Thursday 7 May 2020

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 5 Symphonies No 40 and No 41 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

With this entry of my ten albums, and I must admit this is a bit of a rule-breaker (if there are any rules): I don’t know what the album was, and all I know of it is that it had Mozarts’ Symphony No 40 on one side and his Symphony No 41 on the other. There will certainly have been several vinyl LPs with featuring both of these symphonies, and there are certainly many CDs featuring them and others.

I had my copy of an album with both symphonies in my last year at school (1967/68), but yet again I can’t remember why or when I bought it. And I can’t even remember why I bought this particular one.

Like all teenagers I listened to Radio 1 etc and I can’t remember when I first consciously listened to classical music (or ‘serious music’ as some chose to call it, telling us more about themselves than about music).

My mother liked classical music a lot, but I can’t remember many instances of her playing records (except I remember her once playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet when I was about seven or eight.) My father never listened to music, ever. (There is a quotation, variously attributed to Ulysses S Grant, Abraham Lincoln and W S Gilbert, but no one knows where it originated, that ‘he knew only two tunes: Yankee Doodle Dandy and all the tunes that weren’t Yankee Doodle Dandy’. That was my dear old dad. If he were tone deaf I wouldn’t be at all surprised.)

I love all kinds of music and make no distinction between the different kinds. At the end of the day music is just sound, organised and arranged and produced in a million different ways. It can be complex or not, it can be ‘sophisticated’ or not. And there is some I am not as much attracted to as other, but I refuse to accept, for example, that ‘jazz isn’t really as good as classical music’ which just for sheer nonsense — which jazz? which classical music? — is painful, quite apart from the snobbery intrinsic in that statement.

Some music is more complex than other music — Louie, Louie by The Kingsmen compared with a late Beethoven quartet — but it is certainly not ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Is a boiled egg ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than blanquette de veau served with green beans and pommes lyonnaise? Of course not.

Those two symphonies were pretty much the first two pieces of classical music I heard and got to know and — if this doesn’t sound too fey — got to love. In my last year at school I had one of the ‘sleeping studies’, a sparse 6ft by 10ft cell (small but, ah, it was home) where I played those two symphonies over and over again and over again on my Dansette, to the point where, as I said about Aja, that you know a piece so well you anticipate with pleasure what’s coming next and when it comes the pleasure is all the greater.

To adapt the phrase, ‘familiarity breeds content’. When one finished, I played the other. When that finished I played the first again.

The very first piece of classical music I heard, and then only the first few bars, was Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Don Ameche had a ‘pop concert’ on AFN (American Forces Radio) at 3pm, and I used to listen to it every afternoon doing my homework. This was in Berlin where school was six days a week from 8.30am to 1pm. But I never got to hear the whole concerto until many years later. And to this day I cannot abide any snobbery about Tchaikovsky as does exist. (There is a great Frasier joke between Niles and Frasier, when Frasier reminds Niles that he once enjoyed listening to Tchiakovsky: ‘Good Lord,’ says Niles, ‘was I really once that young?’)

Those two Mozart symphonies sparked my interest in classical music (which I’m pretty sure would have developed anyway, whether through these two pieces or others) and it has expanded ever since.

Sadly, I know very little about music itself and would love to know far more. I can think up simple — very simple — tunes and, courtesy of Cubase, arrange them. But that is less than zilch compared to what went on in the minds of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Debussy, Ravel blah blah and how they could ‘visualise’ whole pieces (I think — subs please check).

I don’t have a favourite of these two symphonies, but here I’m posting No 41 (known as the Jupiter, although I can’t tell you why) because it was Mozart’s last. The slow second movement is exquisite (it really is, just listen to it and don’t think less of me for daring to be so Radio 3 in public), and the last movement quite extraordinary, grand and at once wistful but at the same time joyful. Again, if you listen to it you might know what I mean.

I have not idea where that vinyl album ended up, but when I came to get a CD of it to add to my then iPod I understood what it folk mean when they distinguish between performances.

I went on Amazon and chose, pretty much at random, a CD with both symphonies on them. But when I played the opening of No 40, I was oddly disappointed. I used to like this? Then I realised what the trouble was: as played on that CD the first movement was (for my tastes at least) far, far too slow and it dragged horribly.

So I bought another version, and that was far more satisfactory and is the one I listen to these days. You learn a little every day. (If you find that interesting, there’s a great Radio 3 programme on Saturday mornings called Building A Library where different recordings of a piece are examined and analysed, and it really is an ear-opener.)

So it really is worth checking out different versions of pieces by different bands and conductors. Now go on You Tube and listen to both symphonies. If you are not familiar with them you won’t regret it, I promise.



Wednesday 6 May 2020

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 4 Tutu by Miles Davis

I understand there are parts of middle-class, pretentious Britain where it is de rigueur to ‘just love’ Miles Davis, even if you know nothing about jazz and have heard even less. Miles Davis is the jazzer everyone has heard of and feels they should love (and it helps that he has an impeccably middle-class name, Miles — could anyone in Alderley Edge or Esher really warm to Kev Davis?)

Other possible candidates favoured by jazz lovers who never actually listen to jazz (though ‘Miles’ is always streets ahead) are possibly John Coltrane and Charlie Parker (because they’ve seen the Clint Eastwood film. Oh, and if they start referring to Parker as ‘Bird’ move on just as fast as you can).

As for Miles Davis, who doesn’t ‘just love Miles’? Well, I like some, if not most, of the music I have heard (and I most certainly haven’t heard it all). But he doesn’t always get a pass from me. What makes Miles Davis interesting (apart from the music we like) is that he always moved on (like Dylan) and pleased no one but himself (like Dylan). And that didn’t always go down well or, as far as I’m concerned, have happy results.

He was said to have been a difficult character, but I don’t blame him: he was a very gifted and very proud man who just happened to have been born black. And he did not just resent, but hated, how he, as a black man, and other blacks were treated in America.

The real irony of that is — as though there were only one irony — if it weren’t for the descendants of the blacks the country imported and enslaved for centuries, America wouldn’t have a single bloody note of jazz music. It’s young folk would be jigging about to whatever bastardisation of German oompah-pah music and Scandinavian folk songs had evolved in cosy snow-bound taverns. Certainly such music might have been catchy, but I really wouldn’t bank on it. And exactly what drug would they have taken? Hot chocolate? Lemonade (pepped up with a little extra sugar)?

Davis took nothing lying down, so when he objected and stood up for himself, he was ‘being difficult’. (Actually, he could also be a bit of a bugger with fellow black musician but . . .). And he had ideas which he put into action, only to move on when the rest of the jazz herd caught up. That didn’t always make him popular.

The Miles Davis music which does less for me than a bad wank is on Bitches Brew, and other music he produced at the time. He had always listened to all kinds of contemporary music, not just jazz, and decided on an early experiment in what became known as ‘jazz-rock fusion’. And, to my mind it didn’t come off.

Bitches Brew was an album cobbled together from several recorded jam sessions and that’s all it sounds like. To my ears it’s a mess and not at all interesting. Not being a gifted guitar player, I’ve been part of too many loose and noisy jam sessions (usually jamming against recordings of myself) and its rarely of interest to anyone except those who took part and are tone deaf to boot.

Bitches Brew didn’t please the critics and outraged the purists, who were delighted to start another futile round of But Is It Jazz? To that the only sane answer is: who cares?

So fast forward to today’s featured album, Tutu, which for me is the Good Twin to Bitches Brew Evil Twin: they have a few things in common, not least trying something different, but not much else. For one thing, unlike Bitches Brew, Tutu is immensely engaging and interesting. Like Steely Dan’s Aja, there always seems something new and interesting to spot on each track you hear.

Tutu also outraged the purists (who like to be outraged at least twice a week and were again delighted with another round of Is It Jazz?) and they were particularly irritated that much of the drumming was programmed and the prominence of synthesisers used in producing the music. They said it as just a poor imitation of the electronic music increasingly being produced at the time.

Apparently Tutu started life as an intended collaboration with Prince, but that came to nothing, and Davis turned to New York bassist and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller who not only played but programmed and produced the album.

They made a follow-up album, Amanda, which is just as good, but I heard Tutu first and its tracks stick in my mind most. Ever suddenly out of the blue remember a melody or tune you decide you want to hear again there and then? Well, for me Tutu is full of them.

I just love it, and that it’s by ‘Miles’ should do my middle-class credentials a much-needed power of good (as they have been flagging a little of late).

The track you can hear is Don’t Lose Your Mind. They’re all as good as each other, but this one always sticks with me just that little bit more, mainly because in my young anguished years (©All teens everywhere) it was something I feared might be happening to me. I don’t suppose the cannabis and LSD helped much.



Monday 4 May 2020

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 3 Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan

In 1968 when I was released from boarding school, I somehow scraped into university. It’s wondrous what two A-level poor Es (in chemistry and biology) and an — in many ways a spurious — A (in German) can achieve, though not quite as wondrous as I once thought: after not even finding a place through the clearing system, I heard somewhere it was worth simply writing to universities asking for a place.

I did just that and almost by return was offered three places (by Liverpool, Bradford and Dundee) with no questions asked, and an interview (Kings College, London, which predictably my 18-year-old self screwed up) who were a little more circumspect. It helped that unfilled places didn’t earn universities government money, so to get the full whack of public gelt all places had to be and were filled, one by me. I accepted Dundee’s offer merely because it was the first to arrive.

Nominally, I was there to study philosophy (which I did eventually, though the first year consisted of studying five subjects). Actually, I was there to — in no particular order — grow my hair as long as possible, smoke dope (which in those days was still cannabis not heroin) and lose my cherry. Did I succeed? I wonder.

Folk of my age will remember that the later years of the 1960s (the fabled ‘Sixties’ didn’t really start until 1964) did have a feel of innovation about them, especially in music, but by 1968, Bob Dylan, one of the early innovations, was already a fixture of the music scene with eight albums under his belt and — quite typically — several changes of direction.

What I like about Dylan (and Miles Davis) is that they never choose (or chose in Davis’s case) to stand still and bask in it all. They please themselves first and foremost, and move on in whatever direction they want to, and if the public comes with them, so much the better.

By 1968 Dylan the ‘folk singer’ and ‘the voice of protest/a generation’ — and, to my mind as honest as they day is long so he was never comfortable with that label and never played up to it — had ditched acoustic folk for electric guitars (which he never played at all well). Then, with Blonde On Blonde again changed direction, and soon once more with John Wesley Harding. His career then slightly went on hold until he brought out the album I am featuring today and his career took off again. That pattern has recurred again and again in his life.

Blood On The Tracks is another of those rare albums which are, in their own way and context, almost perfect. There is, though, an extraordinary bum note on one song: it’s 30 seconds into Meet Me In The Morning, and inexplicably it was left it. I can’t for the life of me think it wasn’t noticed at the time if I noticed it, but as this was still late 1974, recording was all on tape, correcting such mistakes was not easy and Dylan (who acted as his own producer) might have thought ‘what the hell’. Who knows? Who cares?

I can’t for the life of me remember how or when I first heard Blood On The Tracks or when I bought it, but I did buy it and have loved it ever since.

There is something obscurely different about this album, and while ‘researching’ on the net for this short blurb, I read that just before beginning to write the songs for what became Blood On The Tracks, Dylan had been taking art lessons and says his art tutor helped him towards a ‘new understanding of time’ which are reflected in the songs. Well, I don’t quite know how, so I can’t help you out on that score, but on, for example, Tangled Up In Blue, the ‘sequence’ of what happens does stand out. Maybe that’s what he means.

The track I have chosen to highlight is not that one, though (and Tangled Up In Blue is usually the one played on the radio if one is ever played), and it has been difficult to pick one out. But I have plumped for Shelter From The Storm which is a beautiful song (Cassandra Wilson does a lovely version, and Manfred Mann’s Earthbound do a god-awful ponderous version).

Shelter From The Storm reminds me of the woman I’ve always loved but who I’ve never met and of experiences I’ve never had. Odd, but true. But then I suppose that’s what makes a good song.

Dylan might not have had the best voice (but like Ray Davies’s and Donald Fagen’s voices I love it), but here he is right on top of his game, and his voice and singing weren’t to got to pot for many more years. Yet despite of late his voice going to pot, even the past few albums are, if you like Dylan, and I do, better than a lot of what is being put out. OK, if you are into Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, you’ll be thinking ‘the hell they are’, but . . .

Incidentally, my theory about why he took so long to acknowledge and accept the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’ is that he thought being awarded that particular prize was simply ludicrous (as do I). Dylan has never made any bones about the fact that at heart he is ‘a song and dance man’, and there’s bugger all wrong with that. So why the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’? Yes, he does write great lyrics, but dragging ‘literature’ into it is more than bizarre. As a rule lyrics never hold up out of context, even the best.

The Nobel Prize, I believe, is simply another instance of ‘the Establishment’ trying their old trick of neutralising ‘the opposition’ and looking cool into the bargain. And I don’t doubt Dylan thought the same (just listen to Day Of The Locusts from New Morning, all about his discomfort about getting an honorary degree from Princeton and it’s not complimentary). But what was he to do? A hell of a quandary.

Turning it down would look terrible: ‘Dylan thinks he’s too good for Nobel Prize’ the headlines might read and who would want that. Accepting it — and he most probably didn’t want to — also went against the grain. So he bided his time and, on balance, realised accepting it was what he would have to do, like it or not.

He finally did so, but typically in his own sweet time, in a letter written some time later; and he did not attend a bunfight in Stockholm with loads of toffs of every stripe wanting in on the act. That’s why I like Dylan over and above all his music and songs and (his extraordinary gift for turning a horribly banal and corny rhyme into a telling lyric). Truly a one-off.


Sunday 3 May 2020

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 2 Aja by Steely Dan

Here is the second album of the ten I’ve been asked to nominate that stands out for me. It will come as no surprise to some of my friends: it’s a Steely Dan album, and it’s Aja.

I was a latecomer to Steely Dan because of an odd, almost inverted, snobbery I suffer from: when Steely Dan were new and all the rage in the mid-1970s, I ignored them because they were new and all the rage. I hate being part of a crowd. But a chance purchase a few years later in the Ebbw Vale, South Wales, branch of the then Forbuoys (whatever the then current chain was called) got me hooked.

This was BCD (before CDs), and like many such stores there was a ‘going cheap’ bin of goods by the counter full of LPs and cassettes they just couldn’t shift for love or money. (It’s only just occurred to me: why would a newsagent chain selling fags, sweets, paper and stationery be selling LPs and cassettes? But they were.) They were being flogged off for just 5op each — 5op! This was in 1977/8 and that 50p is now the equivalent of £2.55, but it was still remarkably cheap.

I sifted through the bin and came across a copy of Aja. I don’t even remember consciously realising it was by Steely Dan — the name doesn’t appear on the sleeve — and thinking ‘ah, Steely Dan, OK, maybe they are worth a listen’. It was the sleeve I liked. It’s a great sleeve.

I took it home over the moor between Gwent and Powys to where I lived in Crickhowell (I was a reporter on the South Wales Argus working out of the Ebbw Vale office and Crickhowell was nicer than Ebbw Vale. Still is) and played it — and played it, and played it, and played it. And then I played it a few more times.

If you know it, and you probably do, it’s one of those rare albums where the featured band hit the top every time with every song. And being Steely Dan, the melodies, orchestration, playing and lyrics are that much more complex, so that every listen seems to reveal little nuggets you somehow previously missed. Then you get to the point where you know the tune so well, you start looking forward with pleasure to ‘where that lead solo comes in’ and ‘where there’s that subtle synth in the background you can hardly hear’.

By then I already liked soul and funk a lot more than boring old on-the-beat four/four rock, and this was a further step towards my appreciation of jazz. But Aja is not jazz and it’s not rock. Some might call it jazz-rock, but even that label is a threadbare description of the music on Aja. And Steely Dan’s music was also far more successful than the many attempts of ‘jazz-rock fusion’ in the 1970s which, to me ears (of what I heard) were usually just a forced marriage of jazz and rock which, like most forced marriages, was not a happy one. Steely Dan’s music, though, was organic: it wasn’t ‘this’ or ‘that’, it was itself and unmistakeable.

On the strength of Aja, I went on to buy, in no particular order, the rest of Steely Dan’s albums, and they are all very good and I listen to them a lot and like them all, but none quite gets to me like Aja. Aja rules supreme.

I particularly liked Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s lyrics and their sardonic take on life and ‘cool’ cynicism. So when a year or so later and by now a reporter working in Newcastle I heard they were to be interviewed on Radio 1, I tuned in. Silly me. It is never pleasant to discover your gods have feet of clay.

All I heard were two smart arse, clever-clever fuckwit Noo Yorkers, being obscure, making in-jokes and generally persuading me they were prime candidates for their own cynical mockery (‘Showbiz kids making movies ’bout themselves / they don’t give a fuck about anybody else’ — well, not quite but Fagen and Becker were getting dangerously close).

But that doesn’t matter. It never matters. The music is the music is the music. Only the music matters. Would the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony be any the less glorious if you discovered he habitually picked his nose? Of course not.

So here it is the album Aja, and the track I have chosen to play is the title track, Aja. That’s not because it is any better — all the tracks are equally good — but because it is longer and the arrangement is a little more complex and shows just how Fagen and Becker took care over every last, tiny, tiny detail. Shame they came across in that radio interview as smart arse wankers.

A few years ago I finally got to see Steely Dan live at Wembley Arena and as if to remind me that they weren’t half as cool as I had thought until that radio interview, Walter Becker kicked off with that hoary old cliche ‘Hello, London! We love your fish and chips!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me a break!

A little later Fagen asked for requests and I — quite prominent in about the fourth row from the stage — shouted back ‘Play Hotel California’. Fagen, oh so cool Noo Yorker Donald Fagen, by then I’m sure a revered darling of the Noo York art scene*, was not amused. Fuckwit.

(*I hope to Christ I never become respectable.)


Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 1 A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles

As the text below (lifted from my Facebook page) tells you, one of the challenges going the rounds while everyone and her/his dog is locked down is to list ten albums which were somehow significant in your life. This was my post, plus the song I mentioned. Over the following days I shall be posting the other nine . . .

I’ve been asked by my good mate Peter Bailey to nominate ten albums (called LPs when life was still in black and white) which — not exactly changed my life, but stood out. Here they are, in no particular order.

The first is A Hard Day’s Night from The Beatles. Every generation likes to think it’s the first in everything — trying sex and drugs and in music especially (and they’re not) — but ‘Beatlemania’ was nothing new, except that The Beatles were at the centre of it and there was a new young generation.

Ten years earlier Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock had ‘shocked’ the world and caused minor mania, ten years before that it was bobbysoxers screaming for Frank Sinatra (when he still had hair), and just a few years before that it was swing music and the jitterbug. And 200 years ago it was Byron and lasses ‘swooning’, overcome by is poetry (never in private, by the way, and there was always some young chap on hand to revive and tend to them. They weren’t daft).

But I am not 90 or 80 but, - - and for me and millions the world over like me it was The Beatles, and as teen I loved them. Every song on A Hard Day’s Night hit and still hits the spot, but the one featured here, I’ll Be Back, is my favourite. It doesn’t seem to be as well-known as one or two others but there’s something wistful about it.

My love of The Beatles was so strong that I can even remember — no bullshit — my heart beating faster looking forward to the release of their then latest Revolver. But, I have to admit, after that they began to fade in my view: OK, we bought and listened to the LPs, but, for example, The White Album is testament to the illusion they now shared that everything they did was brilliant just because THEY had done it: they began to believe the bullshit. It should never have been a double album and would have been far stronger if half the songs had been cut out.

Having said that, nothing can diminish the glory (for me, at least) of With The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Help and Rubber Sole. Beatles For Sale has some classic songs, but also some also-rans, and it is obvious ‘the record company’ were working them hard, hard, hard, for money, money, money — just see how knackered they look on the album sleeve.

Of those four, though, A Hard Day’s Night comes out tops every time, and it is one of those albums which still somehow sounds fresh where others sound horribly dated.

Abbey Road? Magical Mystery Tour? Sergeant Pepper? Yes, I like them but I couldn’t love them. Maybe I was growing up, but they didn’t quite have that special zing of the early albums.