reissues. Taylor was disinterested in cutting corners.

The same applies to the musicians that Taylor brought to the studio. There was often (but not always) a string section; in this recording the string arrangements and conducting is by Claus Ogerman, who had previously worked with Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and who scored some 60-70 albums with Taylor. The rest of the orchestra with Jobim is unusual: no trumpets, no saxophones, but trombone, French horn, flute, drums and bass, the latter played by the great Ron Carter. And Jobim plays piano, but also guitar and harpsichord. Taylor was going for a definitive kind of sound. There is no edge to this sound, only the swelling and receding of the compositions. In lesser hands, this formula might easily disintegrate into “easy listening” pablum, but with Jobim at the keyboard and the intelligence of Ogerman in the arrangements, the sound sparkles and pulses with interest.

The record does not feature Jobim’s earlier bossa nova hits; there’s no “Desafinado,” no “Ipanema.” But what’s here is highly rewarding as well. The title track is a quietly soulful meditation, enlivened by flute and the harpsichord playing of Jobim. “The Red Blouse” is more in the classic samba mode, with its dancelike rhythms anchored by the redoubtable Ron Carter and the drummer, whose inventive snare work keeps everything hopping. (There are three percussionists credited, Bobby Rosengarden, Domum Romāo, and Claudio Slon; Slon is called out as a “mastermind” of the recording in the liner notes and is the one behind the drum kit.) Many of the tracks, including “Look to the Sky,” feature soulful trombone work by Urbie Green, with assistance from Jimmy Cleveland.

If one is to criticize any aspect of the recording, which was engineered by the great Rudy Van Gelder, it is the sound of Jobim’s piano, which sometimes lacks the punch and clarity that we hear in other RVG recordings; this may be due to the strings in the mix. By contrast, Jobim’s guitar, front and center on “Batidinha” and “Triste,” is recorded clearly and is a model of rhythmic and chordal precision, a cool center around which the rest of the tracks are built. “Captain Bacardi” closes out with a pulsing bossa nova rhythm on the drums, piano and guitar, a brisk trombone solo, percussive notes from the cuíca, and a seriously funky Ron Carter bass line. The track simmers along, threatening to bubble over at any moment and belying any thought that we’ve

We are likely to hear more Jobim as I continue my survey of jazz records, but our next stop on our tour through CTI will take us in a slightly different direction. We’ll check that out next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Old mix: We have no heads

Sometimes my early mixes are what might charitably be described as “all over the place.” (Heck, sometimes my late mixes are too.) This one, which was assembled sometime around May of 1993, definitely fits that description.

There comes a time in every young music head’s life when they discover Tom Waits. For me, that was clearly happening right about the time this mix was made. It was fortuitous that Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants had come out about six months previously, as the frenetic energy of the opening track plays nicely with “Goin’ Out West.” (Side note: because I bought a lot of my CDs through music clubs at this stage in my life, I was almost always late to the party when a new album was released. If I recall correctly, it could be a few months before a new release was available in the mail order catalog. —And yes, mail order catalog, because this was right before the Internet began to eat that business model.)

Between those two tracks is “Frelon Brun,” from Filles de Kilimanjaro. I had just picked up this CD, having fallen in love with the title track, which appeared on Miles’ The Columbia Years anthology (another box set I snagged at a discount). “Frelon Brun” is probably the most rock-oriented of the performances on that album; for one, it’s the only track that is under 6 minutes long. It’s funky and powerful and fun. On this album it punctuates the ferocious energy of the tracks on either side.

Side 2 opens with Ayub Ogada’s “Obiero,” a track that appears in slightly different forms on both his own En Mana Kuoyo and Peter Gabriel’s Plus from Us anthology; it’s the latter that appears here (and coincidentally helps to date the mix, since Plus from Us was released on May 16, 1993). That’s followed by “Rain” by An Emotional Fish, which was on the Spew 2 promotional compilation (which I’ve since lost), alongside King Missile’s dryly hilarious “Detachable Penis” (which also appears on this mixtape). And then comes “Traditional Irish Folk Song,” from Denis Leary’s comedy album No Cure for Cancer. Like I said, charitably described as all over the place.

This mixtape also memorializes the beginning of my interest in PJ Harvey, having picked up Dry based on word of mouth from the crew in the basement of Peabody Hall, i.e. the publications staffs of the Declaration and The Yellow Journal. I was still digesting the Talking Heads, having picked up the Sand in the Vaseline compilation earlier that year. And, having bought Neneh Cherry’s great Homebrew on a whim earlier that spring, I discovered the seductive pleasures of “Peace in Mind” by blasting the album out my Monroe Hill window one Sunday afternoon as we played an impromptu volleyball game.

Dig My Grave – They Might Be Giants (Apollo 18)
Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet) – Miles Davis (Filles De Kilimanjaro)
Goin’ Out West – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
Ten Percenter – Frank Black (Frank Black)
The Unbreakable Chain – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
Cain & Abel – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
I Want To Live – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
Plants And Rags – PJ Harvey (Dry)
Summertime Rolls – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
Don’t Worry About the Government – Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77)
Heavy Cloud No Rain – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
Trout – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
Obiero – Ayub Ogada (Plus From Us)
Butterflies – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
Traditional Irish Folk Song – Denis Leary (No Cure For Cancer)
Rain – An Emotional Fish (Junk Puppets)
I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That – Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77)
Who Are You – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
Pets – Porno For Pyros (Porno for Pyros)
Detachable Penis – King Missile (Happy Hour)
Brackish Boy – Frank Black (Frank Black)
Happy And Bleeding – PJ Harvey (Dry)
I Don’t Wanna Grow Up – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
Peace In Mind – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
Epilogue (Nothing ‘Bout Me) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)

You can listen to (most of) the mix via Apple Music here:

Old mix: faith and blues

When I got to the University of Virginia, I started buying much more music. Plan 9 (the original one on the Corner) was within walking distance, I had the mail order music clubs, I had neighbors with their own CD collections, and I started checking out different musical directions.

One of the directions that was new to me at the time was the blues. There had started to be some serious efforts to reissue and preserve old delta blues recordings, starting with the complete works of Robert Johnson and a series of box sets of artists on Chess Records. I found both available on the various CD clubs (probably Columbia, in this case) for a fraction of the list price, and started digesting the music by putting it alongside other blues that I understood better, namely jazz, the Rolling Stones, and folk music.

I might have been on to something. The Child Ballads that Dylan rifled for “Seven Curses” have a straight through-line to the blues. So does every single Leonard Cohen song. And the themes of death, guilt, and murder that snake through most of the rest of the tracks are all steeped in the blues. The outlier might be David Byrne’s “Make Believe Mambo,” but it works well melodically with the songs that surround it, and some blues are for dancing.

I note in passing that I made this mix in the late spring of 1992, long before Jeff Buckley covered the version of “Hallelujah” that appears on this mix as performed by John Cale and made it immortal. I always liked Cale.

Special shouts out in this mix to my upstairs neighbor in Harrison Portal at Monroe Hill for lending me the Rolling Stones compilation; to Greg for introducing me to Reckoning and Camper Van Beethoven in our first year; and to now-Bishop Poulson Reed for suggesting that we visit Preservation Hall on our visit to New Orleans while on the Tour of the South in 1992, where I heard the band play and picked up New Orleans – Vol. 4.

“Sweet Home Chicago” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Sympathy for the Devil” – The Rolling Stones (Beggars Banquet)
“Seven Curses” – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3: Rare and Unreleased)
“Carolyn’s Fingers” – Cocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll)
“Suzanne” – Geoffrey Oryema (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
“Nigh Eve” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
“Peace Like a River” – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
“St. James Infirmary” – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans – Vol. IV)
“So. Central Rain” – R.E.M. (Reckoning)
“Eye of Fatima, Pt. 1 & 2” – Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
“Halo” – Depeche Mode (Violator)
“Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Hallelujah” – John Cale (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
“Kindhearted Woman Blues” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Make Believe Mambo” – David Byrne (Rei Momo)
“Creole Blues” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
“Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed)
“She Divines Water” – Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
“Blues in the Evening” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
“From Four Till Late” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“7 Chinese Bros.” – R.E.M. (Reckoning)
“Who By Fire” – The House of Love (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
“Death’s Door” – Depeche Mode (Until the End of the World Soundtrack)
“Armistice Day” –Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
“Come On In My Kitchen” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
“Walkin’ After Midnight” – Cowboy Junkies (The Trinity Session)

You can listen to (most of) the mix on Apple Music:

Old mix: the blue groove of twilight

One of the things that happened when I got to the University of Virginia was that I began to branch out in my musical tastes—or, maybe more precisely, I began to explore each of the branches I had already grown to like. In this case, it was jazz, and while I had made mix tapes containing jazz music before, this was the first to be (almost) entirely devoted to jazz.

I found my way into jazz from Sting, whose band in the mid to late 1980s was made up of jazz musicians; from summer concerts at Fort Monroe; and from my mom’s record collection. She had some Ahmad Jamal and Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis—nothing too outré but enough to convince me that I wanted to listen to more. I also knew, from U2, that I ought to listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I didn’t really know anyone else who listened to jazz, so I had to find my own way in.

Because I liked to read liner notes, I found myself drawn to the Original Jazz Classics reissue series of classic jazz albums on CD when I was at UVA. There was so much context on the back of those albums! You could see who the players were, read reviews, and more without even opening the album. That’s how I started to dig back into some of the great ’50s and ’60s recordings. I also picked up the threads of Sting’s band, listening to Branford, then Wynton, then Wynton’s band and Kenny Kirkland.

Because I have never been able to focus exclusively, a couple of jazz-adjacent tracks snuck onto this mix. Most notably, “Escalay” from the Kronos Quartet Pieces of Africa appears. While this is nominally a classical or world music track, it has enough in common with the works around it—a strong rhythmic foundation, a modal scale, an improvised solo—to fit in nicely. The other, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” was added to provide an anchor point for some of the other explorations of blues through the jazz idiom on Side 2. And I couldn’t figure out how to end the mix, so I dropped some Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in; it fits better than you’d think because of the vocal improvisation and the general mood.

For the actual jazz tracks, there’s a pretty good range of stuff. Of course we touch on Kind of Blue, but there’s also Coltrane’s Sound and Ellington Indigos. I really like the tracks from Marcus Roberts, the pianist and composer who was the nucleus of Wynton Marsalis’s late-1980s/early-1990s band. And there are a couple of nice sets on the second side, with the early jazz workouts of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins contrasting with the more abstract work of Branford Marsalis, Ornette Coleman and Kenny Kirkland.

Brother Veal – Wynton Marsalis Septet (Blue Interlude)
Nebuchadnezzar – Marcus Roberts (Deep In The Shed)
Central Park West – John Coltrane (Coltrane’s Sound)
Escalay – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
All Blues – Miles Davis (Kind of Blue)
All the Things You Are – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
As Serenity Approaches – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
The Jitterbug Waltz – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
Love In Vain Blues (Alternate Take) – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
Perdido Street Blues – Louis Armstrong (Louis Armstrong Of New Orleans)
My Melancholy Baby [Alternate Take] – Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker (Bird And Diz (+3))
Paradox – Sonny Rollins (Worktime)
Willow Weep For Me – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
Simpatico – Misterioso – Howard Shore/Ornette Coleman (Naked Lunch)
Chance – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
Big Trouble In the Easy (Pedro Pops Up) – Wynton Marsalis (Tune In Tomorrow… The Original Soundtrack)
Crepuscule With Nellie (Take 6) – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
Amazing Grace – Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Paul Simon (Journey Of Dreams)

If you are an Apple Music subscriber, you can listen to (most of) the mix here:

Old mix: An angel being blown backwards into the future

Prodded by yesterday’s post about Pieces of Africa and the mixes it inspired, I was inspired to post about a few of them. These were mix tapes—made well before the advent of Rip.Mix.Burn—and they reflected whatever was going through my brain at the time.

This mix was made early in the summer of 1993. I had just finished my third year at the University of Virginia and was interning in a physics lab, and slowly coming to the painful conclusion that I would not be going on to graduate study in my field. But it was sunny, and I was reasonably happy! So this was made to play in my car with the top down.

Like so many of the mixes I made (and still make), this was a way for me to digest all the CDs I had bought and listened to, whether from Plan 9 or in the BMG music club, which sold classical and other CDs at a substantial discount if you didn’t mind the occasionally blurry reproductions of album art and liner notes they suspiciously sported…

But summer of 1993 was still a pretty good time. Frank Black had just changed his name and released his first solo album; Sting’s latest showed he still had songwriting chops. I had met a singer from a woman’s chorus on a Glee Club tour who moved me deeply, to the tune of a Suzanne Vega song. Peter Gabriel’s Real World was still introducing me to new voices like Sheila Chandra. My friends in the New Dominions had just recorded their first CD, for which I did the jacket and disc design, working around a brilliant illustration by Deepak Raghu. I had heard Tori Amos for the first time in concert at Old Cabell Hall, being lucky enough to score tickets after a Glee Club rehearsal. I was starting to explore jazz beyond Coltrane and Miles and Wynton and Branford. Good times indeed.

Fu Manchu – Frank Black (Frank Black)
99.9 F° – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
Before You Were Born – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
Ever So Lonely/Eyes/The Ocean – Sheila Chandra (Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices)
Ava – David Byrne (The Forest)
Tin Man – New Dominions (Salamander!)
Tilliboyo – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
Road To Nowhere – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
Precious Things – Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes)
The Dream Before – Laurie Anderson (Strange Angels)
Seven Days – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
Drawing Room Blues – Joe Henderson (Lush Life – The Music of Billy Strayhorn)
Sassy – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
Ed Is Dead – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
Warning Sign – Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings And Food)
As Girls Go – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
Dirt In The Ground – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
Death Of A Train – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
Washing Of The Water – Peter Gabriel (Us)
Motorway To Roswell – The Pixies (Trompe Le Monde)

If you have Apple Music, you can listen to the mix here, though it doesn’t include all the tracks… 🙁

Errata: Although “Upside Down” is in the track listing on the j-card for the tape, it wouldn’t fit on the end of Side 1. So I saved it for another mix.

Also noting: I added a page to the blog to track all the articles about mixes.

Kronos Quartet, Pieces of Africa

Album of the Week, March 18, 2023

Coming from the austerity of Black Angels, you might be forgiven for thinking of the Kronos Quartet as a Very Serious Ensemble™. So the opening track on Pieces of Africa, the driving “Mai Nozipo,” might come as a shock. There’s not much austerity here. Instead, there are Ngoma drums and shakers (hosho) from Zimbabwe, played by the composer Dumisani Maraire, and a melody, in a major key, that seems as much driven by the rhythm as floating above it. But Pieces of Africa wasn’t a departure for Kronos; it was the logical outcome of their practice of commissioning new works for string quartet—and the growing accessibility of “world music” as a viable market segment.

All of Kronos’s recordings on the Nonesuch label, where they rubbed shoulders with late 20th century giants like Steve Reich, championed new music and new composers. This was partly born from ideological bent and partly from necessity, given a gap in the market between the existing repertoire for string quartet and Kronos’ aspirations. On their second album for Nonesuch, titled White Man Sleeps, the title work was a commission by South African/Swiss composer Kevin Volans, who sought to reconcile the music of Black South Africa with European 20th century compositional forms. Only the first and fifth movements of the quartet appeared on the album, however. But in the year following Black Angels the quartet released a series of “CD singles” of individual compositions, including Volans’ String Quartet No. 2 “Hunting/Gathering.” One supposes the renewed collaboration may have spurred the idea of recording the entirety of “White Man Sleeps,” which found its way onto the album.

Kronos founder David Harrington has also commented that the piece had roots in his tenth grade music class, when he heard recordings of music from Ghana that touched him and inspired the thought that “I really want my violin to have that kind of a sound someday.” He built relationships with other African composers over the years, resulting in the works on the album.

Indeed, the Volans quartet is something of an outlier on the album. Most of the works here are more like “Mai Nozipo”: melodic, joyous, rhythmic, and written for quartet augmented with other sounds including percussion, African string instruments, and voice. The second work is in a minor mode but no less buoyant for that, and features the first vocals, by the Moroccan composer Hassan Hakmoun and his party.

The third, “Tilliboyo,” is a work that I have some personal history with. Written for kora and string quartet by Gambian composer Foday Musa Suso, it’s a meditative but quietly bright work that burbles along on the strength of the interaction between the plucked lower strings and kora and the bowed first violin melody. I have, at various times, put it on mix tapes and used it as radio intro music for a radio commercial on WTJU asking community-area writers to send in their poetry and prose to the literary magazine I was trying to get off the ground, Rag & Bone. The fourth track, Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza’s “Ekitundu Ekisooka,” continues in a similar optimistic vein, but with a stronger rhythmic drive.

“Escalay (Waterwheel),” by the late Nubian Egyptian composer Hamza El Din, is a horse of a different color. Beginning with a slow introduction on the lute, first solo then accompanied by pizzicato strings, one hears the water start to drip slowly into the raceway of the mill, before the tempo picks up and a driving theme enters in the cello. The violin plays a meditative exploration of the theme above the other strings as the piece stretches into a long coda (this is the longest single track on the record, at over twelve minutes). The effect is trance-inducing and almost minimalist. It’s another work that found its way onto mix tapes, despite its length, as is the following song, Obo Addy’s “Wawshishijay (Our Beginning)” (which featured on my 1992 mix “Sing into my mouth”). “Wawshishijay” includes polyrhythms on various percussion instruments played by the composer, and a sung chorus in the second “verse.”

“White Man Sleeps” follows (on the CD track list, which I believe to be the original sequence), and what is immediately apparent in the first movement is Volans’ affinity for the minimalist composers. If you’re not prepared for the high repetition of the theme in the violins at the end, it might drive you to distraction. But the second and fourth movements have more traditional melodies and are almost surprisingly sweet after the austerity of the first movement. The third and fifth movements return to the more minimal statements, here played in the lowest strings. At the time, I found it the least compelling music on the album, but now the second movement in particular strikes me as standing alongside some of the strongest melodic statements for string quartet that Kronos ever made.

The final track (in the CD sequence; on the LP it closes out side three) is the hymn-like singalong “Kutambarara (Spreading),” again by Maraire. This one is truly the summation: polyrhythms in the percussion and mbira, lead vocals by the composer, a full on African choir. What it doesn’t have is much of a soloistic presence from the Kronos Quartet, who are here strictly to provide the chords and carry a constant rhythmic pulse. They seem pretty happy to be along for the ride, though, and inevitably this was another track that my 20-year-old self splashed onto mix tapes.

Granted that I was always a little weird about putting whatever genre I wanted onto a mix tape, but that fact that I’ve used that phrase about multiple tracks on a string quartet album suggests there is definitely something unusual about this one. The listening public thought so too: it became the first album to top the Billboard charts for both classical and world music recordings. I haven’t bought much Kronos on vinyl; they were already firmly into the CD age at their beginning. But the fact that this album was reissued a few years ago speaks to its appeal. It’s a jubilant record from start to finish and one well worth spending time with.

You can listen to the album here:

Happy 23rd anniversary, Jarrett House North

The first post on this site was on March 14, 2000. I date my actual “blogaversary” to a post called “Quarterly Update (i)” that appeared on June 11, 2001, because that’s when I really started blogging in earnest, but the first iteration of this site came on line over a year earlier. It was then hosted on my Power Mac 7200/90 in a locally running Manila instance, so it’s a continuous miracle that it ever got on the web at all.

My writing has ebbed and flowed here over the years, but right now I’m just grateful that I have someplace I can share my thoughts.

Fun fact: the anniversary of Jarrett House North is on the same day as Kottke.org’s anniversary, just two years later.

Cocktail Saturday: Untitled No. 1

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any cocktail stuff on this page. I suspect this is because I haven’t been thinking as much about my cocktails, since COVID came along. But it occurs to me I never memorialized this one.

A lot of my original cocktails begin as a dare, essentially: can I make something worthwhile with the ingredients in my pantry? Sometimes the answer is a strong yes, and sometimes it’s a qualified maybe. I think today’s cocktail is the latter: an unexpected flavor combination that is thoroughly delightful.

This cocktail started with alternatives to bourbon, which I tend to feature too often in my drinks. Fortunately I occasionally am able to find Laird’s Apple Brandy, which unlike the more easily discoverable Laird’s applejack is made 100% from apples, with no neutral spirits. The other flavors in the mix are cardamaro, an Italian amaro made with artichokes, and a smoke and salt bitters from Crude in Raleigh, NC. Together they are more than the sun of their parts, but the flavors are also evasive, which is why this cocktail remains untitled.

As always, you can import this image into Highball if you use that fine app. Enjoy!

Kronos Quartet, Black Angels

Album of the Week, March 11, 2023

I’ve written about my experience finding Black Angels before, in the year of the 30th anniversary of the release of the album. Everything about what I wrote then remains true now: the searing intensity of the performances, the indelible impression it made on my memory. But how did Kronos get into the place where they made this recording?

It starts with the title piece. David Harrington has said that a 1973 performance of George Crumb’s quartet in protest of the Vietnam War was his inspiration to found Kronos, and you can hear his love for the work in the intensity of the performance. You can also hear something else: the degree of studio engineering it took to realize the experience. “Black Angels” features amplified string instruments, a gong and other percussion instruments as well as chanting and other sounds, and the recording brings all the unusual sound to the fore and, well, beats the listener about the head and shoulder with it. It’s inescapable and haunting, and the quiet opening of the middle movement is as powerfully contemplative as anything on record. The middle movement also features the chanted “Ein, zwei, drei, veir” (here pronounced fear) and a moment of contemplative requiem performed by the lower strings, with the high strings sounding horror-movie scratches above. The final movement features the “God music” in which the quartet is joined by music from crystal glasses.

Which makes the transition into the next work, a studio version of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet “Spem in Alium” rearranged for overdubbed string quartet, slightly less bewildering than it appears on paper. I talked a lot with singer friends about this performance when I was in college; the concept of a string quartet playing 40 different parts from one massive score was as novel to us as, I suspect, the existence of the motet itself. (I grew up on classical radio, but even our relatively cerebral channels WGH (and subsequently WHRO) played very little repertoire that was older than Bach.)

Is the Kronos adaptation of the motet successful? I’d have to say it’s mixed. Certainly the depth of sound from the overdubbed strings is powerful, but nowhere near as impactful as a performance with choir. The studio magic that Kronos employed did not extend to creating the spatial illusion of being surrounded in a cathedral with eight vocal quintets, which is much of the “shock and awe” of the original motet. But it does powerfully convey the sense of colossal loss that seems to underlie so many of Tallis’s works, as a crypto-Catholic at the court of the King of England.

“Doom. A Sigh” is in another space entirely, but maintains the thread of lament. Here the quartet seems to play mostly ambient or electrically amplified sounds, accompanying field recordings of folk songs from Hungary made by the composer István Márta that speak of the loss of the nation’s traditions under Communist rule.

The performance on Black Angels rarely lapses into irony, which makes the one exception, Charles Ives’ “They Are There!,” all the more striking. Accompanying a recording of Ives playing and singing his own composition, the effect of the piece appears to be to skewer the patriotism of the call to war that appears in the text of the work. One interpretation is that Ives, a pacifist, could “get fightin’ mad about his pacifism.” As a teenager coming out of the Reagan years of the Cold War, I tended to interpret Ives’ performance, recorded during the height of World War II, through a heavy lens of irony, keenly aware as I was of the cost of the massive military machine that kept the state of war simmering for more than forty years. Now that we know the cost of the fascism that the troops were fighting at the time, and have seen its resurgence in the last ten years, the ironic reading feels less true for me.

The record closes with a performance of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8, which has been variously interpreted as being dedicated to the victims of fascism (a dedication endorsed and perhaps applied by the official Soviet regime on the quartet’s publication in 1960) and to an overwhelmed soul who contemplated suicide. The work pulls together all the threads from the other works, including threnodic passages that point back (forward?) to “Black Angels,” the requiem-like sadness of the opening movement, and an overwhelming sense of dread and loss.

The overall impact of Black Angels can be overwhelming, but it is highly recommended. After several albums of commissioned works, it earned the quartet many awards and nominations, and put Kronos firmly on the map as an essential, innovative ensemble, a reputation that the quartet would continue to re-earn through the following decade. That’s especially true with the album that we’ll review next week.

You can listen to the album here:

Kronos Quartet, Music of Bill Evans

Album of the Week, March 4, 2023

Over the albums of the past few weeks we’ve listened to the Bill Evans Trio play an assortment of covers and original Evans compositions. Today’s record pays tribute to Evans the composer—with help from of his collaborators—in an unusual form: the string quartet.

Violinist David Harrington formed the Kronos Quartet in Seattle in 1973, but soon relocated to San Francisco and the classic line-up—John Sherba on second violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Jean Jeanrenaud on cello—was in place by 1978. The group focused on modern repertoire but did not limit itself to classical music, and its second major label release was 1985’s Monk Suite: Kronos Quartet Plays Music of Thelonious Monk, featuring arrangements by Tom Darter and guest appearances by Ron Carter and Chuck Israels on bass. The album was a surprise hit, and the group followed it in 1986 with Music of Bill Evans, which also featured arrangements by Darter and guest appearances by Eddie Gómez and by guitarist Jim Hall. In another connection to Evans, the record was produced by Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews.

The arrangements throughout begin as transcriptions of the original trio performances, then branch out to add some solo opportunities for members of the quartet and their guests. The solos by Gómez on “Waltz for Debby” and “Very Early” shine brilliantly in this context, with a bite and snap on the opening number and a meditative glow on the second. A little seems lost in translation in the string solos in “Debby,” though, where the tone feels a little like a hoedown. One thing the quartet gets right in the opening number, though, is the fluidity of the time in the chorus, with the first rendition coming across as a bouncy swing and the second as a time-shifted, smeary triple rhythm.

“Nardis” is a showcase for Gómez, who takes the opening solo with some ferocity. The intensity diminishes a little with the entrance of the violin solo, but overall it’s a fine rendition of the Miles/Evans classic, particularly the finale. “Re: Person I Knew” captures the shifting harmonic colors of the Evans classic (anagrammatically named for Keepnews), with Jeanrenaud’s cello ably providing the melodic and harmonic grounding originally provided by Chuck Israels’ bass. Of all the performances here, it translates best to the quartet form.

“Time Remembered” is an exploration of the harmonic depths of Evans’ ballad playing. Hearing the string parts, one is tempted to go back and listen to the original recordings and revel in the newly clarified harmonies and chords, which sometimes seem to pass by too quickly and unremarked-upon in the trio recordings.

Jim Hall joins the quartet for the next three works: “Walking Up,” “Turn Out the Stars,” and “Fire.” As Keepnews writes in the liner notes, the outer two works of this “mini-suite” “could help destroy the myth that Evans was merely a master of slow tempos”; though the performance of “Walking Up” does not reach the velocity that Evans reached in his short-lived quartet with Jack DeJohnette, the energy is there, especially when Hall’s guitar begins to explore the harmonic complexities of the tune. “Turn Out the Stars,” by contrast, is a deeply introspective work, made all the more poignant by Hall’s unaccompanied, spontaneous closing solo in memory of his friend.

“Peace Piece” closes the album. The quartet unhurriedly explores this great work by Evans that would later be mined by Miles Davis for “Flamenco Sketches,” with the second violin, viola and cello sketching the hypnotically repeating chords of the left hand and Harrington playing a transcription of Evans’ right hand. Here again in the string transcription, the brilliant strangeness of Evans’ harmonic senses shine more clearly, giving us a better appreciation for the genius of his conception.

Though the recording succeeds brilliantly both at illuminating Evans the composer and the performer, this would be the last of the Kronos albums to be devoted entirely to jazz. In subsequent albums they would lean into the contemporary repertoire for string quartets. We’ll hear a particularly notable performance from them next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Bill Evans, Montreux II

Album of the Week, February 25, 2023

It’s a little unfair to say that Bill Evans’ best albums were recorded in the 1960s. He had a productive decade in the 1970s, recording for Columbia, Milestone and Fantasy. But his most enduring compositions were written in the 1960s. We’ve already heard many of them; they continued to feature on the many live albums he recorded during the decade. Picking up a Bill Evans recording from the 1970s, therefore, the odds were that it was live and covered familiar ground… mostly.

Much of Evans’ creativity during these years, ultimately, was in his interpretation and in his song choices. Both elements are broadly on display in Montreux II, Evans’ second live recording from the Montreux Jazz Festival and his final recording for producer Creed Taylor, this time on Taylor’s own CTI label.

We’re going to hear a lot more about CTI in coming weeks (spoiler alert!), but in this early stage of evolution the label was a bright cross-section of straight ahead jazz, proto-jazz-funk, and some reasonably out-there avant-garde stuff. Consider that the first recorded artists in the CTI 6000 series included flautist Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard in an early jazz-funk masterpiece, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joe Farrell, and this Evans date. There is, however, very little of the hallmarks of the classic CTI period here – no big string section orchestrated by Don Sebesky, no jazz-funk, very little in the way of nods to popular music. There’s just the Bill Evans Trio, doing what they did best.

This incarnation of the trio saw Jack Dejohnette (who had left to join Miles following At the Montreux Jazz Festival) with drummer Marty Morell, who would work with Evans and bassist Eddie Gómez from 1968 to 1974. Morell brought steady support and a solid presence behind the kit; while his level of creativity was not as high as Dejohnette, his fills and statements were more assertive than those that Paul Motian, for instance, had brought to some of the earlier trio recordings.

The tone, overall, is jubilant. Evans was playing in an extroverted manner here (relatively speaking). Tempos are brighter and even the ballads have the hint of a smile at the corner of their mouths, metaphorically speaking. The repertoire, as noted above, is a combination of familiar Evans compositions (“Very Early,” “34 Skidoo,” “Peri’s Scope”), covers of well loved favorites (“How My Heart Sings,” “I Hear a Rhapsody,” “Israel”), and a surprise. Starting in the 1970s Evans began to turn toward modern pop songs for repertoire, and this record features a surprisingly tender cover of the 1966 Bacharach/David hit “Alfie.” The first half of the ballad is entirely Evans and Gómez, but Morell joins them for a rhythmically jubilant verse before the trio returns to the more contemplative tone of the opening, with Gómez’s bass providing propulsive energy under the melody. It serves as a blueprint for the whole album.

One of the saddest questions we must ask about Evans’ career is where he would be without his crippling heroin addiction. Unlike past addicts we’ve seen like Philly Joe Jones, John Coltrane, and others, Evans was always careful not to let his habit interfere with his performances or his studio work (except for one memorable occasion when he accidentally hit a nerve with the needle and had to play largely one-handed for a week), but it clearly became an escape for him, and one that was only replaced by cocaine or alcohol on the brief occasions when he managed to get off the drug, from the time he got hooked in 1958 to his death in 1980. It has been described as the “slowest suicide in history,” and there’s no doubt that it interfered with his compositional creativity. But throughout that incredible ear remained as the hallmark of this most sensitive pianist. And his work remains as an influential milestone on jazz, one that a variety of unlikely musicians would pay tribute to after his death. We’ll hear one of those recordings next time.

You can listen to the album here: