Saturday 12/8/24
For a single set--albeit a voluminous set--of Christmas music, the best may very well be Deutsche Grammophon's five-disc 100 Christmas Masterworks. I shared this set with my nephew and nieces this year, saying to my sister, "Play some of this for them!" If I can fit in with all of the work and unpleasantness I must attend to this weekend, I'll get out to BU's Marsh Chapel Sunday morning for their annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, examples from which are in the DG box. Will be at Boston Baroque's Messiah Sunday at Jordan Hall, and this Handel oratorio is naturally well-represented as well. As I said in an op-ed once: the concluding Amen chorus is the best part.
It's tough to go wrong with a good wassail.
How would this have been for the Christmas season? You were a music buff and jazz lover who lived in Chicago, and on December 22 and 23 1965 you went to the Plugged Nickel nightclub to hear all eight sets played by Miles Davis and his Second Great Quintet. The year had been difficult for Davis who'd been in and out of the hospital. He had hip surgery, he broke his leg, and finally he had to have a plastic hip joint put in.
The 1965 Plugged Nickel material represents to me what may be the finest music of Davis's career, which I'll be writing about in a chapter of an upcoming book. The band had been playing again after some downtime, and they were tight but venturesome, taking new approaches to previously familiar tunes that were now unrecognizable to some listeners. Drummer Tony Williams was perhaps the leading driving agent.
All of the sets have been released in what is some of the best sound and you-are-in-the-room ambiance of any live jazz recording. You can close your eyes and listen such that when you're done, it's not hard to imagine putting on your coat and heading back outside into the Chicago night. Happy Christmas. I would have liked to walk around thinking about what I'd just heard, looking at the lights, seeing the revelers.
I think about Eric Dolphy at this time of year, too, and the Christmas season--or basically two days of that season he had in 1961. He takes part in Gunther Schuller and Jim Hall's session for the third stream album Jazz Abstractions around December 20. On December 21, he cuts his own Far Cry with Booker Little, and on that very same day he plays on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz.
The mindset was one of I'll go here and do this, then here and do that, and next I'll get myself here and do this, of challenging one's self. People talk about John Coltrane's musical journey, but I think often about Dolphy's questing spirit. There's a little-known Velvet Underground song called "Follow the Leader," and you could apply the idea to Dolphy.
He's the real star of early 1960s jazz experimentation, the pushing outward, if you will. A kind of one-man braintrust for where to go next. A number of people who got more credit looked to Dolphy for their subsequent moves. Relied on him, utilized his talents.
I think Dolphy inspired Coltrane (in his thinking) to a greater degree than anyone and Coltrane wouldn't have tried a lot of what he tried to do had he not been with Dolphy so much in 1961. Dolphy was with Coltrane and his band in Europe right up into that very same month of December 1961, and of course there was the run from the Village Vanguard in November, which will also be the subject of a chapter of that music book I mentioned, which is about extended residencies that changed American musical history. And more sometimes.
I like how Free Jazz is a kind of battle of the bands which occurs at the same time.
Buddy Rich was a show-stopping drummer--which isn't necessarily a good thing--to such a degree that the wow-factor overrode his music, which was more like a host for that wowing commodity. The most cohesive music of his career was made in a small group setting with Art Tatum. That material holds up much better than the showmanship stuff, as impressive as it is technically.
An interesting piece would be looking at two New Year's Eve gigs on the same night going down simultaneously, one in New York, the other in Boston, closing out the 1960s: This would be Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East and the Grateful Dead at the Ark respectively. The Dead's complete 1969 Boston gigs would make for an excellent box set.
There are many points in the opening, extended salvo of Green Day's American Idiot when it seems the ideal time for the singer to shout, in-between lines of lyrics, "Get those fucking hands in the air!" as if this material was written with an eye towards doing so.
The Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket" and "Train in Vain" have stellar guitar riffs in the manner of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee." That is, the riffs don't register as pronounced riffs. That's rare. Normally we lock on a guitar riff, or at least it stands out to us.
The Clash didn't go the falsetto route very often, but it's like Mick Jones can't help himself at 1:56 of "Train in Vain" on the word "do" which becomes "do hoo hoo."
As for "Lost in the Supermarket": The line "I wasn't born so much as I fell out" is punk's version of the opening of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, if we're calling this punk, or if you want to call it rock, or pop.
The Beatles' "I'll Be on My Way"--the only Lennon/McCartney original for which we have a BBC recording and nothing else--is often seen as twee; after all, the song features a moon/June rhyme. But it also includes the line, "Don't hide the tears that don't show," which presages "The movement you need is on your shoulder" from "Hey Jude" five years later.
Macaronic Christmas carols are like gifts that have been unwrapped and their contents revealed in that moment when they switch to a different language.
The Grateful Dead doing "Run Rudolph Run" in December 1971: Delightful. Our leading interpreters of Chuck Berry. At their Ann Arbor concert on December 15, 1971, you would have heard them perform this holiday classic along with "Dark Star." Isn't that something? Here's this fun, witty Chuck Berry Christmas number, and here's the song about what? Teleology? The 12/15 "Dark Star" is the last of 1971, actually--the Dead would only play it one more time before the European dates in spring 1972, and what a chapter that would prove for perhaps the ultimate vehicle of musical improvisation.
Put another way: There's but a single "Dark Star" performance between this one and the version played at Wembley on April 8, 1972 on the second night of the European tour. I find that startling and telling. It was like, "We're not going to do this for a while, but when we return to it, we will be commencing a new era in the history of this song and improvised musical art." This had to have been intentional to some degree. There was design and reason behind that gap and what they were doing or thinking during it.
Likely mentioned in these pages at an earlier point, but Gene Autry's The Complete Columbia Christmas Recordings would be a staple for me back up in Rockport if I am able to return there. An album to have on often at this time of year as one goes about the inside portion of a happy day.
The deluxe edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of my favorite albums of any kind. To hear how it all came together with all of the outtakes. That minor key Peanuts melancholia that nonetheless uplifts you. I know that certain timeless music is not more timeless by definition than other examples, but still, "Christmas Time Is Here" has that ring to it, doesn't it?
Going to at least pitch a piece probably in the next day or two on Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". What a massive voice--a voice to ring out through a forest of Christmas trees. Singers have these cut loose moments where they really go for it. John Lennon was good at that--it was something he tended to do on rhythm and blues covers. Think of the close of the Beatles' 1963 BBC version of Little Eva's "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" and that same year's cover of Arthur Alexander's "Soldier of Love" (arguably their two best covers). Love explodes through this song. You have Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, but Love's Wall of Voice, if you will, is more powerful still. This is the big moment from her. You wish there were more, but this is the stand-alone performance.
I saw that the JazzTimes archive was back up online (though it omits the contents of the last issue with my Wes Montgomery feature), which I noticed when I was on Instagram recently and saw that the Charlie Parker account had shared a feature I'd written on Parker's live radio version of "White Christmas." His airshots from the Royal Roost comprise a vital part of his discography. As a whole, the surviving recordings of live jazz on the radio make for an invaluable vein of music, one too little mined.
I have to decide whether or not to include the Miles Davis piece I wrote on Kind of Blue this summer--the longer one, not the op-ed--in The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Essential Power and Artistry. Major artists like Davis have several writings about them throughout the book. The thinking with the book is to have a work of literature that is also about jazz and and is the most illuminating book about jazz for both the person whose life is jazz and the person who has not yet listened to jazz and everyone in between. No reader left behind and every reader rewarded.
Whitney Balliett published a hefty book of his jazz writing, and it's fine--but more like dispatches from a given time and which requires a preexisting interest in jazz--but I wanted something that goes further and is art itself and as a life experience in the partaking of that art. The best writing has to be more than writing, as we've discussed. I circle back to an editor at JazzTimes' pithy description of my jazz writing: Art about art. He was on to something regarding what I am up to.
Mozart's letters are among the most felicitous written by any composer, which is what you'd expect from Mozart in his prose were you to extrapolate the spirit of his music. (There's a particularly nice volume devoted to correspondence with his family.) Mozart had a light touch without actually being light. Or not lightweight, anyway. His music could dance like no other composer's.
In the past, I've said that Charlie Parker is the Mozart of jazz musicians. People will just say things and they think if they reference some "famous" composer, that's all they have to do. For instance, Beethoven will be the only name most people know when it comes to classical music composers, so if they want to praise someone of a more recent vintage as super duper significant--because this is how simple and uneducated most people are--they'll say they're the Beethoven of their era or whatever.
It doesn't work like that. You actually have to know stuff. Things need to make sense and track all the way through. But we are not like this, because hardly anyone knows anything, so someone else, who also only knows Beethoven, responds, "FACTS" to this comparison that isn't a real comparison--likening--or something similarly stupid.
There is nothing I say--by which I mean nothing--that has not been thought through and vetted, top to bottom. Both Mozart and Parker had a highly developed sense of play, too. They made playfulness an art form. Part of their art. Play is supremely important in life. I am not talking about "play" as in playing music. I mean having a sense of play, understanding the value of playing, finding ways to play--like a child does--and continuing to play. It's something that we must do even in darkest times. When we lose this sense of play, we lose a vital road which we need. You have to be able to take that road. There's no alternate route to get to the spot that play takes us to.
I found and downloaded these rare recordings of Jerry Lee Lewis at a place called the Shamrock Club in New Jersey from 1962. This is a very different Lewis than the one who would make a come back of sorts in 1964. Lewis made some of the best music of his life in 1964; it's one thing to have a classic live album, another to put out two in the same year. He really dialed up the Killer persona for 1964. The larger-than-life wild music man thing. There's a complete TV performance he gave in England from that year and it may be the most unhinged I've ever seen a rock and roller on the stage. It's great, don't get me wrong. But madness. He wasn't this way in 1962, though, as evidenced by these surviving audience tapes. A chiller Killer.
He was also excellent on BBC radio in 1964 with old Beatles chum, Brian Matthew. You feel like you're in good hands whenever you hear Matthew's voice on the radio. Or you did, I imagine. And now, too, when we listen to recordings made from back then for "Auntie Beeb." I've spoken about this on the radio myself, but Lewis's own version of "White Christmas" for Top Gear is handled as only Lewis could. He bridged styles such that a given song could be part this, part that, and so forth, but wholly Jerry Lee.
He had an interesting relationship with the Christmas season. You have this BBC performance, and also the December 4, 1956 Million Dollar Quartet session I wrote about for Rolling Stone (print only) which wasn't so much a session as a gathering with the tapes rolling, and that Lewis tried to turn into a competition between himself and Elvis at points. Christmas is all around the edges of that gathering--Christmas is a big reason why it even happened. The downtime of the season, the catching up with the people--and the places, too--of one's past.
Keeping with the date of December 4: Whenever I think about the Who's 1973 Philadelphia show from that day, I also think how silly it is that it hasn't been officially released. You have this all-time type of live album, in perfect sound, with explosive performances from what may be the band's best album in Quadrophenia--selections from which it was a challenge to get right on the stage--and an in-concert juggernaut in its prime, and you don't put it out? Then again, look how long it took before the band--and/or their label--allowed the December 1971 San Francisco tape to officially surface.
The Philly recording was a fairly early bootleg, both on vinyl and CD. Many Who fans know it as Tales from the Who, which had a memorable cover riffing on Tales from the Crypt. The show was not complete on bootleg, given that it was sourced from a radio broadcast (speaking of live music on the radio). You can find the complete performance though by applying a little internet elbow grease and searching well. The FM source omitted "Love Reign O'er Me" and edited out some of the language. The full recording has some patches from an audience tape. You can even find a recording with the vocals from Townshend and Entwistle boosted in an attempt to correct the lower volume levels of their microphones. Keith Moon is outstanding throughout.
Speaking of macaronic Christmas music: "Boar's Head Carol" is a favorite of mine. It dates to the fifteenth century and is about the serving of a boar's head during a Yuletide feast. Think of one with an apple in its mouth. A sumptuous feast with friends gathered and much hearty good cheer, flagons filled to the brim with ale. On a Grateful Dead-related note: St. Stephen was often depicted in Swedish art as bringing a boar's head to a gathering on his feast day of December 26. In addition to their song "St. Stephen," the Dead had a rather significant St. Stephen's Day in 1969 when they played their first (unplanned) acoustic set which would be a huge deal for them with what was to follow, what I regard as a part of the biggest about-face in the history of American music.
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