#0027: The Everly Brothers - A Date With The Everly Brothers [**]

Ah what you gonna do, it's the Everly Brothers?

I tell you what you're gonna do.  You're gonna close your eyes and try to forget how much the harmonies remind you of the Louvin Brothers and wait patiently for Kathy's Clown.  It's the last track by the way and even though you've just listened to an album full of songs repeating the same formula, it still stands out as the one they got right.  Kind of like LSD.  It took Albert Hoffman 25 syntheses to get it right.  These guys took only 12 attempts to get one song right but in fairness there wasn't as much giggling or as many colours.  A date with the Everly Brothers?  It's was no acid trip and I certainly didn't feel like putting out at the end of it.

#0026: Miriam Makeba [**]

There's a track on here called Mbube.  It is unmistakably the reason The Lion Sleeps Tonight exists and by extension one of the few low points in the Friends story arc.

Worthy of ridicule though those things are, it would be an unwarranted slur to slag this album.  It is not something I would choose to put on to entertain myself but it is bursting with personality and authenticity.  When Paul Simon was running out of ideas, he turned to the indigenous music of Africa to rekindle the flame of his creativity.

This woman had suffered a great deal - apartheid being the tip of the iceberg - before she died of a heart attack in 2008.  She had a phenomenal voice; powerful but non-invasive  Having read the briefest of synopses of her life, I can hear that voice carrying the weight of those experiences, expressing them and overcoming them.

I guess the difference between this and some other equally beleaguered performers is that she just doesn't sound as needy as they do.  I'm glad to have heard this but it's not for me.

Interestingly, this features a version of House Of The Rising Sun, a song Joan Baez also included on her album.  I'll take this over that any day of the week.

#0025: Elvis Presley - Elvis Is Back [*]

When did Elvis really lose it?  Was it the later years in Vegas?  Or was it when he came back from the Army and trundled out this crock of shit?  There is no evidence of the vivacity we saw in the 50s.  The backing vocals do their best to fill gaps in his lacklustre mewling but it's a lost cause.  The songs are just not good enough.

He bought himself a nice reputation in the army and came back a hero, a smart way of ensuring this record would do well.  I'm not going to change any minds about this overrated, flaccid demigod and I don't need to flex my foil to whip up a handful of insults to go with those I've already dispensed.

It sucks.  You may disagree.  Let's move on.

#0024: Joan Baez [*]

And we're into the 60's.  Phew.

Okay, let's get this in perspective.  It's another Commitments reference I'm afraid.  A girl, a really odd looking alternative type shows up at Jimmy Rabbite's door and he asks, "Who are your influences?"  She tells him, "Joan Baez".  He slams the door.

It was funny.  But the rudeness of his actions need not apply to his opinion of Joan Baez or any of the other artists who weren't the right answer.  They just weren't soul artists and that was the kind of band he was trying to form.

Listening to this, I get the joke all over again.  It's soft, shrill, acoustic folk, not unlike Joni Mitchell's output years later.  I've heard of her just never heard anything I consciously knew was her.  Some of it does sound familiar though.  I'm sure I've heard this woman on film soundtracks.  It's definitely not soul, though.

I could put up with this if it was on quietly in the background while I was indulging my hippy side.  And by that I mean talking cosmic bollocks to crack on to some new age chick.  But that's about the extent of its appeal to me.  After a few songs that voice, high quality, controlled and earnest tho it is, that voice starts inserting razor blades between my vertebrae.  A glass has a shatter pitch and so does my spine.

Still eight tracks to go though.  No wonder they smoke weed when they listen to this stuff.  You need something to take the edge off.  Ironically it also slows time down.  It's a cleft stick all right.

#0023: Dave Brubeck - Time Out [****]

This is a jazz album for people who say they don't like jazz.  The arrangements are very carefully planned - or they seem to be.  You can hear and follow the tunes in all of these instrumental pieces.  After a while you could even sing a long to them.

Probably his most famous tune, Take Five is on this album but it doesn't really stick out as the only decent track, beguiling buyers to purchase the album like the deceitful Vogue on Madonna's catastrophic soundtrack I'm Breathless.  No, every track has merit and its own personality.

Perhaps its secret is Brubeck's trademark juxtaposition of rhythm and unusual time signatures.  They keep you on your toes so even if his harmonic choices grow a little old there's still some mileage in his percussive imagination.

#0022: Marty Robbins - Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs [*]

I get how music can make you question things: social values, the meaning of life, whether you were a selfish, meanie to your ex-girlfriend or whether she was just a duplicitous whore. The question raised in my mind by this album is "Why?"  More specifically, why is this an album I must hear before I die?  Did this guy really gun a man down in some obscure town in the Old West and then write a song about it?  That would be interesting.  It'd be a pretty stupid move for a popular singer to confess his crime to a comparatively large audience.  But it would at least makes these stories interesting.

Yessirreee bub it's another country album.  This one's got more than 2 parts to its harmonies and the guitar playing has a bit more finesse to it but it's still whiny old toss.  I wouldn't normally judge.  I'm sure the people of the time welcomed this kind of noise to drown out the bedlam of those moonshine voices in their heads.
Each to his own.  But songs and/or a sound important enough to be required listening more than a half a century later?  I don't think so.

#0021: Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis [****]

I do believe this makes him the first artist to appear twice in the list.  And fair enough.  If Sarah Vaughan's album is a sure fire way to get lucky then this album should come with a money off voucher for the morning after pill.

You put this on and the lights dim inside your head.  The sweet stupor of inhibition-lowering alcohol washes over you without imbibing a drop.  I don't want to call it smooth cuz that'll put the aural image of Kenny G in your head and this is a far cry from the synthetic nature of those productions.

This glides.

From the opening bars of what is almost certainly the album's most well known track - So What - to the end of...the last one (depending on which issue you're playing), it is seductive and deliciously relaxing.  The laid-back, who-gives-a-fuck message of track 1 permeates the mood throughout.

This is another of the albums that I already knew very well, by the way.  I've fallen asleep listening to it many times but its soporific qualities are in this case a positive.  Yep, I've fallen asleep to this many times.  I didn't say I was alone or what I was doing beforehand ;-)

#0020: Ray Charles - The Genius Of Ray Charles [***]

This album is, according to the reading I just did a few seconds ago, a breakaway album.  Ray Charles was already a well established RnB* player by the time he made this record.  The comparison could be brashly made with The Beatles almost decade later, who broke away from their establish sound to make Sgt Pepper.  I don't think this move is worthy of that comparison, however.  In Sgt Pepper people got something they hadn't heard before whereas this set simply joins an already crowded mainstream of big band singers.

Having said that, the presence of players from Count Basie's and Duke Ellington's bands is noticeable albeit in a hindsight kinda way.  "Aaah _that_'s why it sounded great."  Quincy Jones was also involved in this and with credentials like that, who's gonna knock it?  Charles himself with his funky piano style and road-worn vocal texture breathes into these songs life that may hitherto have been beaten out of them with soulless repetition.

Altogether it's damn enjoyable but I wouldn't go so far as to ascribe it genius.  Certainly it's better than anything I could've produced that year, being as I was still a decade away from the first Higgs-Boson of a glint in my father's puritanical eye.

But I have fond memories of Ray Charles.  His duet with Billy Joel remains a firm favourite of mine and I can't think of Ray Charles without being reminded of that scene in the Commitments where Jimmy tells the piano player he has to perform without his spectacles.

Stephen: But I'm blind without me glasses!
Jimmy: So was Ray Charles.

His piano playing is beyond reproach and this album contains consistent evidence of that.  So in case there's any doubt, "I don't think there's anything wrong with the action on this piano."

* - And by RnB, I mean actual rhythm and blues where the tunes are carried with emotion rather than with a desperate sense of self comparison to Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and the interminable pantheon of caterwaulers littering unimaginative backing tracks with their unimaginative vocal cadenzas.

#0019: Ella Fitzgerald - Sings The George & Ira Gershwin Song Book [*****]

I like a Gershwin tune.  How about you?

This is a triple album, which I would put good money on being quite a coup in 1958.  I don't know if there were songs left out.  I'm not a Gershwin geek by any stretch but there are many of those songs in my favourites list from this genre.

Fitzgerald's voice is clear and bright, even in the low register.  It lacks the road worn crackle of Holiday or the crepuscular smokiness of Vaughan but given the arrangements on this collection, they were clearly going for shiny and pristine over character.  They are letting the songs do the talking.  Nelson Riddle's arrangements are smooth, precise and spacious allowing you to sit back and take in the panorama.

Arrangements are fine, and voices are lovely but without good writing to back it up there is only so far you can get.  There is a personality in these songs that gives them immortality in spite of the inherent antiquity of the style.  Tenuous rhymes on one line and simple truths the next, the lyrics dance with the language like nobody's watching.

Many of these songs would be popular answers in any survey of this period.  Someone To Watch Over Me, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off, They Can't Take That Away From Me, Embraceable You...I could go on. And on.  Mind you, there are some real gems on here too that haven't enjoyed as much of the spotlight - Slap That Bass, to name just one.

It's value for money.  It's a sophisticated dinner party soundtrack.  And if it's neither of those, you'll at least feel yourself wanting to watch When Harry Met Sally and that's never a bad thing.

#0018: Sarah Vaughan - At Mister Kelly's [****]

Have this in the CD player when you get home from that 3rd date and you'll only have yourself to blame if you don't get laid.  For a mostly andante collection of jazz tunes, it's remarkably upbeat in terms of mood.

The recording was made live at some club and has that trademark authentic live jazz crowd chatter.  It sounds like there's maybe not even 20 people in the room although I dare say there were a lot more.  At the very start the announcer advises the audience that the session is being recorded and that Ms Vaughan will use a lyric sheet.  I think that's cute.  It's a throwback to a simpler time when people were more easily impressed.  Mind you, they were also more easily offended, more easily conned and more easily a lot of things.  I just like the tone he sets.

Then on the 2nd track - Willow Weep For Me - having said she's using a lyric sheet, she messes the words up anyway and instead of shutting the hell up and letting the band cover it, she carries on singing in an extemporaneous commentary on the blunder and draws loud laughter from the crowd.  The atmosphere is well established now and I just felt comfortable.  Do you think if that recording were made today the producers would have included that track as is?

I think jazz should be played a certain slap dash, hap hazard irreverence.  The music is serious enough.

She lampoons Ella Fitzgerald later on as she forgets the words again.  An irony lost on me at the time but I've since read one of her early breaks was to open for Ella Fitzgerald at the Apollo (that's Harlem not Hammersmith :0)

Altogether a fine album for both listening and mood setting.  Oh and keep an eye out for the piano player on this one, jazz dorks.  Man's got chops.

#0017: Ramblin Jack Elliott - Takes The Floor [***]

This is a funny little album.  He's got one of those hillbilly voices and plays a country/bluegrass guitar with that interwoven strumming and picking technique.  It's done well.  The songs have humour and he does these spoken intros over the opening vamps.  It's quirky and it's early enough that I could believe he was one of the first to do this.  There's something reminiscent of A Boy Named Sue about the delivery and it's pretty enjoyable although I wouldn't ever put this on out of choice.  But I'll certainly makes a note of it cuz it could be useful as background music for a film or a show.

And speaking of Johnny Cash, there's a track on here called Cocaine.  The first time I heard this song was at a Swansea open mic when a guy called Ian (I think they call him the Reverend Ian) played it.  I don't recall him citing Ramblin Jack Elliot as the writer at the time but this is obviously where he got it.  Then some years later I saw Walk The Line and Joaquin Phoenix plays it near the end of the film.

While trying to identify which film I'd seen this in, I discovered this really useful site.  It doesn't just list songs on the official soundtrack, it identifies songs used anywhere in the film.

So where the Louvin Brothers left me cold, Ramblin Jack left me with a smile on my face.  Groovy.

#0016: Billie Holiday - Lady In Satin [***]

In contrast to Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours this collection of sad and slow songs gives me what Frank could not: empathy.  Billie Holiday's extraordinary voice communicates a depth of feeling, a nonchalant despair that makes it easy to accept her sadness.  It's not needy or grandiose like Wee Small Hours.  The horns are mellow and well rounded.  The strings are controlled and stand well back from that line where the swooping and swirling starts to make you feel dizzy.

Yes, all of these songs sound the same but a good album is like a box of chocolates.  Now, before I tag that simile, I'm going to take issue with the character who most famously likened something to a box of chocolates: Forest Gump's mum.  "You never know what you gonna get."

She also said, "Stupid is as stupid does."  You know what stupid doesn't do?  Stupid doesn't read the little card you get in a box of chocolates that tells you what you're gonna get!

Anyway, a good album is like a box of chocolates.  You always want another chocolate.

#0015: Tito Puente - Dance Mania Vol. 1 [*]

I feel like I should be sat in a tapas restaurant, squinting at the menu in the dim light.  I'm not entirely sure but I'm fairly confident I have heard this before, perhaps in La Tasca.  There are too many naked flames and wooden furniture in that restaurant to be playing this sort of thing to hungry people.

The entrance of the marimba almost half way through provides long overdue reprieve from the sun-crazed, harsh trumpets but then it's back to the blaring brass.

I have been known to say that tapas is aptly named cuz it turns your ass into a tap.  But now I'm thinking it may not have been the food that turned my stomach.

#0014: Little Richard - Here's Little Richard [**]

At some point in the 50s, somebody figured out that if you sing the first couple of lines with minimal accompaniment, it disguises the fact you're playing a 12 bar blues _again_, making it sound like the progression comes in on chord IV.  Cases in point: Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally and every other track on this album.

It's a welcome break from all the Latin in the period but more than one track at a time of Mr Penniman's albeit splendid boogie piano chops is just dull.  Unfair?  Certainly.  I'm not arguing the merit of his inclusion in this list.  It's clearly influential but the issue here is whether I was entertained by it.  

And I wasn't.  Except for Tutti Frutti.  And even that gets old pretty quickly. 

#0013: Machita - Kenya [**]

It starts with drums.  Yes - that kind of drums.  For a minute I thought I was just going to be writing "see album #0011" and leaving it at that.  It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes long but by the end of it I was once more praying for the sweet release of death.

But after that, the blood-pressure-tripling, excessively busy bongos are masked by some really beautiful horn work.  It's still Latin.  Don't get me wrong.  Tequila and percussion should be kept apart with the same tight regulatory system as petroleum spirit and matches.  But there are tunes and from track 2 to 12, it's almost pleasant.  And if the centrifugal power behind that positive spin is more than a little driven by gratitude that track 1 has finished, then that's fine by me.

Maybe that's the message of the album: It Could Be Worse.

#0012: Miles Davis - The Birth Of The Cool [***]

This is the first of the albums on the list that I actually own.  I bought this CD back in 1995 as part of my jazz education.  That sounds like I have some kind of formal jazz credentials.  I don't.  My jazz education is this CD, a Best Of Blue Note compilation my then girlfriend bought me and the first Sting album.  

This was a very influential album in the world of jazz.  Presumably because it did things that nobody had done before.  But I've just listened to Basie's Complete Atomic and there's nothing on BOTC that Basie hadn't already covered.  To my ears, anyway.  And I preferred Basie's stuff.

That said, I do like this album and I play it reasonably regularly so...yeah.  

#0011: Sabu - Palo Congo []

That's right: none.  Fuck all stars.  If my rating of this album was the night sky, there would be no astrology.

I get the same kind of intense irritation from listening to this random, tuneless cock munge as I do when I see people forming a drumming circle.  There's no need for that shit and there's no need for this.  

#0010: Thelonius Monk - Brilliant Corners [**]

A lot of people have sung the praises of TM to me for a lot of years but I never actually got around to sitting down and listening to any of it.  I feel obliged, due to the large of body of compliments already accrued in his favour to write something of the same ilk.  Genius.  Unprecedented.  Visionary.

But it's really not.  The clue is in the traditional melodies.  When he does take a break from, what I'm going to nomenclate as "fucking odd", the accessible melodies are dull and predictable.  Never mind the jazz.  The players play well.  It sounds good.  It's not exciting.

But I am obliged to say something positive about it.  Cuz it's him.  And the best I can muster is: mathematically justifiable.

#0009: Count Basie - The Complete Atomic Basie [****]

I don't how many horns Count Basie had in his band but it sounds like a thousand.  This is an enormous sound.  Paint yourself an aural picture of the glitzy, flamboyant overture before the likes of Sammy Davis Jr took to the stage in Vegas and you're half way there.

This instrumental collection really doesn't feel the want of vocals.  The tones, the textures, the sweeping undercurrent of horns juxtaposed with the delicate finesse of intricate piano licks, the measured, reflective slower swing numbers, it all blends beautifully.  

The saxophone solos are played often with very little piano presence, leaving ample space for the implied chords to wow and the infinitesimal note lengths of the runs, ducking and spiralling like otters swimming through red bull to amaze.

 

#0008: Buddy Holly & The Crickets - The Chirping Crickets (1957) [***]

It was, ooooh, must have been 1997.  My daughter had just been born, I'd just parted ways with the band I was in and I was working in my first ever IT contract.  In the January, the aforementioned band had pulled off one of the most impressive feats (for a bunch of fuckwits) that Basingstoke had ever seen.

We were all big fans of Pink Floyd and Robbie (our trumpet player) had one of his madcap ideas.  Let's perform the whole of The Wall at the Anvil.  The Anvil is a 1200 seater venue and way out of our league.  Robbie was not to be put off by that.  He applied in writing to Mr Waters for permission to perform his masterpiece and give all the profits to charity.  Mr Waters agreed.  The rest of the story I'll tell you when I (hopefully) encounter the album on this list.

While we were performing there, I was offered a job on the technical crew of the venue.  I was delighted and jumped at the chance to work in a theatre.  One of the shows I worked on was Buddy: the travelling company version of the West End show.  It was excellent fun and I still remember those days very fondly.  The music of the show is ingrained for all time - the songs of Buddy Holly.

Many of them are included on this album and as much as I try to listen objectively, when I hear the twangy 50s guitar strumming out That'll Be The Day and Oh Boy I am transported back to the flying gantry where over the balustrade I would look down at the performers on stage and wish it was me.  I can smell the musty cloth of the blankets we laid on while waiting for cues, the ropes we heaved on to raise and lower the gargantuan Buddy neon sign.

Without that experience I think maybe this would've hit me much the same way as the Louvin Brothers did.  Okay, maybe not that bad but this 50s light rock and roll isn't really my bag.  My memories of a special time with this as the soundtrack give the songs an immutable resonance with me.  I can now identify with the kids of the 50s, whose own unique experiences played out over this simple, innocent sound so far removed from the over produced pop of recent times.