THE BLUE MOMENT – Music Commentary | This, That and The Other

It’s hard to imagine a Beach Boys fan — a real Beach Boys fan, that is — who doesn’t have a warm place in his or her heart for 15 Big Ones and The Beach Boys Love You, the two widely ignored and often derided albums they recorded and released in 1976 and ’77 respectively in their new Brother Records studio in Santa Monica. The superficial view took them as acts of desperation following years in which only greatest-hits albums like Spirit of America and Endless Summer kept their name alive. The first was an album of mostly covers, the second an attempt to haul Brian Wilson back into a role front and centre of the group’s activities in the studio. Both were recorded in an atmosphere of uncertainty over what they needed to do in order to reassert themselves as a creative and commercial force. Neither album had a lot of polish, certainly not at the level of Surf’s Up or Holland, their studio predecessors. And there were certainly few vestiges of the rapt introspection of Pet Sounds or the fascinating brainstorms of Smiley Smile. Instead, 15 Big Ones and Love You came from a place between Little Deuce Coupe and Beach Boys’ Party! — only made by guys a decade older, with all the tensions the intervening years had introduced. I liked both albums a lot, for all their rough edges, and play them often. The doo-wop/R&B covers on 15 Big Ones — the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night”, the Six Teens’ “A Casual Look” and Little Willie John’s “Talk to Me” — are in the class of their earlier versions of the Students’ “I’m So Young” and Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Want to Dance”. The originals on Love You — “Let Us Go On This Way”, “The Night Was So Young”, the lovelorn “I’ll Bet He’s Nice”, the witty “Johnny Carson”, the duet between Brian and his first wife on “Let’s Put Our Hearts Together” — match the quality of those on, say, Sunflower. A new three-CD package called We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years collects outtakes from 15 Big Ones, the original masters and outtakes from Love You, various cassette demos made by Brian, plus tracks recorded later in for Adult/Child, an aborted album planned by Brian as a sort of tribute to the Four Freshmen, one… [TheTopNews] Read More.

From left: Binker Golding, Jihad Darwish, Tee Peters, Sarah Tandy, Jamie Murray, Poppy Daniels (photo: Paul Pace/Ronnie Scott’s Club) All Sarah Tandy has to do to make me happy is sit down at a good piano and play a standard ballad. But she’s an ambitious bandleader and composer, and it was those aspects of her musical journey that were explored at Ronnie Scott’s last night. As she did when her debut album, Infection in the Sentence, came out seven years ago, she brought her quintet to the Frith Street temple to showcase some of the material from its successor, to be released later this year. Now with Poppy Daniels on trumpet, Binker Golding on tenor saxophone, Jihad Darwish on bass and Jamie Murray on drums, the band launched the first set with “Unleash the Beast”, whose introduction quickly gave way to a raging up-tempo blast over what sounded like a modern variation on the structure of Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Tandy’s opening solo set the tone, chorus after dizzying chorus, like a dancer leaping and pirouetting across a tightrope with no safety net, laying down the challenge for Golding and Daniels to meet. The next new piece, “Aftermath”, began with Darwish switching to bass guitar and using loops and other effects on an unaccompanied introduction before the band settled into a late-night funk groove, like something you might find on one of the better CTI albums. The piece ended with the dying fall of Daniels’ nicely poised solo — no recapitulation of the theme or arranged coda, which is typical of Tandy’s interesting approach to the architecture of her compositions. By contrast, the set ended with the thunder of Murray’s drum improvisation at the conclusion of “Bradbury Street”, from the first album, a witty exercise in staccato syncopation which seem to have tilted over the years in favour of the Second Line rhythms of New Orleans and gave Murray the chance to demonstrate how to employ formidable chops with discretion. After the break, Tandy turned to her electric piano and synthesiser for two new funk-based instrumental pieces, “Princess Peachy” and “Keep Dreaming”. The former featured a Daniels solo in which the trumpeter set aside her liking for extended multi-noted flurries in favour of well-shaped phrases with a tone that reminded me of the young Donald Byrd, while the latter showed Golding at his most trenchant. Then Tandy introduced… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Like Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones gives a great deal of ongoing thought to how she presents her songs in terms of musical arrangement. Such care is never allowed to outweigh the feeling of freshness and spontaneity, even when the material concerned is getting on for half a century old, as were the five songs from her debut album, written when she was barely into her twenties, included in last night’s 90-minute set. Her current touring band includes the brilliant Ben Rosenblum on accordion, piano and harmony vocals, the divine Petra Haden on violin, percussion and harmony vocals, and the very fine Vilray Bolles on Fender Telecaster. It’s a beautifully dextrous and flexible unit, capable of handling the way Jones likes to stretch songs such as the opening “Weasel and the White Boys Cool”, “We Belong Together” and “Living It Up” into woozy mini-symphonies. Just about everything about the evening was deeply enjoyable, including her very funny introductions and digressions and a couple of wonderful extended solos on the standards she inserted in the middle of the set: deft jazz guitar from Bolles on “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, swooning accordion from Rosenblum on “Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo”. When Haden and Rosenblum joined Jones for the high harmonies, particularly on “Weasel” and “We Belong Together”, the effect was spine-tingling. Gradually she drew the audience into a closer involvement, which seemed to deepen when she talked about when she sang “Bonfires”, the very plain, folk-based break-up song which was written for 2009’s Balm in Gilead but sounds about a thousand years old. The last half-hour was a beautiful slide through “The Horses”, written at the end of the 1980s for her infant daughter, the emotional exposure of “Coolsville”, the gorgeous “A Tree on Allenford” (from 2003’s The Evening of My Best Day), and, as a valediction, the immortal “Last Chance Texaco”. Pretty close to a perfect night. * Rickie Lee Jones is at the Apex, Bury St. Edmunds, tonight (May 27), Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry on May 29 and the RNCM Theatre in Manchester on May 30. [TheTopNews] Read More.

There’s so much Miles Davis around just now, in celebration of today’s centenary of his birth on May 26, 1926. There are stage plays (I went to one in Southwark, starring the trumpeter Jay Phelps), orchestral concerts at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival and the BBC Proms starring Guy Barker and Ambrose Akimusire respectively, tribute albums like A Supreme Blue by Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown, and audiophile editions of landmarks such as Birth of the Cool and the soundtrack to Lous Malle’s Ascenseur pur l’echafaud. And there’s Radio Three’s composer of the week slot, presented by Kate Molleson, which began very promisingly on Monday. Good. He deserves it all. I’ve written a lot about him in the past (including a couple of books), and although I want to mark this occasion, I don’t really have anything new to add to the debate. So here’s an unpublished photo I took of him at Montreux on July 7, 1991, during rehearsals for the following day’s concert, when he played Gil Evans’s historic charts in front of a specially assembled large ensemble conducted by Quincy Jones. He didn’t look strong and his playing was fragile, but the spirit was still there in his eyes and his manner. He wanted to make it good, of course, particularly after overcoming his lifelong aversion to looking in the rear-view mirror. Just under three months later, in a hospital in Santa Monica, he died from a combination of factors, including bronchial pneumonia and a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 65. I fell in love with his music when I heard “Milestones” — the one with Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones — at my school’s jazz society in, I think, 1960. An older boy had brought it on a UK Fontana EP for us to absorb while clustered around the gramophone. Pretty soon I came to think of what it contains in five minutes and 42 seconds as a rare example of perfection in art, and I’ve never seen a reason to resile from that opinion. The one little trumpet fluff on the bridge of the final theme statement is the dropped stitch in the Persian rug, included by the weaver in acknowledgment that true perfection belongs only to Allah. Well, I don’t really know about that. But if I could take only one piece of music… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When I left Nottingham for London just before the end of the ’60s, Northern Soul was still in its embryonic stage. We’d danced to “I Can’t Help Myself”, “This Old Heart of Mine”, “You Don’t Know Like I Know”, “Helpless” and “Knock on Wood”, but something different was about to emerge from that club culture. On a visit back home in, I think, 1972, my friend David Milton — who had a shop in Derby called R. E. Cords — told me what it had become, after Dave Godin had given it a name in his Blues & Soul column. At Brian Selby’s Selectadisc, on long-gone Arkwright Street, I bought the Fuller Brothers’ “Time’s A Wasting” on Soul Clock and a bootleg of David and the Giants’ “Ten Miles High”. I’d pretty much stopped dancing by then, but although I was always at arm’s length from Northern Soul (no visits to the Torch in Stoke on Trent, Blackpool Mecca or Wigan Casino), it always exerted an emotional pull on me: geographical, tribal and musical. It reminds me of the wonderful Welsh word hiraeth: the longing for a home you may never have known. Northern Soul: Still Burning is a new 90-minute documentary film written and directed by Alan Byron, on show in cinemas this week. Against a constantly changing background of appropriate music, it consists mostly of talking heads — the disc jockeys (Richard Searling, Russ Winstanley. Ian Levine, Kev Roberts), the participants and the observers, including the journalist Paul Mason, who was both, the designer Wayne Hemingway, the documentary maker Tony Palmer, whose 1977 Granada TV film provides priceless footage from Wigan in 1977, and Elaine Constantine, whose feature film Northern Soul (starring Steve Coogan and Lisa Stansfield) came out in 2015 and also provides clips. From the contemporary scene, we hear from Ady Croasdell, who deejays all-nighters at London’s 100 Club, and two young chaps running Northern Soul nights in Deptford. And there’s Tony Blackburn, whose story of how he became an accidental Northern Soul star is the film’s comic highlight. But the principal concentration is on evoking the emergence 50 years ago of a social and cultural phenomenon in northern and midlands towns already feeling the blight of post-industrial decline through the closure of steel works, woollen mills and coal mines. The music itself is barely discussed: we don’t hear… [TheTopNews] Read More.