Sunday 29 May 2016

Mister Magic



Tilley the Kid and I were sitting on the back balcony during a rare sunny interlude, drinking a cup of my mint and rosemary concoction, fresh from our weedy octagonal herb garden. Since she was working on her leafy mural – an ongoing project to turn our breakfast bar into a detail of Douanier Rousseau's famous primitive painting of a jungle (a project which is beginning to take on the proportions of the Sistine Chapel) – she got to choose the music.



It was Amy Winehouse's Frank, an album that I prefer to its more celebrated successor, Back to Black, and I recognised a tune that she or a collaborator put words to. It was 'Mister Magic'. I nipped upstairs to find Grover Washington Jr.'s album of the same name, so I could play it to my girl as part of her compulsory musical education. A second airing in as many months surely qualifies an album now more than 40 years old as a 'lifer'.



During my brief tenure in a hall of residence at Exeter University, Mister Magic was one of the records of choice in the corridors of soul-power. I first heard its funky beat thumping out of Mike Doherty's king-size speakers. I knew from the way that my hips were moving to that crazy beat that I had to have it.



The second half of the '70s and a few years beyond were Grover Washington Jr.'s heyday. Many of his records, such as Feels So Good (the follow-up that also appeared in 1975), seem now to have one particular stand-out track that puts the other titles in its shade. Mister Magic may have only four, two per side, but what makes it exceptionally good is that the other three are almost as good as that wickedly insistent title track.



A tenor saxophonist from Buffalo, Washington had a beefy sound that recalls two minor luminaries of the '50s of whom I'm particularly fond: Ike Quebec and Gene 'Jug' Ammons. He found his niche on producer Creed Taylor's Kudu label, which provided him with a rock-solid in-house rhythm section whose real stars were Harvey Mason on drums and Ralph MacDonald on percussion, both of whom would feature prominently on George Benson's live double album of the era, Weekend in LA.




Like many a tenor man before and since, Washington doubled on soprano sax. And it's the soprano that's the main voice on the two opening tracks: keyboard player Bob James's atmospheric 'Earth Tones', and 'Passion Flower', a beautiful tune written by Duke Ellington's beloved collaborator, Billy 'Swee' Pea' Strayhorn. An advisory sticker might have warned me that it employs a big string section. Normally I avoid them like a pandemic, but on this occasion strings enhance rather than trivialise the delicate melody.



That strings also appear on both tracks of Side 2 only goes to show that – like the best disco numbers – a bit of saccharine in your funk is not always the bad idea it might appear. The title track, otherwise, is a fabulous bit of straight ahead blowing, propelled by Harvey Mason's knot-tight drumming and Eric Gale's choppy funked-up guitar. A horn section's insistent stabbing motif adds colour and oomph to what is arguably Washington's career highlight.



It's a difficult act to follow, but the moody 'Black Frost' makes a good stab at it. The strings on this occasion lend it an icy quality that wouldn't be amiss in one of those gritty detective thrillers of the time, like The French Connection.



The whole caboodle was recorded at Rudy van Gelder's famous studios in Hackensack, New Jersey, where the engineer-of-choice presided over countless great jazz sessions in the 1950s and 1960s – which helps place Mister Magic, I suppose, in the tradition of soul jazz and the groups led by the likes of pianist Horace Silver and alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson.



The Kudu label, however, was not to emulate Blue Note's immortality. Synonymous with the fairly short-lived era of jazz-funk, at its worst the Kudu output was subject to the kind of 'smooth jazz' clichés characteristic of Bob James's solo albums. Grover Washington was less guilty than some, but before he died prematurely of a massive heart attack, he was partly responsible for foisting Kenny Gee on vulnerable audiences everywhere.



At its best, though, Kudu helped to revitalise the career of Esther Phillips and to leave us with a legacy of albums like Mister Magic that bolstered commercial success with genuine musical substance. The label's sax star from Buffalo would end up signing with Elektra and would continue to bring out popular albums, such as Winelight.



Personally, I had lost interest in him by then and moved on to things a little less smooth. Several of his Kudu albums sit on our shelves, but it's only really Mister Magic that earns repeated airplay. I rather like what Amy Winehouse did to the song, but like even more that The Daughter seems to like the original. That's my girl, getting on the good foot.

Monday 23 May 2016

Blow By Blow



While the wife's away, yer man will play... So I thought I'd induct my daughter into the splendours and wonders of This Is Spinal Tap. After all, the kid's got a very acerbic sense of humour and a fine line in the art of taking the piss. All these years of living in an alien culture have left their mark.



I even gave her a little bit of a trailer to set the scene and whet the appetite. A few minutes of a documentary about the 'rockumentary' offered up some celebrity talking heads: Martin Freeman, Rob Bryden, Ricky Gervais and others, all telling of the number of times they've seen the film – and why.



That should have given me a strong clue. The Daughter's interest waned after about 20 minutes. All those aficionados were of course rather male. Even though it was a female friend of mine who first enthused about the film back in the mid 80s when it surfaced, I realise now that Spinal Tap must be a bit of a male thing. After all, it satirises the excesses of heavy metal and prog rock, both of which are not exclusively but certainly predominantly for 'chaps'.



Since I'd long since sold my copy of Black Sabbath's debut album and renounced underground music before it acquired its prog-rock label, I always feel sufficiently self-satisfied to wallow in the film's wicked satire. Quite simply, I find it one of the funniest films ever made. My wife and daughter don't. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would have had it.



Anyway... I mention this because on the cover of Blow By Blow album, Jeff Beck strikes a pose that is pure Nigel Tufnell, 'Tap's' dippy lead guitarist, portrayed with gormless gum-chewing genius by Christopher Guest. Right down to the shoulder-length 'mop-top' one associates with Keith Richards of that era. I should say of course that Nigel Tufnell strikes a pose that is pure Jeff Beck. Maybe Christopher Guest has a copy of the album in his collection.




If he has, it will be present tense rather than past, because this is not the sort of album that you get rid of. It was made in 1975, but has stood the test of time – more so perhaps than Beck's own brief dalliance with heavy metal, when he teamed up with two members of Vanilla Fudge to form the powerhouse trio, Beck Bogart and Appice.



My copy of The Rolling Stone Record Guide gives the album a slightly begrudging four stars, but more surprisingly it alludes to Beck's 'infamous ego'. Obviously I don't know the man personally, but my impression of Jeff Beck has always been of someone down to earth, content to spend his time playing music or tinkering with car engines, someone who avoided the kind of rock-star clichés to which his fellow Yardbirds guitar heroes, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, were given in their heyday.



Talking of The Yardbirds, the first time I encountered Beck was probably in Antonioni's film, Blow Up, with its scene in a swinging London club where The Yardbirds were on stage performing 'Stroll On'. Beck was there, as was Page, playing guitar. Many, many years later, I would pick up a DVD in a sale of Jeff Beck's quartet performing live at Ronnie Scott's: one of the most incendiary live performances I've ever witnessed either in concert or on a screen.



In between came Blow By Blow. It's difficult to know what to describe it as, since there are elements of rock, funk, jazz and even a couple of orchestrated passages by that gentleman producer-of-choice, George Martin. Coming as it does a few years after his vocal group with Rod Stewart, the only thing that you can really say for sure is that it's an instrumental album.



Another thing about Beck's so-called 'infamous ego' is that this album is far from a mere vehicle for his guitar heroics. He made it with the British keyboards player, Max Middleton, who formed a jazz-funk group called Hummingbird and who would go on to work with the likes of Kate Bush, Mick Taylor and John Martyn. The two soloists are supported by a splendid Anglo-Caribbean rhythm section of Phil Chen on bass and Richard Bailey on drums.



At times – on the funky opener, 'You Know What I Mean', or the propulsive 'Freeway Jam' and 'Constipated Duck' – the band sounds a little like a stripped-down Mahavishnu Orchestra or the UK's answer to The Crusaders. At other times – on the closing 'Diamond Dust' (enhanced rather than sugared by George Martin's tasteful string arrangement) and the beautiful version of Stevie Wonder's 'Cause We've Ended as Lovers' – Beck's lovely weeping guitar sound recalls Carlos Santana at his most lyrical.



Side 2, in fact, opens with two consecutive numbers by Mr. Wonder. Whether the second, 'Thelonius', is or is not some kind of misspelt tribute to Thelonious Monk, the band pulls it off with enough aplomb to suggest that they could happily back the Motown star himself. The track even features a little bit of vocoder a year before Peter Frampton came alive and gave the device a good or bad name, according to your musical taste.



The second track, a very tasteful rendition of Lennon and MacCartney's 'She's A Woman', also throws in a little vocoder for the chorus. But I suppose, if there's any one track for which this album is celebrated, it's probably the furious 'Scatterbrain'. Richard Bailey's superb drumming chases Jeff and the band towards the first side's frantic finale, with Beck playing some lightning fast choppy guitar in the manner of the Mahavishnu himself, John McLaughlin.



For all the occasional guitar pyrotechnics, it is very much a group album. In an era when jazz-funk was very much in vogue, the band delivers in spades what many higher-profile outfits of the time failed to do convincingly. When you listen to it now, there are remarkably few hackneyed clichés to be heard. It still sounds fresh and very, very assured.



Jeff Beck has always seemed to me a regular down-home decent cove. Like many a guitar hero, he no doubt played with a lot of volume. But his technique was and is so agile and so apparently effortless, that – unlike Nigel Tufnell – he would never have needed an amplifier that went up to 11. And with records like this on his cv, nor would he ever have ended up in a 'chapeau shop'.

Sunday 8 May 2016

Mingus Ah Um



My graduation from Fabulous magazine to the Melody Maker marked a transition from the Rolling Stones to the wonderful world of 'progressive music' – or prog rock as we now prefer to call it. I took my music a little more seriously and, being an anally-retentive teenager, would read my weekly music journal from cover to cover.



Towards the back cover of the Melody Maker, not far from the small ads, came the jazz page. It was edited by an older looking guy in black beret and glasses called Max Jones. I subsequently learnt that he was the first jazz musician to become a professional journalist. I didn't know many of the names that appeared in his column, but I noted how the name 'Mingus' would appear on a regular basis.



Later on, I gave up the venerable Melody Maker for the more upstart New Musical Express, which seemed to be staffed by younger journalists more interested in the younger music that appealed to me. Although I didn't forget the name Charles Mingus, it was quite a bit further down the road before I took the chance to gauge what Max Jones was on about.




I had imagined someone whose music would be as intimidating as his bear-like frame – and his overweening personality. Mingus was a difficult individual, as befitting a creative genius. It seems that genius always demands a price to pay and it was his several wives and his faithful sidemen – and sometimes his audiences – who had to pay the lion's share. He was the band leader and exacting composer who wanted things done exactly his way.



Built like a human version of the double bass he played, often with surprising delicacy and finesse, he wasn't the kind of person you'd argue with. There were stories about eruptions and fist-fights on stage. Notoriously, he took a swing at his trombonist Jimmy Knepper during rehearsals, broke his tooth and permanently damaged his embouchure. It's a measure, though, of how much leeway genius is granted that Knepper returned to the fold right at the end of Mingus's short life and continued to play for Mingus Dynasty, a band dedicated to the promulgation of their dead leader's compositions.



So it was with a little trepidation that I bought Mingus Ah Um when it came up in a HMV sale. I didn't even know how you were supposed to pronounce it. I still tend to refer to it literally as aaah ummm, even though it probably signifies the sound of a throat clearance. But then Mingus liked to tease his audience in this way. It was the music that mattered, not so much the title – which probably accounts for things like 'Orange was the colour of her dress and then blue silk' and 'The shoes of the fishermen's wife are some jiveass slippers' (or 'Slippers', as it tends understandably to be abbreviated to).



But there was little to worry about. Mingus Ah Um was made in the annus mirabilis of 1959, the same year that witnessed Kind of Blue, and it shares the latter's 3M stamp of approval: memorable melodic music. Actually, 4M, if one adds the adjective 'marvellous'. It was made by an eight-piece band, hand-picked graduates of Mingus's 'university', the Jazz Workshop (or 'sweatshop', as it was sometimes dubbed). With a tenor, two altos and two trombones, the collective sounded – on numbers like the heavily gospel-influenced opener, 'Better Git it in Your Soul' – like a feisty little big band.



If the little big sound would become a hallmark of Mingus's music over the years, so did the contrast between the rumbustious opener and the exquisite track that followed. 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' was Mingus's elegy for Lester Young, the Prez: a beautiful number that inspired many versions, including those by Jeff Beck and Joni Mitchell, who added lyrics on her tribute album, Mingus. Typically, it's followed by a short sharp musical shock: the brilliant 'Boogie Stop Shuffle', which would have made fine incidental music for a Bullitt-style car chase or a French nouvelle vague heist film.



Shade and colour characterise the man's music. The frenetic 'Boogie Stop Shuffle' is followed by the gorgeous, melancholic 'Self-Portrait in Three Colors' – every bit as exquisite in its way as 'Pork Pie Hat' and arguably more so, given its under-familiarity. The final track on the first side, 'Open Letter to Duke', makes it clear just how important the influence of Duke Ellington was on his music. These are, above all, compositions. There are solos at times, but the music never mirrors the clichéd jazz format of: statement of theme, solo improvisations around a theme, and re-statement of theme.



Four tracks grace Side 2. The opening 'Bird Calls' is a three-minute belter, presumably written with Charlie Parker in mind, that might just briefly set a listener's teeth on edge who wasn't attuned to the way of jazz. 'Fables of Faubus' is another of Mingus's immortal standards: a brilliantly restrained product of the man's lifelong frustration and anger with the inequities of society. In this case, his ire was channelled towards the segregationist governor of Alabama, Orval E. Faubus. The 'E' presumably didn't stand for the education and eloquence of Mingus's piece.




The overtly down-home bluesy 'Pussy Cat Dues' echoes the minor-key sound of 'Faubus' and, as with the opening track, you keep expecting a Pentecostal congregation to put their hands together and get seriously upset. Among the ensemble playing, there's a brief but emphatic solo by another longstanding sideman, Booker Ervin, whose name always sounds suitably ministerial.



The rollicking final track harks back to the cradle of jazz itself, the unique musical melting pot of New Orleans. 'Jelly Roll' is Mingus's jaunty tribute to the world of bordellos and marching bands and the rolling piano music of Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton. It's a lovely upbeat way to end a jazz masterpiece.



There's a photo of its composer on the back of my copy looking genial and happy. I would imagine that Mingus Ah Um appeased the devilish little perfectionist that nagged away inside his soul. Perhaps the 4M standard should be re-phrased as marvellous muscular melodic music. Mingus's bands always consistently punched above their weight and, of all his many great albums, Ah Um is the one that consistently delivers blow after knock-out blow.

Sunday 1 May 2016

Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus



I've always liked Spirit. Just before my 18th birthday, I dropped a very strong hint to my younger brother – who was 13 at the time and not yet a waiter with money from tips to spare – that I'd welcome Spirit's Clear to mark the occasion. He duly obliged. It was – and is – a very good album, but I'd already bought myself the cream of the crop two years earlier. So Twelve Dreams retains a special place, not least because it is, almost undeniably, their best.



They always struck me as one of the most interesting of West Coast rock acts. For one thing, their drummer Ed Cassidy was older and completely bald, at a time when the other four members of the band – like just about everyone else who was young at heart then – all sported manes of hair. This was a time, remember, before Duncan Goodhew, our clean-shaven go-faster Olympic swimmer; a time when the black population seemed universally to sport Afros the size of privet hedges; a time when baldness was fodder for Benny Hill's knockabout 'humour'.




Ed Cassidy, who lived four score years and nine, was guitarist Randy California's stepfather, which was also a bit peculiar. He tended to dress all in black when everyone else was in floral shirts and kaftans. And he was a jazz drummer who had served his time with the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Roland Kirk before going on to found the semi-legendary Rising Suns with Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal.



So Ed Cassidy was a little weird. And Spirit were a little weird. They hailed from LA, with its strong jazz heritage, and later I would come to realise that it was probably precisely this that appealed to me and made the band more interesting than 'purer' West Coast acts from upstate in San Francisco.



Ah, Frisco... I've always had a soft spot for 'The Airplane', whose Grace Slick was one of the gutsiest female vocalists ever to front a male band, but I steered clear of Grateful Dead lest becoming a 'Dead-Head' opened up a Pandora's box. Janis Joplin was too ragged and uneven, I never got Moby Grape, and Steve Miller would reach me later. For a time, I had Quicksilver Messenger Service's 'Happy Trails' and would spend many a happy hour playing along on a tennis racquet to Gary Duncan's epic guitar solo on their rambling version of Bo Diddley's 'Mona'. And, sigh, despite their beautiful artwork, I would end up selling both my albums by It's A Beautiful Day.



I guess Spirit's LA roots made them tougher and earthier. For all the jazzy undertones, there were a lot of urban hard rock overtones. In Belfast, I would go to concerts at the nearby Queen's University students' union building and a local student band would often ply their trade as a warm-up act. They didn't have a lot going for them, but I was taken with a rocky number called 'Fresh Garbage', which hailed, I discovered, from Spirit's eponymous debut album.



There's no garbage at all on Dr. Sardonicus, but it's a weird mélange of styles. This, their fourth album, came out in 1970 and it's cover and interior art work suggested an LSD trip in a hall of mirrors. Ed Cassidy's face and pate are painted to suggest some sinister not-quite-child-friendly villain from TV's Batman. Randy California sports a black turban ornamented with a miniature version of his step-pop's painted head, and all is, like, wild and freaky, man.



But there is very little lysergic self-indulgence. Apart from keyboard player John Locke's glorious 'Space Child', which opens Side 2 and sounds like a piano jazz trio fed through a Moog synthesiser, the song-writing is shared between rhythm guitarist, Jay Ferguson, who would soon take bassist Mark Andes with him to form JoJo Gunne, and lead guitarist, Randy California, who once played in the same band as a very young Jimi Hendrix.



This is an album of genuine songs. Roughly half are Ferguson's, while the other half are California's. The former's tend to have a slightly raunchier and more commercial leaning, as typified by the splendid 'Mr. Skin', which was featured on the CBS sampler, The Rock Buster. 'Mr. Skin' was the band's nickname for their rock-solid shaven-headed drummer, who apparently raises his head 'in a touchy situation' and makes his bed 'in the heart of the nation', able to 'bring you pain' and 'bring you sudden pleasure'.



California's songs are a little more ecological and introspective. They range from the more gentle and harmonious 'Nature's Way' and 'Life Has Just Begun', which both suggest fellow LA denizens, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, to the pure rock 'n' roll of 'Morning Will Come', with a horn arrangement in which Southside Johnny & the Asbury Dukes would later specialise.



California's electric guitar is very electric and there's much flashing between the speakers designed, perhaps, to impress teenagers in Northern Ireland. On the other hand, some of the vocal harmonies are Beach-Boy-beautiful and may have been an influence on Eagles-to-come. A song like California's brief but lovely 'Why Can't I Be Free' would not sound amiss on the second side of Abbey Road.



So it's a strange brew of spaced-out Zappatic jazz-rock, CSN&Y harmony rock and the kind of raunchy rock that reputedly impressed and even influenced Led Zeppelin.

(Only Sherlock Holmes could have resolved the mystery of who really wrote the guitar intro to 'Stairway to Heaven'.) Dr. Sardonicus marked both the zenith and the end of Spirit Mark 1. Spirit Marks 2, 3 etc. would soldier on regardless without Andes and Ferguson, but they would never really produce anything that matched the vinyl footprint of these twelve beguiling little dreams from the urban west coast.