I've not been able to blog in some time now. My life is taking all sorts of interesting twists and turns at the moment, involving plenty of uncertainty but also, I hope, some new opportunities. I hope, slowly but surely, to ease back into regular writing again.
Whilst I've been busy working and planning for the future, plenty seems to have happened in the world of music, not least the sad loss of two figures personally significant for me (and many others). Along with John Peel, Charlie Gillett was surely one of the two most important voices in British broadcasting. He treated his listeners with respect, trusting them to have the same keen and adventurous ears that he had. His style was totally and refreshingly unshowy and unpretentious, allowing the music to speak for itself whilst also communicating his enthusiasm and passion for it in a naturalistic, almost effortless manner. He was a broadcaster of real integrity - compromising his own tastes and interests in the service of his career would have been unthinkable. Compare this with the excitable preaching of Zane Lowe and it's easy to see what has been lost to the tradition of radio with Charlie's passing. He can't be replaced - but I do hope the World Service continues to devote a small part of its schedule to sharing music from around the world.
Alex Chilton was a more tricksy character but, at his best, undeniably one of the great pop songwriters. Big Star were a band that sounded like they ought to have had hit after hit but, in the end, they remained a cult concern. It's worth remembering that, over time, cult interest bands have considerable impact on a wide range of people - and the many tributes to Alex on Twitter are testament to the fact that conventional, commercial measures of popularity often serve to marginalise immensely significant players. 'The Ballad of El Goodo', 'September Gurls', 'Thirteen', 'Thank You Friends', 'Kanga Roo' rank among some of the finest songs I know. As a solo artist, Chilton was wayward and unpredictable - although there are those for whom the ragged charm of 'Like Flies on Sherbert' holds more interest than the more polished sound of the first two Big Star albums. There's definitely a sense that, middling quality of the recent Big Star album notwithstanding, Chilton had more to offer.
I now have a large task on my hands attempting to catch up on everything I've been enjoying recently. Blogging will probably remain intermittent as I start a month of new work on Tuesday and I really hope to get the best out of a short amount of time.
Showing posts with label Tributes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tributes. Show all posts
Friday, April 02, 2010
Friday, August 28, 2009
Ellie Greenwich 1940 - 2009
‘Be My Baby’, ‘Leader of the Pack’, ‘Then He Kissed Me’, ‘I Can Hear Music’, ‘River Deep Mountain High’, or even the much less cool ‘Sunshine After The Rain’ – it’s an old cliché, but they simply don’t make them like that anymore. All were co-written by the great Ellie Greenwich, who died this week at the age of 68. Theiconic producers behind her biggest hits (Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Phil Spector) are rightly given credit for defining the sound of popular music at that time, but their influence would not have been so pervasive were it not for the quality of the writing of Greenwich and her partner Jeff Barry. Whilst the other husband and wife writing teams of the time, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, remain household names, few are even aware of Greenwich’s achievement.
Many of her songs exalted the naïve excesses of adolescent emotions, making them readily identifiable for many. Whilst they were undoubtedly written for a commercial imperative in a rapidly growing market, they also came to define the genuine art of the 2-3 minute pop songs. Here was all the grandeur and feeling of a symphony, compacted into a readily digestible form. The harmonic progressions were necessarily simple, but the formula was always irresistible and endlessly repeatable.
Many will know Greenwich’s best loved songs, even if they are completely unaware that she wrote them. Fewer will have any idea of her own solo recordings as a singer-songwriter, most of which are criminally unavailable. Posthumous it will now be, but a reissue programme would be greatly appreciated.
Many of her songs exalted the naïve excesses of adolescent emotions, making them readily identifiable for many. Whilst they were undoubtedly written for a commercial imperative in a rapidly growing market, they also came to define the genuine art of the 2-3 minute pop songs. Here was all the grandeur and feeling of a symphony, compacted into a readily digestible form. The harmonic progressions were necessarily simple, but the formula was always irresistible and endlessly repeatable.
Many will know Greenwich’s best loved songs, even if they are completely unaware that she wrote them. Fewer will have any idea of her own solo recordings as a singer-songwriter, most of which are criminally unavailable. Posthumous it will now be, but a reissue programme would be greatly appreciated.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Ian Carr 1933 - 2009: A Personal Tribute
It’s a sad and rare day when I get to write here about a significant figure in British music with a direct and personal influence on my life. For this reason, I’m not going to write too much about Ian Carr’s career and body of work. There are already some excellent obituaries online (to which I shall link at the end of the piece) that cover all this in much more detail than I can manage. It will suffice to say that those not familiar with Ian’s music and his considerable role in the jazz-rock movement should at least check out ‘Out of the Long Dark’ or the first two Nucleus albums (‘Elastic Rock’ and ‘We’ll Talk About It Later’). His playing is also well showcased on Neil Ardley’s adventurous ‘Greek Variations’ and ‘Kaleidoscope of Rainbows’ amongst many other notable sessions. His major contribution had finally been recognised in 2006 with the BBC Services to Jazz award, but by this time he was sadly already afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. In this piece, I want to write more about Ian as an educator, the domain in which I came into contact with him and where I benefited from his considerable musicianship, experience and wisdom.
I was fortunate to attend a prestigious fee paying school with impressive facilities – computers with sequencing software for every student, numerous instruments, concert halls and a recording studio- but there were many ways in which the school’s music department was sorely lacking. One of these was its attitude to jazz. Everyone involved in teaching and performing jazz in the school was well meaning and polite – but they were not specialists and viewed improvisation as a skill far from the reach of teenage minds. Solos for the school jazz band tended to be written out, and there was an unappetising focus on the hoariest of standards, always played exactly ‘as written’ in a staid and organised ‘music for schools’ fashion. Spontaneity and interaction were not exactly encouraged.
Thank goodness, then, for Ian’s workshops at Weekend Arts College, then located in a dilapidated but vibrant shack next to Kentish Town West train station (now located in the classier environment of Hampstead Town Hall). I first attended Ian Carr’s workshops in September 1995, when I was just 14 years old. I had already developed a taste for jazz at least in part from my Dad’s record collection but also from Gerry Hunt’s wonderful classes for younger children at the college on Saturdays. Here I earned myself a bit of a reputation for being prepared to try out almost any instrument, from steel pan to bass guitar, but more focus and higher standards were demanded from Ian's classes. I duly opted to concentrate on drums. At £1.50 for three hours, these classes cost a small fraction of my school music lessons but contributed so much more to my knowledge and experience. In Ian’s classes, improvisation was an essential ingredient of music, and a liberating force.
Crucially, making mistakes was an inherent part of the learning process. Ian was always full of pithy, wise phrases, but the one I remember most clearly is ‘jazz is the art of recovery’. It was in Ian’s classes where I learned the value of getting things wrong. The important mark of a good musician was in how they took risks and recovered when things didn’t quite work: ‘If you fail, fail again but fail more successfully’. Improvised music was a necessarily imperfect art form where learning never stops, no matter what standard you might attain.
Ian was therefore as passionate about the learning process as he was about teaching us – ‘I’m still learning every day - if you have stopped learning, you should stop altogether’, he often used to say. Although he could certainly be a tough taskmaster with some very strong, ingrained opinions, he also enjoyed working with his students as much as working for them. As a result, he was never patronising. When we eventually got to perform our repertoire for the term, he would often play with us, and would be tremendously guilty about taking a long solo for himself when his passion and enthusiasm simply wouldn’t allow him to sit out. He once told a guitarist in our group: ‘Tom, I’m so sorry, I think I took your solo – but it was so damn groovy I just had to play!’ In these situations, he couldn’t be stopped and, as a rhythm section, we got the undoubted benefit of supporting him.
Ian could be particularly tough on the rhythm section, and as a somewhat unconfident teenager, this could sometimes present a challenge. It would sometimes feel as if he might be singling out particular individuals for censure over apparently trivial issues. Only when our analysis of the structure and function of a piece of music progressed did it become clear how sensitive and attuned his attention to detail was. As a trumpeter and keyboardist, he didn’t teach me so much about playing the drums but he taught me a great deal about music and the wider role of the drums within it. He would often put drummers on the spot with questions about harmony or possible scales, making it clear that drummers could not get away with just hitting things and knowing next to nothing about the form or harmonic structure of the music. He was particularly intolerant of virtuosity for its own sake – bass players had to master a solid and dependable walking feel before they varied their placements and he would be far more enthusiastic about a drummer with comfortable time feel than one with dexterous chops and poor judgment over which ideas to play. I remember him castigating poor Alex Gould (a technically excellent drummer) for not placing the cross-rim on beat four of the bar during ‘Milestones’. ‘That rimshot on beat four is the absolute crux of the piece!’ he would enthuse – ‘it cannot be put just where you want it!’ I learnt quickly to focus on my ride cymbal feel and get to grips with the structure of the piece, before attempting to impose my individual contribution.
It was really through Ian’s classes that I learned how to listen. It’s this quality he recognised in my playing at the time – an ability to listen to the contributions of other members of an ensemble and to play supportively. He also directed my listening in the broader sense, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz history and artists’ discographies. He would be offer very specific recommendations – Oliver Nelson’s ‘Blues and the Abstract Truth’ was one of ‘the key albums of the 1960s’, whilst ‘Tales of Another’ by Gary Peacock, Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette was another of his all time favourites. I doubt I would have even heard of George Russell, a major but underestimated presence in jazz history, were it not for Ian’s praise of him and subsequent radio broadcast.
It was often hard to elicit praise from Ian but when it came, he would deliver it in spectacular fashion. We worked on an aggressive, driving rendition of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Elegant People’ (still among my favourites of his compositions) to which Ian remarked: ‘Daniel that was so deep down in the swamp I thought you’d changed colour!’ Lack of political correctness aside, I could only take that as a very sincere compliment.
Then there were his wonderful, lengthy stories – of encounters with Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett, of his experiences performing (those infamous ‘double diminisheds!’) and, latterly, writing. He had certainly experienced a lot in his lengthy and illustrious career, not all of it positive, but all of it somehow valuable and informative.
Perhaps Ian’s most transparent flaw was his innate suspicion of free improvisation. More recently, having enjoyed the music of Evan Parker, Tim Berne, David Torne and many others, I’m not sure that I share Ian’s views here. He certainly saw few limits to improvising within a compositional structure – indeed, his teaching often emphasised just how wide the choice of scales and ideas could be. Yet whenever we requested to improvise completely freely, he was well out of his teaching comfort zone. Fairly understandably, our attempts at free improvisation were often tentative, sometimes even plain embarrassing. Perhaps Ian merely felt we needed to get to grips with a tradition and a language first. I remain unsure as to what his true opinions were here but I think it stemmed from his emphasis on the importance of time to all music. He felt that ‘time’ could never be entirely abandoned (‘play two notes, or even the same note twice, and you are playing time’) and maybe therefore that the free improvisers’ quest to escape these strictures was rather futile. Indeed, the possibilities of playing time were so vast that it needn’t be seen as a stricture at all.
It could sometimes feel as if Ian was condemning you with faint praise. His final report on me said something like ‘Daniel is starting to become a very good drummer’. It was perhaps the phrase that followed that that was more significant though, and I’m only now starting to understand what he meant. ‘Where he goes now is up to him’. This seemed quite an ambiguous and mysterious statement to my 18 year old self but it now seems very simple. A clear conception of your direction and what you want to achieve is vital to your progress as a musician. I certainly don’t regret studying history instead of music. At the time, I was quite hot-headed and fervently believed that studying music or literature might risk destroying my personal passions for the art I loved. I now believe this opinion to be ignorant and naive and am finally, ten years on, taking the steps I think Ian was encouraging me to take then. I’m doing it later than most, but there is still time and I will long be grateful to Ian for setting me off on a very long road.
I was lucky to catch Ian at the end of his teaching career. His playing had started to deteriorate and he would often be visibly frustrated by this in classes, although he had lost none of his enthusiasm for the music or for communicating. He retired from WAC a year after I left to study history at University. Subsequently, Tim Whitehead, Jonny Phillips and Ricky Mian have all ably stepped into his shoes, inheriting and developing a great tradition of jazz education at the college.
It’s deeply sad that Ian’s career was cruelly cut short by health problems at precisely the time he was gaining both a new audience and the wider recognition he’d long deserved. He’d often been unfairly portrayed as being in the shadow of his hero, Miles Davis, when his contribution to jazz-rock was actually contemporaneous with that of Miles. Some extraordinary musicians passed through Ian’s workshops at WAC - Julian Joseph, Courtney Pine, Jason Rebello, Mark and Michael Mondesir and many of the pack of musicians now revitalising British music – Zoe Rahman, Naadia Sheriff, Tom Herbert, Tom Skinner, Dave Okumu, Jesse Hackett of Elmore Judd and many others. This is testament to his manifest qualities as a teacher and his legacy will live on through these musicians for many years to come. Personally, I respect him for managing to combine pretty much all of my personal interests in one career. He composed music that crossed the often unnecessary boundaries between classical, jazz and rock (accompanied by an open-minded appreciation for a variety of musical forms), he wrote passionately and authoritatively about jazz, and even became an excellent broadcaster too.
Some links to more informative and objective obituaries covering Ian’s life and music:
http://www.iancarrsnucleus.net/IanCarrobituary.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ian-carr-trumpeter-and-composer-whose-band-nucleus-was-at-the-forefront-of-the-jazzrock-movement-1633339.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5810825.ece
I was fortunate to attend a prestigious fee paying school with impressive facilities – computers with sequencing software for every student, numerous instruments, concert halls and a recording studio- but there were many ways in which the school’s music department was sorely lacking. One of these was its attitude to jazz. Everyone involved in teaching and performing jazz in the school was well meaning and polite – but they were not specialists and viewed improvisation as a skill far from the reach of teenage minds. Solos for the school jazz band tended to be written out, and there was an unappetising focus on the hoariest of standards, always played exactly ‘as written’ in a staid and organised ‘music for schools’ fashion. Spontaneity and interaction were not exactly encouraged.
Thank goodness, then, for Ian’s workshops at Weekend Arts College, then located in a dilapidated but vibrant shack next to Kentish Town West train station (now located in the classier environment of Hampstead Town Hall). I first attended Ian Carr’s workshops in September 1995, when I was just 14 years old. I had already developed a taste for jazz at least in part from my Dad’s record collection but also from Gerry Hunt’s wonderful classes for younger children at the college on Saturdays. Here I earned myself a bit of a reputation for being prepared to try out almost any instrument, from steel pan to bass guitar, but more focus and higher standards were demanded from Ian's classes. I duly opted to concentrate on drums. At £1.50 for three hours, these classes cost a small fraction of my school music lessons but contributed so much more to my knowledge and experience. In Ian’s classes, improvisation was an essential ingredient of music, and a liberating force.
Crucially, making mistakes was an inherent part of the learning process. Ian was always full of pithy, wise phrases, but the one I remember most clearly is ‘jazz is the art of recovery’. It was in Ian’s classes where I learned the value of getting things wrong. The important mark of a good musician was in how they took risks and recovered when things didn’t quite work: ‘If you fail, fail again but fail more successfully’. Improvised music was a necessarily imperfect art form where learning never stops, no matter what standard you might attain.
Ian was therefore as passionate about the learning process as he was about teaching us – ‘I’m still learning every day - if you have stopped learning, you should stop altogether’, he often used to say. Although he could certainly be a tough taskmaster with some very strong, ingrained opinions, he also enjoyed working with his students as much as working for them. As a result, he was never patronising. When we eventually got to perform our repertoire for the term, he would often play with us, and would be tremendously guilty about taking a long solo for himself when his passion and enthusiasm simply wouldn’t allow him to sit out. He once told a guitarist in our group: ‘Tom, I’m so sorry, I think I took your solo – but it was so damn groovy I just had to play!’ In these situations, he couldn’t be stopped and, as a rhythm section, we got the undoubted benefit of supporting him.
Ian could be particularly tough on the rhythm section, and as a somewhat unconfident teenager, this could sometimes present a challenge. It would sometimes feel as if he might be singling out particular individuals for censure over apparently trivial issues. Only when our analysis of the structure and function of a piece of music progressed did it become clear how sensitive and attuned his attention to detail was. As a trumpeter and keyboardist, he didn’t teach me so much about playing the drums but he taught me a great deal about music and the wider role of the drums within it. He would often put drummers on the spot with questions about harmony or possible scales, making it clear that drummers could not get away with just hitting things and knowing next to nothing about the form or harmonic structure of the music. He was particularly intolerant of virtuosity for its own sake – bass players had to master a solid and dependable walking feel before they varied their placements and he would be far more enthusiastic about a drummer with comfortable time feel than one with dexterous chops and poor judgment over which ideas to play. I remember him castigating poor Alex Gould (a technically excellent drummer) for not placing the cross-rim on beat four of the bar during ‘Milestones’. ‘That rimshot on beat four is the absolute crux of the piece!’ he would enthuse – ‘it cannot be put just where you want it!’ I learnt quickly to focus on my ride cymbal feel and get to grips with the structure of the piece, before attempting to impose my individual contribution.
It was really through Ian’s classes that I learned how to listen. It’s this quality he recognised in my playing at the time – an ability to listen to the contributions of other members of an ensemble and to play supportively. He also directed my listening in the broader sense, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz history and artists’ discographies. He would be offer very specific recommendations – Oliver Nelson’s ‘Blues and the Abstract Truth’ was one of ‘the key albums of the 1960s’, whilst ‘Tales of Another’ by Gary Peacock, Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette was another of his all time favourites. I doubt I would have even heard of George Russell, a major but underestimated presence in jazz history, were it not for Ian’s praise of him and subsequent radio broadcast.
It was often hard to elicit praise from Ian but when it came, he would deliver it in spectacular fashion. We worked on an aggressive, driving rendition of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Elegant People’ (still among my favourites of his compositions) to which Ian remarked: ‘Daniel that was so deep down in the swamp I thought you’d changed colour!’ Lack of political correctness aside, I could only take that as a very sincere compliment.
Then there were his wonderful, lengthy stories – of encounters with Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett, of his experiences performing (those infamous ‘double diminisheds!’) and, latterly, writing. He had certainly experienced a lot in his lengthy and illustrious career, not all of it positive, but all of it somehow valuable and informative.
Perhaps Ian’s most transparent flaw was his innate suspicion of free improvisation. More recently, having enjoyed the music of Evan Parker, Tim Berne, David Torne and many others, I’m not sure that I share Ian’s views here. He certainly saw few limits to improvising within a compositional structure – indeed, his teaching often emphasised just how wide the choice of scales and ideas could be. Yet whenever we requested to improvise completely freely, he was well out of his teaching comfort zone. Fairly understandably, our attempts at free improvisation were often tentative, sometimes even plain embarrassing. Perhaps Ian merely felt we needed to get to grips with a tradition and a language first. I remain unsure as to what his true opinions were here but I think it stemmed from his emphasis on the importance of time to all music. He felt that ‘time’ could never be entirely abandoned (‘play two notes, or even the same note twice, and you are playing time’) and maybe therefore that the free improvisers’ quest to escape these strictures was rather futile. Indeed, the possibilities of playing time were so vast that it needn’t be seen as a stricture at all.
It could sometimes feel as if Ian was condemning you with faint praise. His final report on me said something like ‘Daniel is starting to become a very good drummer’. It was perhaps the phrase that followed that that was more significant though, and I’m only now starting to understand what he meant. ‘Where he goes now is up to him’. This seemed quite an ambiguous and mysterious statement to my 18 year old self but it now seems very simple. A clear conception of your direction and what you want to achieve is vital to your progress as a musician. I certainly don’t regret studying history instead of music. At the time, I was quite hot-headed and fervently believed that studying music or literature might risk destroying my personal passions for the art I loved. I now believe this opinion to be ignorant and naive and am finally, ten years on, taking the steps I think Ian was encouraging me to take then. I’m doing it later than most, but there is still time and I will long be grateful to Ian for setting me off on a very long road.
I was lucky to catch Ian at the end of his teaching career. His playing had started to deteriorate and he would often be visibly frustrated by this in classes, although he had lost none of his enthusiasm for the music or for communicating. He retired from WAC a year after I left to study history at University. Subsequently, Tim Whitehead, Jonny Phillips and Ricky Mian have all ably stepped into his shoes, inheriting and developing a great tradition of jazz education at the college.
It’s deeply sad that Ian’s career was cruelly cut short by health problems at precisely the time he was gaining both a new audience and the wider recognition he’d long deserved. He’d often been unfairly portrayed as being in the shadow of his hero, Miles Davis, when his contribution to jazz-rock was actually contemporaneous with that of Miles. Some extraordinary musicians passed through Ian’s workshops at WAC - Julian Joseph, Courtney Pine, Jason Rebello, Mark and Michael Mondesir and many of the pack of musicians now revitalising British music – Zoe Rahman, Naadia Sheriff, Tom Herbert, Tom Skinner, Dave Okumu, Jesse Hackett of Elmore Judd and many others. This is testament to his manifest qualities as a teacher and his legacy will live on through these musicians for many years to come. Personally, I respect him for managing to combine pretty much all of my personal interests in one career. He composed music that crossed the often unnecessary boundaries between classical, jazz and rock (accompanied by an open-minded appreciation for a variety of musical forms), he wrote passionately and authoritatively about jazz, and even became an excellent broadcaster too.
Some links to more informative and objective obituaries covering Ian’s life and music:
http://www.iancarrsnucleus.net/IanCarrobituary.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ian-carr-trumpeter-and-composer-whose-band-nucleus-was-at-the-forefront-of-the-jazzrock-movement-1633339.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5810825.ece
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Norman Whitfield RIP
Yet another legend has passed away this week - Motown producer and songwriter Norman Whitfield. Although Whitfield is less well known than Stax counterpart Isaac Hayes (he didn't enjoy such a fruitful solo career), his influence and style are pretty similar. His songwriting partnership with Barrett Strong mirrored the collaboration between Hayes and David Porter at Stax. His production style, creating what has since been dubbed 'psychedelic soul' must surely have informed Hayes' work on the Shaft soundtrack.
Whitfield was responsible for writing one of the most enduring songs of the Motown era - 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. The song was immortalised by Marvin Gaye's extraordinary delivery (and the exquisite orchestration on that version), but was also recorded by many other groups Whitfield was involved with, including The Temptations and The Undisputed Truth.
His production work for The Temptations still sounds imaginative today and has been hugely influential. Tracks like 'Psychedelic Shack', 'Ball of Confusion' and 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone' took them well beyond the conventional limitations of the soul vocal group.
The Undisputed Truth, very much a Whitfield project, have been less fondly remembered and remain criminally underrated. 'Smiling Faces (Sometimes)' and 'You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell (Right Here On Earth)' remain two of the most potent examples of Whitfield's skill with prodution and arranging - the mood of both is palpably threatening.
Whitfield was responsible for writing one of the most enduring songs of the Motown era - 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. The song was immortalised by Marvin Gaye's extraordinary delivery (and the exquisite orchestration on that version), but was also recorded by many other groups Whitfield was involved with, including The Temptations and The Undisputed Truth.
His production work for The Temptations still sounds imaginative today and has been hugely influential. Tracks like 'Psychedelic Shack', 'Ball of Confusion' and 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone' took them well beyond the conventional limitations of the soul vocal group.
The Undisputed Truth, very much a Whitfield project, have been less fondly remembered and remain criminally underrated. 'Smiling Faces (Sometimes)' and 'You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell (Right Here On Earth)' remain two of the most potent examples of Whitfield's skill with prodution and arranging - the mood of both is palpably threatening.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Isaac Hayes 1942 – 2008
Had Isaac Hayes’ career extended only as far as being a session musician and songwriter for the Stax/Volt/Atlantic labels (with writing partner David Porter he composed Sam and Dave’s most memorable hits, including ‘Hold On I’m Coming!’ and ‘Soul Man’), he would still merit a pretty substantial footnote in soul music history. Yet his achievements as a solo performer arguably elevated him to the pantheon of greats.
His 1969 debut album ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ reinvented him as a magnificent arranger and interpreter and included brilliant, interpolated versions of Burt Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. Both tracks were unashamedly vivid and grandiose, memorable as much for Hayes’ improvised half-rapping as for their flourishes of strings and stylised guitar lines. This lavish approach would greatly influence the later Stax sound that, whilst dooming the label to financial collapse in the short term, has more recently been reappraised for its inventiveness and musical character (particularly see Tony Hester’s arrangements and production for The Dramatics, heavily indebted to Hayes).
Some might have felt he developed the style beyond its logical conclusion with the bloated ‘Black Moses’, but there was actually more genuine emotion there than self-aggrandising. If it was a feat of artistic indulgence, it still stands comfortably with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ as an indulgence worth tolerating.
Along with Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack, Hayes bolstered his career with a major soundtrack (‘Shaft’). Whilst the blaxploitation movies have recently been re-examined with fresh favour as cultural landmarks, there’s still little argument against the contention that Hayes’ instantly identifiable wah-wah theme has outlived the film.
Like many before and after him, Hayes overspent in the immediate aftermath of his fame and filed for bankruptcy in the mid-70s. Unlike others, he recovered from this with dignity and artistic credibility intact, continuing to write and perform throughout the 80s and 90s. An album as recent as ‘Branded’ could claim to be a worthy part of his musical legacy.
He may now be remembered as fondly for his good-humoured role as Chef in the controversial but popular animated series South Park, its somewhat unsubtle ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ single providing him with a late re-appearance in the pop charts. It’s undoubtedly a shame that Hayes could tolerate and even encourage the series’ lambasting of cultural and social targets save only for his hallowed Church of Scientology. The programme’s attack on the religion/cult clearly proved a step too far for Hayes and provoked his resignation from the show. Whilst this doesn’t exactly tarnish his image, it sadly leaves many of us wondering how such a talent could be quite so irrational.
Hayes had been married four times and leaves a pretty impressive tally of twelve children. He obviously lived life with a somewhat reckless intensity. Still, at just 65, he may well have had another grand statement left to offer, although he had apparently already suffered a stroke in 2006.
His 1969 debut album ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ reinvented him as a magnificent arranger and interpreter and included brilliant, interpolated versions of Burt Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. Both tracks were unashamedly vivid and grandiose, memorable as much for Hayes’ improvised half-rapping as for their flourishes of strings and stylised guitar lines. This lavish approach would greatly influence the later Stax sound that, whilst dooming the label to financial collapse in the short term, has more recently been reappraised for its inventiveness and musical character (particularly see Tony Hester’s arrangements and production for The Dramatics, heavily indebted to Hayes).
Some might have felt he developed the style beyond its logical conclusion with the bloated ‘Black Moses’, but there was actually more genuine emotion there than self-aggrandising. If it was a feat of artistic indulgence, it still stands comfortably with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ as an indulgence worth tolerating.
Along with Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack, Hayes bolstered his career with a major soundtrack (‘Shaft’). Whilst the blaxploitation movies have recently been re-examined with fresh favour as cultural landmarks, there’s still little argument against the contention that Hayes’ instantly identifiable wah-wah theme has outlived the film.
Like many before and after him, Hayes overspent in the immediate aftermath of his fame and filed for bankruptcy in the mid-70s. Unlike others, he recovered from this with dignity and artistic credibility intact, continuing to write and perform throughout the 80s and 90s. An album as recent as ‘Branded’ could claim to be a worthy part of his musical legacy.
He may now be remembered as fondly for his good-humoured role as Chef in the controversial but popular animated series South Park, its somewhat unsubtle ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ single providing him with a late re-appearance in the pop charts. It’s undoubtedly a shame that Hayes could tolerate and even encourage the series’ lambasting of cultural and social targets save only for his hallowed Church of Scientology. The programme’s attack on the religion/cult clearly proved a step too far for Hayes and provoked his resignation from the show. Whilst this doesn’t exactly tarnish his image, it sadly leaves many of us wondering how such a talent could be quite so irrational.
Hayes had been married four times and leaves a pretty impressive tally of twelve children. He obviously lived life with a somewhat reckless intensity. Still, at just 65, he may well have had another grand statement left to offer, although he had apparently already suffered a stroke in 2006.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
RIP Teo Macero and Joe Gibbs
All those with an interest in the creation and manipulation of sound may well feel saddened by the recent deaths of Teo Macero and Joe Gibbs, two of the most influential producers in popular music.
Macero’s work with Miles Davis was genuinely pioneering, introducing techniques of cut-and-paste editing to a form of music that had formerly assumed the primacy of the live recording. It would have been enough for Macero to have produced Kind of Blue or Sketches of Spain but his later work on the likes of In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Tribute To Jack Johnson and On The Corner helped revolutionise the music for a second time. For ‘In A Silent Way’, still my personal favourite Miles Davis album, Teo collaborated with Miles to edit together two meticulously crafted tracks from hours of recordings. The recent box sets with their various out-takes give a fascinating insight into this highly creative process. Macero also worked with a fascinating variety of other Columbia Recording artists, including Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, helping craft some of the most significant and influential albums in contemporary music history. Macero is generally believed to be one of the few figures prepared to stand up to Miles Davis over creative decisions, and a man capable of eliciting compromise and conciliation from a notoriously intense control-freak. Brian Eno claims that Macero did something that was ‘extremely modern’, a statement supported by the fact that those extraordinary, spatial, haunting records with Miles still sound remarkably fresh even now.
Joe Gibbs was one of the legends of rocksteady and reggae, but has generally garnered less attention than those wild pioneers of dub such as Lee Perry or Keith Hudson. Perhaps this is merely because their creative use of the studio was frequently more obvious and pivotal. Yet Gibbs was responsible for some of the very finest reggae albums – particularly Culture’s astounding ‘Two Sevens Clash’ and its righteous fury. He also worked his magic with The Heptones, The Mighty Diamonds, The Ethiopians, Johnny Clarke and many others, and scored a massive hit with Nicky Thomas’ ‘Love of the Common People’. I’ve always admired the great sound of the drums on his recordings.
Macero’s work with Miles Davis was genuinely pioneering, introducing techniques of cut-and-paste editing to a form of music that had formerly assumed the primacy of the live recording. It would have been enough for Macero to have produced Kind of Blue or Sketches of Spain but his later work on the likes of In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Tribute To Jack Johnson and On The Corner helped revolutionise the music for a second time. For ‘In A Silent Way’, still my personal favourite Miles Davis album, Teo collaborated with Miles to edit together two meticulously crafted tracks from hours of recordings. The recent box sets with their various out-takes give a fascinating insight into this highly creative process. Macero also worked with a fascinating variety of other Columbia Recording artists, including Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, helping craft some of the most significant and influential albums in contemporary music history. Macero is generally believed to be one of the few figures prepared to stand up to Miles Davis over creative decisions, and a man capable of eliciting compromise and conciliation from a notoriously intense control-freak. Brian Eno claims that Macero did something that was ‘extremely modern’, a statement supported by the fact that those extraordinary, spatial, haunting records with Miles still sound remarkably fresh even now.
Joe Gibbs was one of the legends of rocksteady and reggae, but has generally garnered less attention than those wild pioneers of dub such as Lee Perry or Keith Hudson. Perhaps this is merely because their creative use of the studio was frequently more obvious and pivotal. Yet Gibbs was responsible for some of the very finest reggae albums – particularly Culture’s astounding ‘Two Sevens Clash’ and its righteous fury. He also worked his magic with The Heptones, The Mighty Diamonds, The Ethiopians, Johnny Clarke and many others, and scored a massive hit with Nicky Thomas’ ‘Love of the Common People’. I’ve always admired the great sound of the drums on his recordings.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Ingmar Bergman 1918 - 2007
With impeccable timing, the legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has died, at the grand age of 89, just as his most famous work, The Seventh Seal, is enjoying yet another retrospective.
Bergman was one of the towering masters of the cinematic art, able to elicit performances of visceral intensity and raw emotion, as well as having a genius for staging and the close up shot. Like Leonard Cohen in the world of popular music, his reputation for doom and gloom preceded him, but this not only ignores his capacity to capture real feeling, but also the equal power of some of his lighter, more approachable fims (Summer With Monika). Woody Allen described him as 'probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera'.
Still, some remain unconvinced, viewing even his greatest films as emphasising technical machismo above emotional substance. In my view this is wrong. His best works, particularly when at his most discomforting, match powerful, disorientating imagery with overwhelming emotional force. Many will rush to cite The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander or Persona as his ultimate masterpiece. I would opt for the extraordinary Cries and Whispers, easily one of the most painful films I can remember watching - the vivid crimson colours and the howls of torment are still imprinted on my mind. He will remain unchallenged as the filmmaker to capture most powerfully the extremes of emotional confrontation.
Bergman was one of the towering masters of the cinematic art, able to elicit performances of visceral intensity and raw emotion, as well as having a genius for staging and the close up shot. Like Leonard Cohen in the world of popular music, his reputation for doom and gloom preceded him, but this not only ignores his capacity to capture real feeling, but also the equal power of some of his lighter, more approachable fims (Summer With Monika). Woody Allen described him as 'probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera'.
Still, some remain unconvinced, viewing even his greatest films as emphasising technical machismo above emotional substance. In my view this is wrong. His best works, particularly when at his most discomforting, match powerful, disorientating imagery with overwhelming emotional force. Many will rush to cite The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander or Persona as his ultimate masterpiece. I would opt for the extraordinary Cries and Whispers, easily one of the most painful films I can remember watching - the vivid crimson colours and the howls of torment are still imprinted on my mind. He will remain unchallenged as the filmmaker to capture most powerfully the extremes of emotional confrontation.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut: 1922 - 2007
It's worth taking some time to mourn the passing, and celebrate the life of one of my American heroes, the great writer Kurt Vonnegut, who has died at the age of 84. Vonnegut had a genius for reducing complex issues and concepts to their starkest, simplest terms and was a master of dry, biting satire. It's perhaps for this reason that he always rejected the 'science fiction' box, although as a scientist-turned-writer, he was in a unique position among the great American writers, and able to highlight the pitfalls of a form of 'progress' that continually threatens to destroy civilisation. As a self-proclaimed progressive socialist and committed member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Vonnegut realised that left wing politics and personal freedom needn't be mutually exclusive, and his experiences as a PoW and of the Dresden bombings also left him a firm pacifist.
Vonnegut was perhaps unique among the great male American writers for his mercilessly concise prose style. The likes of Roth, Updike, Bellow and Ford opted for intentional verbosity, elaborate rants and lengthy sentences. Vonnegut summed up his sentiments in crisp, dry phrases ('So it goes...' etc) and his writing never contained anything extraneous.
Whilst many will remember the superb anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, or perhaps Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions as his best works, it's also worth noting his mastery of the essay and short story forms, as well as his emergence from retirement last year with his extraordinary 'memoir' 'A Man Without A Country' (not so much a memoir as a remarkably cogent and wise summary of where America has gone wrong, and, more impressively, even offering some solutions to put it right). Despite his initial hope for the world turning into pessimism, and his personal battles with depression (he once attempted suicide), Vonnegut still managed to make his allegories and satires blisteringly funny.
It is an extraordinary injustice (and one which we should not begrudge Vonnegut identifying himself in 'A Man Without a Country') that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. If any writer has better captured the ideals highlighted by the Nobel committee, I've yet to find them.
Many full obituaries will appear in the press over the next few days, but it's surely best to let the man speak for himself. Here are just a few of his edifying statements:
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon."
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."
"We are put on earth to fart around, don't let anyone tell you any different."
"I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second ... only one person benefited - not two or five or ten. Just one. ... Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that." (1977 Paris interview on the Dresden firebombings)
"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere."
"My last words? 'Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.'"
"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. "
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. "
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. "
"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."
Vonnegut was perhaps unique among the great male American writers for his mercilessly concise prose style. The likes of Roth, Updike, Bellow and Ford opted for intentional verbosity, elaborate rants and lengthy sentences. Vonnegut summed up his sentiments in crisp, dry phrases ('So it goes...' etc) and his writing never contained anything extraneous.
Whilst many will remember the superb anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, or perhaps Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions as his best works, it's also worth noting his mastery of the essay and short story forms, as well as his emergence from retirement last year with his extraordinary 'memoir' 'A Man Without A Country' (not so much a memoir as a remarkably cogent and wise summary of where America has gone wrong, and, more impressively, even offering some solutions to put it right). Despite his initial hope for the world turning into pessimism, and his personal battles with depression (he once attempted suicide), Vonnegut still managed to make his allegories and satires blisteringly funny.
It is an extraordinary injustice (and one which we should not begrudge Vonnegut identifying himself in 'A Man Without a Country') that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. If any writer has better captured the ideals highlighted by the Nobel committee, I've yet to find them.
Many full obituaries will appear in the press over the next few days, but it's surely best to let the man speak for himself. Here are just a few of his edifying statements:
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon."
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."
"We are put on earth to fart around, don't let anyone tell you any different."
"I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second ... only one person benefited - not two or five or ten. Just one. ... Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that." (1977 Paris interview on the Dresden firebombings)
"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere."
"My last words? 'Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.'"
"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. "
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. "
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. "
"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
An Appreciation of Alice Coltrane
I don't normally post tributes or obituaries on here (not even for pivotal figures such as James Brown), yet somehow I feel compelled to write something about Alice Coltrane. I think this is mainly because she spent most of her life condemned by critics either, entirely unjustly, as a Yoko Ono figure trading incomprehensible work on the legacy of her late husband or simply as an inferior musician worthlessly attempting to continue propagating his concerns. That she was in fact neither of these things has been asserted by a handful of excellent writers, perhaps most notably David Toop, who has written perceptively about her masterpiece, 1972's 'Universal Consciousness'. It has really only been during the past couple of years, with the reissue of her Impulse and Atlantic albums, a fascinating interview in The Wire magazine (one of the magazine's finest issues) and with the 2004 comeback 'Translinear Light', that her own outstanding contribution has really been recognised.
Alice McLeod actually began her musical training remarkably early, at the age of seven, and had become an able, expressive bepop pianist in the manner of Bud Powell well before she met John Coltrane. She performed with Terry Gibbs, Kenny Burrell and, perhaps most significantly, Yusuf Lateef in the early 60s. Her personal and professional union with Coltrane would completely revolutionise her style, however, as she followed her husband creatively into fiery, free-form territory. Yet her playing style was always informed by earlier developments, particularly the modal techniques pioneered by Bill Evans and extended in Coltrane's earlier works. Although there are doubters who understimate her contribution to Coltrane's later music (she doesn't appear on significant studio works such as 'Ascencion'), it's worth emphasising that 'The Olatunji Concert', now readily available on Impulse CD, is considered one of the finest live recordings of free improvisation in the history of the music.
Following John Coltrane's tragically premature death, she produced a series of albums for the Impulse label ('A Montastic Trio', 'Huntinton Ashram Monastery', 'Ptah The El Daoud', 'Journey In Satchidananda', 'Universal Consciousness', 'World Galaxy' and 'Lord Of Lords') that showed her consistent imagination and inspiration, but which mostly baffled the critics of the time. This extraordinary, visionary and exciting music was informed by a vast array of influences, not purely musical but also spiritual. The connection with gospel and the blues ran deep, and as a result the music sounded intense and fervent. Yet Coltrane also admired the Eastern religions, particularly the acts of meditation and spiritual contemplation. The earlier albums have a fiery, furious swing, frequently dominated by the juxtaposition of Rashied Ali's relentless drumming with Coltrane's full, powerful chord voicings on the piano. Where Pharoah Sanders also featured, the results were even more muscular. It was a superb ensemble, revelling in the energy and joy of musical discovery. She had already begun to push herself further in intriguing new directions though, and the deployment of the harp was more than mere novelty - in her hands it became as expressive an improvisatory medium as the piano.
By 'Universal Consciousness', she had moved well away from conventional compositional structure and had begun to explore looser, mostly free styles of playing. Yet the music on this great achievement is neither confounding nor indulgent, but rather characterised by a constant conflict between turblulence and tranquility. The notion that there was a 'universal consciousness' common to all spiritual belief is an idealistic but appealing notion which Coltrane portrayed with quiet dignity through a purely musical language. She would continue to investigate these ideas to their full extent across the next two records, increasingly incorporating strings (still a feature entirely alien to most jazz of the period) to expand the textures. 'Lord Of Lords' (still criminally unavailable on CD - I've seen original vinyl copies on sale for £70+ with that value sure to increase now) even contained her interpretation Stravinsky's 'The Firebird', prefiguring the closer relations between jazz and strict composition that would develop further during the 70s and 80s, especially in Europe. The version of 'A Love Supreme' on 'World Galaxy' neatly encapsulates the complexity of her musical relationship with her husband's legacy - it was a radical re-interpretation, retaining the spirit of the original recording, but with a substance entirely of her own making.
The Atlantic albums of the 70s are less consistent, and frequently more challenging, but they are worth pursuing as they show her reluctance to stand still. Mostly abandoning the piano in favour of a variety of organs, she continued to investigate devotional concerns through her music, and a passionate intensity remained intact. Founding her own religious centre in 1975, much of the rest of her life would be devoted largely to spiritual works and personal retreat.
She continued to perform, albeit infrequently, and judging by the standard of 2004's excellent comeback 'Translinear Light', had lost none of her dynamism or energy. Beginning to perform more regularly last year, and mid-way through recording what appeared to be an intensely serious and significant new work, her passing was unexpected and unbearably badly timed. I plan to listen to all these albums again this week, and it shall no doubt be poignant, but they are the kind of works which intimate new facets and dimensions with every play, so the experience will also be edifying and inspirational. The combination of the spiritual and the musical is difficult to achieve without becoming vulnerable to accusations of pretension, and Coltrane suffered from this during her career. Yet pretension means pretending to be something you are not - my sense of Alice Coltrane is that she was genuinely serious-minded, committed and, yes, perhaps divinely inspired.
Alice McLeod actually began her musical training remarkably early, at the age of seven, and had become an able, expressive bepop pianist in the manner of Bud Powell well before she met John Coltrane. She performed with Terry Gibbs, Kenny Burrell and, perhaps most significantly, Yusuf Lateef in the early 60s. Her personal and professional union with Coltrane would completely revolutionise her style, however, as she followed her husband creatively into fiery, free-form territory. Yet her playing style was always informed by earlier developments, particularly the modal techniques pioneered by Bill Evans and extended in Coltrane's earlier works. Although there are doubters who understimate her contribution to Coltrane's later music (she doesn't appear on significant studio works such as 'Ascencion'), it's worth emphasising that 'The Olatunji Concert', now readily available on Impulse CD, is considered one of the finest live recordings of free improvisation in the history of the music.
Following John Coltrane's tragically premature death, she produced a series of albums for the Impulse label ('A Montastic Trio', 'Huntinton Ashram Monastery', 'Ptah The El Daoud', 'Journey In Satchidananda', 'Universal Consciousness', 'World Galaxy' and 'Lord Of Lords') that showed her consistent imagination and inspiration, but which mostly baffled the critics of the time. This extraordinary, visionary and exciting music was informed by a vast array of influences, not purely musical but also spiritual. The connection with gospel and the blues ran deep, and as a result the music sounded intense and fervent. Yet Coltrane also admired the Eastern religions, particularly the acts of meditation and spiritual contemplation. The earlier albums have a fiery, furious swing, frequently dominated by the juxtaposition of Rashied Ali's relentless drumming with Coltrane's full, powerful chord voicings on the piano. Where Pharoah Sanders also featured, the results were even more muscular. It was a superb ensemble, revelling in the energy and joy of musical discovery. She had already begun to push herself further in intriguing new directions though, and the deployment of the harp was more than mere novelty - in her hands it became as expressive an improvisatory medium as the piano.
By 'Universal Consciousness', she had moved well away from conventional compositional structure and had begun to explore looser, mostly free styles of playing. Yet the music on this great achievement is neither confounding nor indulgent, but rather characterised by a constant conflict between turblulence and tranquility. The notion that there was a 'universal consciousness' common to all spiritual belief is an idealistic but appealing notion which Coltrane portrayed with quiet dignity through a purely musical language. She would continue to investigate these ideas to their full extent across the next two records, increasingly incorporating strings (still a feature entirely alien to most jazz of the period) to expand the textures. 'Lord Of Lords' (still criminally unavailable on CD - I've seen original vinyl copies on sale for £70+ with that value sure to increase now) even contained her interpretation Stravinsky's 'The Firebird', prefiguring the closer relations between jazz and strict composition that would develop further during the 70s and 80s, especially in Europe. The version of 'A Love Supreme' on 'World Galaxy' neatly encapsulates the complexity of her musical relationship with her husband's legacy - it was a radical re-interpretation, retaining the spirit of the original recording, but with a substance entirely of her own making.
The Atlantic albums of the 70s are less consistent, and frequently more challenging, but they are worth pursuing as they show her reluctance to stand still. Mostly abandoning the piano in favour of a variety of organs, she continued to investigate devotional concerns through her music, and a passionate intensity remained intact. Founding her own religious centre in 1975, much of the rest of her life would be devoted largely to spiritual works and personal retreat.
She continued to perform, albeit infrequently, and judging by the standard of 2004's excellent comeback 'Translinear Light', had lost none of her dynamism or energy. Beginning to perform more regularly last year, and mid-way through recording what appeared to be an intensely serious and significant new work, her passing was unexpected and unbearably badly timed. I plan to listen to all these albums again this week, and it shall no doubt be poignant, but they are the kind of works which intimate new facets and dimensions with every play, so the experience will also be edifying and inspirational. The combination of the spiritual and the musical is difficult to achieve without becoming vulnerable to accusations of pretension, and Coltrane suffered from this during her career. Yet pretension means pretending to be something you are not - my sense of Alice Coltrane is that she was genuinely serious-minded, committed and, yes, perhaps divinely inspired.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Sad News
The world of jazz has suffered a double devastating loss this weekend, with the deaths of Michael Brecker and Alice Coltrane. The influence of Brecker's technique is hard to overstate and he will be much missed by musicians and enthusiasts alike. Alice Coltrane's death is particularly hard to take - she had only recently started to receive due credit for her substantial body of work, and had spent too much of her life in the shadow of her husband's towering legacy. Only recently performing live again, she was due to appear at the Barbican in London in April, a concert I had been anticipating keenly. It's tragic news. I'll write a full appreciation of her as soon as I have time. Why are no major news outlets in the UK reporting this (even sites primarily dedicated to music)? The Alice Coltrane news came from Pitchfork, an American website that barely otherwise ever even mentions jazz! Maybe I'm too unrealistic in my expectations of the media, but it pains me that Kylie's outbreak of flu is considered more significant.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
John Peel 1939 - 2004
An immense loss to both broadcasting and music - John Peel was a true legend whose passion for seeking out new music meant that he was able to survive through numerous management changes and radical programming reforms at Radio 1. I haven't listened to his show as much as I should in recent years - yet I still find it hard to believe that I will never hear another festive fifty or Peel session. Quite simply, there has never been another broadcaster of his dedication, enthusiasm and talent. A number of crucial bands may never have achieved critical and commercial success were it not for the early exposure he offered them. He never patronised his audience, fostered diversity (something increasingly rare in today's formatted radio world) and was a consummately relaxed and skilful presenter. RIP...
An immense loss to both broadcasting and music - John Peel was a true legend whose passion for seeking out new music meant that he was able to survive through numerous management changes and radical programming reforms at Radio 1. I haven't listened to his show as much as I should in recent years - yet I still find it hard to believe that I will never hear another festive fifty or Peel session. Quite simply, there has never been another broadcaster of his dedication, enthusiasm and talent. A number of crucial bands may never have achieved critical and commercial success were it not for the early exposure he offered them. He never patronised his audience, fostered diversity (something increasingly rare in today's formatted radio world) and was a consummately relaxed and skilful presenter. RIP...
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