Tag: robertjohnson

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.

  1. “Sweet Home Chicago” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  2. “Sympathy for the Devil” – The Rolling Stones (Beggars Banquet)
  3. “Seven Curses” – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3: Rare and Unreleased)
  4. “Carolyn’s Fingers” – Cocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll)
  5. “Suzanne” – Geoffrey Oryema (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
  6. “Nigh Eve” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  7. “Peace Like a River” – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
  8. “St. James Infirmary” – Preservation Hall Jazz Band (New Orleans – Vol. IV)
  9. “So. Central Rain” – R.E.M. (Reckoning)
  10. “Eye of Fatima, Pt. 1 & 2” – Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
  11. “Halo” – Depeche Mode (Violator)
  12. “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  13. “Hallelujah” – John Cale (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
  14. “Kindhearted Woman Blues” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  15. “Make Believe Mambo” – David Byrne (Rei Momo)
  16. “Creole Blues” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  17. “Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed)
  18. “She Divines Water” – Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
  19. “Blues in the Evening” – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  20. “From Four Till Late” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  21. “7 Chinese Bros.” – R.E.M. (Reckoning)
  22. “Who By Fire” – The House of Love (I’m Your Fan — The Songs of Leonard Cohen)
  23. “Death’s Door” – Depeche Mode (Until the End of the World Soundtrack)
  24. “Armistice Day” –Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
  25. “Come On In My Kitchen” – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  26. “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.

  1. Brother Veal – Wynton Marsalis Septet (Blue Interlude)
  2. Nebuchadnezzar – Marcus Roberts (Deep In The Shed)
  3. Central Park West – John Coltrane (Coltrane’s Sound)
  4. Escalay – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
  5. All Blues – Miles Davis (Kind of Blue)
  6. All the Things You Are – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
  7. As Serenity Approaches – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  8. The Jitterbug Waltz – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  9. Love In Vain Blues (Alternate Take) – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  10. Perdido Street Blues – Louis Armstrong (Louis Armstrong Of New Orleans)
  11. My Melancholy Baby [Alternate Take] – Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker (Bird And Diz (+3))
  12. Paradox – Sonny Rollins (Worktime)
  13. Willow Weep For Me – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
  14. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
  15. Simpatico – Misterioso – Howard Shore/Ornette Coleman (Naked Lunch)
  16. Chance – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
  17. Big Trouble In the Easy (Pedro Pops Up) – Wynton Marsalis (Tune In Tomorrow… The Original Soundtrack)
  18. Crepuscule With Nellie (Take 6) – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
  19. 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: