Duke Ellington - The Reprise Studio Recordings (Mosaic, 1999)

I came in to jazz rather late. Unless my memory is failing me, it was some time earlier in this decade that I stumbled on 'Kind of Blue' and thought about giving it a go. I loved it. Sublime, indulgent, soothing and not at all like the kind of 'chill out' crap that everyone in the UK was loving at the time (it has John Coltrane on it, ffs). So, my ears were suddenly opened up to the sea of possibilities that jazz had to offer right from the kick-off this wonderful album had given me. I have to admit my new love of jazz back then became a bit Miles-heavy at first, particularly after I bought 'Bitches Brew' and my soul was sold on his jazz-rock-metal-funk-Stockhausen vibe from 1968-1975. The sounds were draining my senses like no other music I had heard since discovering The Velvet Underground. How on earth had I missed this music all this time? But looking back, I hadn't really opened up my ears at all because Miles was it and I didn't stray much beyond his canon. Sure I dallied with Coltrane a little but aside from 'A Love Supreme', 'Favourite Things' and 'Africa/Brass', he didn't float my boat despite his gilt-edged association with the man.

However, there were two jazz purchases I did make around this time that weren't Miles and have stayed with me all this time: two of Columbia's idiosyncratic 'Greatest Hits' jazz series of the late 60s - Theophilus Monk and Duke Ellington (I say idiosyncratic as the idea of jazz having chart 'hits' seems utterly ludicrous, even now). Monk's was superb, even fun (there's just something about the way he 'plays' with his piano that makes you think he's having a ball) but the Duke one was something else. Whereas most post-war jazz focuses on using the melody to go off on one, Duke was all about the melody and what he was going to do with it. Ok, so his big band sound was much easier to enjoy in comparison with Miles' 'Dark Magus' (for example) but it's on a different plateau to the trumpet man's heavy metal effort from 1974. This was jazz as purist dance music circa 1933. Shortly afterwards I got 'Black, Brown & Beige' his gospel collaboration with Mahalia Jackson from 1958. Being a bit religious myself in short doses, I found the sweeping, pounding, swaying melodies rather moving as a paean to God and the nobility of human suffering. A sublime LP I would recommend to anyone wanting to hear the man and his orchestra at full compositional tilt outside of straight dance music.

And so to 'The Complete Reprise Recordings'. After a reasonable review in MOJO a few years back, I was delighted to discover this 5 CD box set in the local library recently. As the excellent booklet accompanying the set explains, the set covers the period 1962-1965 when he was signed to the Reprise label by no less than Sinatra himself. Keen to not just have him as a recording artiste but as a director of all jazz content on label for the foreseeable future. High praise indeed for a man with, then, nearly 40 years of innovation behind him. However, his tenure there didn't quite live up to its prestigious opening billing and over these five CDs it's quite easy to see why.

Disc 1 opens with sessions for the 'Will the Big Bands Ever Come Back?', a reflective look back at his heyday of 20 or 30 years before, with particular focus on some songs he didn't get to record. Sure, it's great hearing the band blast through Cab Calloway's old party favourite 'Minnie The Moocher' or swoon through 'I'm Getting Sentimental Over You' but much of the material on this first disc sound like Duke struggling to breathe new life into the periphery of the era's repertoire. Perhaps if Duke had recorded these back in '29 or '36, they would have sounded fresh, lively and fantastic but in 1962 (and now in 2009), they just sound very samey. Not a good start for this box set.

Disc 2 does start to reveal some of the genius behind the man's compositional standing today ikn the form of the complex percussive heavy sounds of the 'Afro Bossa' album. A move away from its predecessor's nostalgia (although - ironically - it was released after this album), its delicious, funky lounge feel sounds more contemporary than a lot of what his peer group were doing then. 'Volupte', 'Limbo Jazz', 'Tigress' and 'Angu' are the standout tracks here.

Disc 3 is something I really didn't get into much with one exception. The caterwauling sounds of the lead instrument on 'Jazz Violin Session' drove me to despair. The violin (as opposed to the fiddle) really doesn't work as a lead instrument for a jazz band or group: it's too high pitched and therefore too whiny sounding (especially when the soloist goes off on one). I know many love the 'Hot Club' antics of the late Stephane Grapelli but no, it does absolutely nothing for me. And on this disc there's just too much of this dirgey nonsense. The exception? The 'Night Creature' suite. The big widescreen sound of this piece (he added strings) really gives a bombasting edge to the simmering, slithering gait of a denizen of the night. Wonderful.

Disc 4 is the 'Pop' disc. During the mid 60s Duke cut two albums ('Ellington '65' and 'Ellington '66') covering some of the big songs of the day. Despite its derring-do to try to shape the new sounds of the 60s into Ellingtonia, these albums were widely criticized at the time as being a waste of his talent. One can see where the critics are coming from with really weak versions of contemporaries like 'Blowing In The Wind, 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand', 'I Left My Heart In San Fransisco' and 'People'. Only his take on The Beatles' 'All My Loving' stands out from the 'beat' songs tried here as being a genuinely unique cover. With all the best will in the world to try and mould them into his own, they just don't suit Ellington at all. However, where he does succeed on these sessions is with the modern tracks that are most akin to his M.O.: 'Hello Dolly', 'Call Me Irresponsible', 'Fly Me To The Moon' and 'Stranger On The Shore'. The re-arrangements on these tracks are superb but (and I have to agree with contemporary critics here) one has to wonder why he agreed to do these 'pop' covers when it only delayed yet more original work from the man.

The saving grace of this mixed bag of a box set is its final disc. Now, I know you will think I am completely mad when I suggest that 'Duke Ellington Plays With The Original Motion Picture Score of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins' is the highlight of this set, but please bear with me. Put aside any dislike of the movie and the mawkishness of Disney at its worst and just listen. Of all the albums compiled in this box, this is the most fully-realised. Again he may have been delaying that return to original composition but this is the best case he could ever make for his arranging skills during this less-than-original time. 'Feed The Birds' with its swooping clarinet is sublime, 'Step In Time' strolls along in striking strident minimal time, 'A Spoonful of Sugar' is re-cast as a pumping fast-blues number and 'Supercalifragalisticexpealidocious' is a hurricane riot. The whole album is a joy and redeems the man from this less than satisfying period of his creative life.

The box set stops at 1965 with the studio portions of 'Concert In The Virgin Islands' (only a handful of disappointing tracks not worth dwelling on) and yet - disappointingly for this reviewer - ignores a collaboration with his boss on 'Francis A. & Edward K' from 1967. As I've alluded to above this is a real mish-mash of a compilation that, although pretty thorough for his time at Reprise, also shows why little of this period is celebrated amongst even casual critics of the man and his music. It wasn't until he joined RCA the following year that this seemingly stale period came to an end with the now classic 'Far East Suite' album. Ellington allegedly had some disagreements with Reprise over Sinatra 'borrowing' key members of his band and what his role really was at the label, so perhaps these tensions may had bled through and stifled any sought-after creativity. Whatever may have gone on, it did not lead to the sort of incredible music his band had re-emerged with a decade before. So, there are some gems here but few and far between. This is one for the Duke aficionados out there looking to microscopically examine this 'lost' period but not for the Duke-curious fan like myself looking to expand his or her knowledge. In the meantime, Hunt out '..Mary Poppins' instead!

NRS Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5.

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Coming soon:

The Cellar Door Sessions - Miles Davis (Sony)
No Line On The Horizon - U2 (Mercury/Universal)
Revolution (RM Take 20) - The Beatles (Unissued - author's own copy)

Admin: Sorry, I've been a bit tardy keeping this blog active. Although I have a part-time job, I also study two courses and have to keep this house in order. I am uber-busy but I'll keep trying to throw in a review when I can. Hopefully either one a week or one every two weeks. Thanks for your persistence and patience

The Velvet Underground - S/T (aka 'The Third Album') [A failed 33 1/3 proposal, Feb 2009]

In 1968, rock – like the politics of the day – was going through its own revolutionary times. Inspired by the rootsy sound of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding from late 1967 and The Band’s first two albums, rock re-channelled its psychedelic energies into simpler sounds. In October of that year following the departure from the Velvet Underground of his sparring buddy John Cale, Lou Reed looked like he too was heading back to such basics. Cale was the avant-garde heart & soul of the band whose ‘lunacy’ made their live performances some of the most experimental in pop. Differences over “[the] music, or where we intended to go as a group” came to a head in the summer of 1968 and after months of bitter infighting, Reed, the self-appointed leader of the group, decided he “could not work with…[Cale] any longer” . Doug Yule brought into replace him (literally at the last minute) was no classical prodigy or experimentalist at heart but he was someone that Lou could, at least, manipulate (Yule: “he wanted what he said agreed with” ). It was against this background of conflict, a speedy re-positioning of core band values and barely tested brand new songs that one month later Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed, Moe Tucker and Doug Yule went into Sunset and Highland Sound studios in Hollywood to begin work on their third album: The Velvet Underground. No Nico, No Warhol, No Cale and (unusually) no producer to speak of , it was to be a defining moment for the band but the beginning of the end for Reed’s involvement with the group.

Given all the drama beforehand, it didn’t get off to a good start. Despite losing their firebrand experimentalist on September 28th 1968, in their first few days with Yule in the band they more than made up for the loss with rip-roaring performances at the La Cave Club in Cleveland (listen to Reed’s extraordinary solo on the live ‘What Goes On’ from Disc 4 of the Peel Slowly and See box set). But somewhere on the way to the studio that November, the band had the proverbial rug pulled from under them when their equipment was stolen. It’s often been said that this resulted in the oft-quoted ‘cleaner, quieter’ sound of The Velvet Underground but that would be excusing the album in comparison with its predecessors. Reed himself has said that he “really didn’t think we should make another White Light/White Heat…it would be a terrible mistake…we would become this one-dimensional thing” . One must wonder if this reflects his then frustration at the lack of commercial success the band had under Cale’s tenure. Despite the cachet of working under Andy Warhol in 1966-7, The Velvet Underground and Nico took over three or so months to crawl to 171 in the Billboard charts . White Light/White Heat – without Warhol or Nico – fared even worse: stooping at a lowly 199 in the top 200 in March 1968 . There was, according to Boston Tea Party manager Steve Nelson, “pressure on them from the label, from management [to make hit records]” . Yule acknowledges that there was “a move to mainstream acceptance going on” and the band had also been moved up from Verve Records to its bigger sister, MGM “[to]…use a different sales manager” (according to Morrison in 1969) . Live recordings from late 1968 do indicate that although they still had their ‘wild’ side now and then (especially the heavier material from their first two albums), they had now started to sound “more normal… [because] the lunacy factor had gone” . Reed when interviewed later in 1969 about this shift in sound said “we didn’t want to be put in the band of forerunners of the drug maniacs and all that” . Whether all this was a deliberate move to sharpen their commercial nous after years of declining sales isn’t clear but following Cale’s departure, Lou Reed’s song writing productivity was “on a creative roll…by early summer 1969 he had…enough [material] for a double set” . If you include these, the songs for the next album Loaded and other stray songs from 1969 (such as ‘Follow The Leader’ ,) the sheer volume of material suggests Reed felt somewhat liberated during this time. Writing in his biography of Lou Reed, Growing Up In Public, Doggett suggests that “Cale’s departure unlocked a key in Reed’s psyche… [now] relieved of the burden of matching [Cale]…[he] discovered a more subtle way of expressing his feelings” . Victor Bockris, a biographer and long-term acquaintance of the band, backs this up: “Lou was a romantic and an egomaniac….[he] wanted to go mainstream, he wanted people to buy a few records …but in order to do what he had to do, he had to dominate” .

Whether or not Reed was relieved of the burden of catching up with Cale or whether he was chasing commercial as well as critical success, when the band began to record their new album there was a consensus that they wanted it to reflect what they did on stage. Yule confirms that “the album was basically a live album… one of the reasons...it has that particular sound is that it was just pulled out of the band while it was on tour” . This minimalist approach reflected not only the lack of equipment they now had and the lowly financial position they had with MGM, but also – as the publicity for the album would later boast – “something different . As if to make a point to the world that things had changed, the album opens with a lead vocal by its newest member, Doug Yule. One might argue, somewhat cynically, that the use of Yule on this opening track could be interpreted as one great big slap in the face from Reed towards his former colleague. However, Sterling Morrison suggests it was far more prosaic than that when it came to recording the song. When talking about the session for ‘Candy Says’ he explains that “we were in the midst of touring the West Coast….[and] if [Lou] sounded froggy…just to get the track complete….we would have Doug sing” . Yule is somewhat coy about why Reed asked for his contribution to the song but recalls that “he sang one [take] and came back and said ‘why don’t you sing one?’” . The critic Sal Mercuri makes a valid point regarding Reed’s generosity on vocals during The Velvet Underground when he says “[it’s] proof that Lou was much more relaxed with himself and…[not] fighting to be heard and because he knew his songs would be heard, he didn’t necessarily have to sing them” .

The absence of Cale not only allowed Reed’s song writing to blossom but also allowed Morrison’s guitar playing to come to the surface. Morrison, often buried beneath the cacophony of Cale/Reed’s sonic battles, was to feature more prominently on The Velvet Underground than on its predecessors. Both his rhythm and lead playing was to come to the fore on tracks like ‘Beginning to See The Light’ and ‘I’m Set Free’. On ‘What Goes On’ Reed even allows himself to duel alongside Morrison in the song’s main solo. Again this was as much to do with the limitations the band were under during the session: “ [the engineer said] ‘if you do one more [guitar track on the tape] we’re going to have to take off one of them [because] we’re running out of space…why don’t you just play them together?’” The result is a thrilling play-off between the two guitarists that made the track an obvious pick as the album’s lead single (although MGM only went as far as releasing DJ promo discs) . Reed later picked out Morrison’s ticking performance on ‘Some Kinda Love’ as “one of the greatest parts he ever did…everything revolved around that part” Reed in his new ‘relaxed’ attitude to vocals went even further and gave Morrison (alongside his colleagues) a speaking role on the album’s penultimate track ‘The Murder Mystery’.

The sessions wrapped up in mid-December but not without one further twist in the tail. Sometime between then and March 1969, Reed went back into the studio to create an alternate version of the album – the infamous ‘closet mix’ as it has come to be called. Currently available on the Peel Slowly and See box set, the emphasis of the mix shifts the band instrumentation down and the vocals up giving it an intimate feel (hence the ‘closet’ moniker given to it by Morrison ). Bizarrely, ‘Some Kinda Love’ was not even remixed and an alternate take was preferred to the one the band had finalised at the sessions. This ‘mix’ was used for the first few pressings of the album in the U.S.A. but it did not travel as the mix created by engineer Val Valentin was used everywhere else instead. No-one seems sure as to why he did this although some – like Morrison – have inferred that “[Reed] felt the real essence of the tracks…[were] the lyrics” and hence the change in emphasis. As Bockris has already pointed out he did “[want] people to buy a few records…but in order to do what he had to do, he had to dominate” . Perhaps maybe this was why he wanted his songs, his lyrics and his mix to be the one that flew off the shelves when The Velvet Underground was released in March 1969.

Despite all these shenanigans, when the album’s release date did approach, the band took the unusual step of upping their promotional work rate to a scale not seen before. Prior to 1968, promotion of their material – outside of touring – was minimal unless it fell under the category of ‘Factory’ work. For The Velvet Underground the band made an effort to appeal to the myriad of radio stations across the U.S.A and their audiences. Reed himself volunteered on a number of occasions to talk enthusiastically about the album and its ‘unity’. He often referred to the sequence of the album as exploration of thought from the self-doubt of the opener ‘Candy Says’ to a form of resolution at the end with ‘Afterhours’ . To back up the band’s effort for this album to be a ‘hit’, MGM also provided a press-kit with glossy photos, a bumper sticker (!) and a sheet of some of the better reviews the band had garnered . A promotional single was issued too with Bill Mercer camply endorsing the album’s “expressions of….honesty, purity and feeling” to the radio masses. The band also stepped up its touring schedule throughout 1969 to bolster this renewed push – around 100 or so gigs in comparison with 75 or so the previous year .

But it was all in vain. The album was the band’s first total flop – it didn’t register at all on Billboard’s top 200 albums chart that year. This disaster cast a shadow over the wealth of newer material Reed had written during 1969. The band was “convinced that… [MGM]… had lost interest in them and… [they] faced the prospect…[of] completing their four-album contract with little enthusiasm” . Their suspicions were partly right: they were dropped by MGM head Mike Curb sometime before October 1969 but not to cut losses – more as part of a clear out of everything counter-culture within the label. The fifteen or so titles they enthusiastically recorded in spurts that year didn’t materialise until Polygram compiled them into the VU and Another View albums in 1985-6. However, despite personal disappointment at the failure of The Velvet Underground and their exit from Verve/MGM, Reed and the band ploughed on and made efforts to woo the behemoth Atlantic Records for what would be their final album, Loaded. Sadly, even though it was more commercially oriented than its predecessor (even to Reed’s dissatisfaction), it too died a death and shortly afterwards a dishevelled Reed left the Velvet Underground for good.

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Coming next: Duke Ellington - The Reprise Studio Recordings.

Beginning to See The Light.

I know what you're thinking : another bloody blog about music, ho hum. Everyone who thinks they know music has got their own two cents on U2's latest release, the buzz around Animal Collective or what mess Amy Winehouse has got herself into, 'so what' you say? There are thousands upon thousands of blogs all talking about music, reviewing albums from past and present out there so why do I want to start my own specialist blog when I already have a simple one complimenting my university studies. Is that not enough? Well, no. I have a serious purpose for this blog: three days ago, I was heartbroken and I didn't know what to do.

On Monday morning after weeks of over-excited anticipation the editors at 33 1/3 (the continuing series of little books on individual albums) rejected my proposal on The Velvet Underground's self-titled 3rd album. It was my first attempt at submitting something for professional consideration. I've written bits and pieces on various music forums and the occasional review for Amazon but I'd never put anything forward formally with a view to having it in print. I admit now with some embarrassment that I had too high an expectation of its success: I really, really, really believed if I was chosen, that it would open doors. A published book would look good on my CV if I wanted to work for someone like MOJO. Even though my wife warned me that getting over-excited would only make the disappointment crushing and painful, I still thought that I would take the potential bad news with some philosophical maturity. Well, I was wrong.

When I got the e-mail from David at 33 1/3 saying no, I was heart-broken. That's a bit of a over-simplification because I can't express in words how crushed I was immediately afterwards. I know it sounds like over-dramatisation but I was really devastated, really upset, really lost, really baffled and really miserable. I'd blown my biggest chance of a lifetime to escape the lifeless, professional wilderness of the last 20 years. It took a good hour or two of soul-searching and reflection with loved one around me before I started feeling just about ok with it and then I made a big mistake: I read the list of titles that made it through to Round 2. Sure, there were some interesting proposals that made it through (loads, in fact) but my eyes were drawn to a few that didn't seem to fit....Big Country? Huh? Van Halen? Britney Spears? Cyndi Lauper? The fucking Eagles???? USA for Africa?? GARTH BROOKS???? What the fuck?? My blood began to boil. What on earth were these names doing in a serious analytical album series? I was mortified. My proposal may not have been great but I couldn't understand why these "dead weights" of popular culture were preferred as subject matter over "the more serious efforts" I and other rejectees had spent time and effort working on. So I then did something, I'm now wholeheartedly ashamed of: I lashed out.

There's a comment link under the list of proposals on 33 1/3's blog and straight after the list was published, many posters started congratulating each other on their success and halfheartedly commiserated with others less fortunate. I didn't quite feed the need to commiserated like this: I was baying for blood. I began to first question the motives of David et al for allowing such 'ridiculous' proposals through, then moaned that I had worked hard on mine only for it to be pushed out by work being "clever for the sake of clever". Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Utterly silly and pointless. It developed away from a question and answer session into the nature of the series ('it's not the album itself being put through, it's the proposal..period'), into a slanging match. It wasn't pretty and I would now like to offer my very humblest apologies for some of the comments made on Monday and part of Tuesday. Especially to all those at 33 1/3. The rants and abuse I threw back at you all were immature and completely unjustifiable. I was upset and I should have just bitten my tongue and walked away. But now in the light of this reflective perspective, maybe you can see how I got into this tizz in the first place and see what led to this mild-mannered janitor getting shitty all of a sudden (and appositely, I can now see some of the sage advice for what it was - good).

This is point in the story where the rescue plan from the disaster kicks in and I'm sent back on my merry way again. I gotta thank my fellow posters at my regular hang out Black Cat Bone who set me right and helped give me the idea for this blog. I started to crack abuse at some of them as well because several lucky members had proposals accepted by 33 1/3 (thankfully none of the above!). Gradually it dawned on me that this irrational rage was really eating me up and I was now starting to push away people I consider friends. I was ashamed. I slept on this overnight and decided in the morning to turn it round with a new approach. Rather than endlessly moaning about my 'injustice', I asked my successful friends (and other BCB people who work in the media) what would I need to do to be taken seriously as a writer? Believe it or not, suggestion number one was....'take rejection with dignity'! Yeah, I think I got that now guys, I laughed. Since then the generosity of advice offered to me by my fellow BCBers has been overwhelming and I'm now back to my old self again after my day and a half of madness. The blog idea was suggestion number 2 and well, here it is!

I'm not bitter now and in fact I'm happy for all those first-timers who got through the first stage. Good luck to you all. I will submit for 33 1/3 again but hopefully next time, I'll have more experience and more poise when things don't quite go to plan. I hope to god I'll never be that bitter ever again.

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To start the ball rolling after that sob story (of sorts), immediately after this is up I'm going to post my proposal for all to see. I fully expect a deluge of shit after what I've said elsewhere but I suppose I deserve it. If some of you do want to offer genuine criticism of its value or worth, great. I promise I won't bite. By the way, it comes without its footnotes and references as they probably won't paste over from my original Word document. In that case, I can assure you it has been researched throughly (well, as much as I could..the libraries here leave a lot to be desired) and I'm happy to provide any back up info if needed. Thanks.