364: Mask Dance, by Black String

Black String (South Korea)
Mask Dance (2017)
7 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Korean music has been one of the biggest revelations across the music world of recent years. In the past decade or so, the South Korean government has put so much effort – and money – into promoting the country’s musical culture of all different forms. Most visibly, K-pop has taken the world by storm, a phenomenon unequalled in pop music since the boy- and girl-bands of the 1990s. The effect has been felt on the world music scene too. It feels as if every year, another two or three Korean artists working with Korean classical or traditional music make themselves known across Europe and the Americas. And it’s not for nothing – each of these groups do something different and each of them do it in an incredible way. Just this year, I have seen performances by Kim So Ra (solo janggu (hour-glass drum) player innovating the classical style), Ak Dan Gwang Chil (a band turning folk songs from a region now in North Korea into sophisticated jazzy pop) and NST & The Soul Sauce featuring Kim Yulhee (a roots reggae/dub band backing lead vocals from the ancient epic sung poetry of the pansori). What a wild mix, and each of them were fantastic. Today’s album comes from another such group, and probably the Korean artists that have made the most impact on European world and jazz scenes in the last five years.

The music of Black String is somewhat hard to describe, because there are so many different ways that it can be described. Depending on what ear you bring to it, it is sophisticated math rock; it is free jazz in the Ornette Coleman mould; it is an eclectic mixture of Korean classical, folk and religious styles that date back many centuries; it is contemporary improvised sound art. The music is meditative, acidic, mysterious, aggressive, confusing, calm, powerful. Of course it is all of these at once. The ensemble is led by Yoon Jeong Heo from the geomungo, the ancient Korean fretted zither. Other traditional Korean instruments are provided by Aram Lee on the daegeum and danso flutes and the yanggeum metal-stringed zither and Min Wang Hwang on the janggu and other percussion and voice; with a very different sound is Jean Oh, an electric guitarist with a jazz background who plays his instrument with as much distortion as possible and liberal use of the whammy bar, as well as contributing electronic sounds. As much as each musician is a master of their own instrument in their own tradition, each one of them is taken in a new direction. They play using unorthodox techniques, they use their instruments as much as noisemakers as musicmakers, they bring in bubbles of influence from unlikely places. From all of it comes forth music that is immediately recognisable as deeply and traditionally Korean, but as viewed from a different angle. Black String are pioneering this new wave of Korean improvised art music and, by doing so, creating a whole new tradition with those that came before.

It’s so exciting to see all of the impressive new talent coming out of Korea every single year, with each artist bringing something new and astonishing to the table, and playing every conceivable type of music, too. The pool of these artists seems inexhaustible. It’s indisputable that South Korea is now one of the musical powerhouse countries. And you know why? Because their government doesn't only value music in a way that means lip-service is paid to its importance as part of a wider culture while slashing music education, creating a hostile environment for music venues and generally making funding for musicians increasingly rare and hard to come by (thanks, nine years of Conservative leadership!), but instead literally value it by pumping actual money into music programmes, consistently, for years. By paying musicians to make music or empowering those who can, and by letting those musicians create new sounds that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. By funding those artists to travel abroad to play at festivals, make tours or present at professional events. By running those festivals and music professionals’ events in South Korea in turn, to bring the world to the music as well as vice versa. It’s really simple: if you make music a national priority, you get incredible, international-standard music out of it and a valuable national export to boot. Black String are just one particularly compelling example. It’s a methodology that could and should well be considered by many other governments around the world. Listen up!

361: Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation, by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (USA)
Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960)
9 tracks, 55 minutes (1990 CD version)
Spotify

Jazz music is brilliant, a boundlessly creative form that exists to push the boundaries of what’s possible, its musicians exploring the outer wilds of rhythm and harmony and creating some of the catchiest and most exciting melodies to go around them, even off the top of their heads.

Jazz isn’t just music, though. Jazz is a whole world of art and attitude. Painting, architecture, graphic design, photography, dance, pornography, journalism and fashion can all be jazz. It can also be the way you receive things, you can hear something with a jazz ear or see it with a jazz eye or behold it with a jazz brain. Conversation can be jazz. I’m not really sure how, but I’m pretty sure there can be jazz in food, too – if anyone knows any hip chefs who can help me confirm, that would be very useful. There is a whole world of jazz that is solidly in the realm of not-music. We’ve heard non-musical jazz on this blog before, and much like the monologues of Lord Buckley or the comedy of How to Speak Hip, Jack Kerouac’s writing is jazz.

Kerouac thought in jazz. The way he describes scenes in his novels are so lush and full of passion – whether that is a positive or negative passion – and when he describes actions it is as if they have been filtered through centuries of poetry. My favourite part of his writing, though, is when he gets on a riff. Kerouac’s riffs can be on anything, from the aforementioned scene-setting to thoughts on philosophy or culture or the taste of food. You can feel the text building up a pace as his thoughts tumble over each other. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness, but in a way that has been keenly honed. Thought threads come and go but never seem random, rhythms are developed and dissipate and the rules of grammar are bent and broken in a way that only serves to increase the beauty of the riff without losing any of its intelligibility. That’s right: Kerouac wrote in jazz solo.

The most potent example of this for me comes on this album of Kerouac performing his work – poetry and excerpts of his novels – completely solo. ‘The Beginning of Bop’ (later retitled ‘Fantasy: The Early History of Bop’) was originally an essay written for a gentleman’s magazine in 1959, but becomes another beast when he performs it out loud. It’s an 11-minute flight into the formative moments of bebop that never quite existed. It’s a stunning listen, and incredibly hypnotic. Kerouac bends his words into an almighty groove, his smooth, smoky voice and heavy Massachusetts accent giving the written words a rhythm so palpable you could play drums to it. The story he spins is compelling, too, musing on the meanings and deeper religious, philosophical and nostalgic bases of the music as well as its sounds and cultural impacts. I first listened to this recording sitting in a beautiful, empty church, followed that evening by a small but feverish obsession whereby I transcribed the whole of that recording as I heard it, pen-on-paper across five A4 sheets. I felt desperate to imbibe the words into myself, and I’m still glad I did that. It’s as if I solidified my own experience and connection to this amazing work.

Jack Kerouac is probably the most well-known of the movement known as the Beat Generation – he came up with the term himself, after all – and his semi-autobiographical book On The Road is regarded as one of the Great American Novels. It’s even more impressive when you consider that English wasn’t even his first language. For me, Kerouac is also one of the most defining voices in the non-musical world of jazz. His words can sing you to another place – listen to this album and let him read you there.

357: Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze), by Django Bates

Django Bates (United Kingdom)
Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze) (1995)
10 tracks, 67 minutes
Doesn’t seem to be anywhere to stream or download this online, apparently. I’ve put together a YouTube playlist of five tracks from the album that have already been uploaded there, so that you can get a small feel for the album, and you can buy the CD from Amazon or Discogs.

With yesterday’s Winter in America and today’s Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze), you’d almost think it was winter outside the window as well. What a strange serendipity.

On this album, pianist Django Bates leads a big band set-up of some of the biggest names in UK jazz at the time. True to his boundary-pushing and forward-thinking form, however, the music they make is quite a world away from the standard big band fare. The rest of the arrangements treat the 15-piece ensemble more like an expansive small band; that ultra-cheesy swing sound is only present in a handful of moments and always used in subversion.

The result is a set full of noise and chaos that falls just on the right side of avant-garde. Well, it does for me at least, your mileage may vary. There are unpredictable and angular melodies, dizzyingly fast and wending lines, out-there harmonies that switch between heavy dissonance and ludicrously simple chords, time signatures that would need a maths professor to work out. Influences from funk and Latin music abound, and there’s a slight soul sway in there occasionally, but all of it is quickly taken into outer space and back so many times within each piece. Even the only cover on the album, a version of the theme from Scorsese’s New York, New York, is turned into a cacophonous Latin-prog-jazz-metal excursion.

In all of its pandemonium, there’s so much fun in the album. It’s obvious that the musicians are at the top of their game in terms of skill, and the creativity is off-the-scale, so that it doesn’t feel like a dry exercise in quirkiness without purpose or an exploration of the borders of any particular type of music for an academic curiosity. It fizzes with electricity enough to turn a well-known ensemble template into a completely different beast. That energy is captured most obviously in the album’s joyous conclusion, in a reprise of the disc’s opening track ‘You Can’t Have Everything’, starting with a wild penny whistle solo and ending with a triumphant all-together-now horns-blaring, arms-around-each-other singing-on-New-Years-Eve but still occasionally dissonant finale. Winter Truce (and Homes Blaze) is a big band album, but not one from any planet you or I have visited.

355: lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to, by Various Artists

Various Artists
lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to (2017 onwards)
∞ tracks, ∞ minutes
Stream live on YouTube

lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the biggest musical phenomena of the past few years. It some ways, it represents a whole new paradigm of how and why people listen to music. And no, it’s not technically an album. If you’ve not yet been exposed to it, let me introduce you to the wonders of lofi hip-hop, compiled by ChilledCow:

I’ve been really excited to write about this, because there’s so much to talk about. Even the format that it takes is very much a 2010s thing: sort of a midway between an algorithmically-generated playlist and a curated radio station, a never-ending and continually updating set of tracks available 24 hours a day. There’s something I love about the infinite but unselectable nature of it. You don’t get to choose to only hear the tracks you know that you like, and you don’t get to skip any, but you can drop yourself in and out whenever you like. The tracks aren’t played in any specific order, but they are very carefully selected – a mix of the automated and the personal.

The music itself is a very specific genre with a very specific ambience. The name ‘lofi hip-hop’ may lead you to expect a little different to what it actually is. It’s an almost entirely instrumental style that is based around the marriage of off-kilter J Dilla-esque beats and samples often taken from relaxed jazz. The whole thing is chopped up and rearranged in a slightly surreal or hypnagogic way, and everything is treated with a production that makes it feel warm and fuzzy, cosy even, using vinyl-like surface noise, a strangely warped and wobbly feel to it, lots of shimmering and glittery timbres and a slow, steady tempo for ultimate chill-out vibes. Bassist, music theorist and YouTuber Adam Neely even looked into the way lofi hip-hop uses harmonies and unusual tunings and posited, very convincingly, that it has much more akin to a new field of jazz than hip-hop.

And for all its weird quirkiness, this isn’t some small niche, it is hugely popular. ChilledCow’s YouTube channel has over four million subscribers. At any given time, lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to has tens of thousands of listeners (at the time of writing – 3pm on a Saturday – it has over 19,000 people tuning in). Neither is it the only one: ChilledCow also runs lofi hip hop radio - beats to sleep/chill to (4,200 listeners right now), and there’s also the marginally differently-titled lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to (2,400 listeners), the festive 24/7 Christmas lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/chill/relax (1,200 listeners) and the list goes on. The music has the same atmosphere, the names are almost interchangeable and even the aesthetic of the artwork is precisely the same – a short looping animation of a cosy but cluttered anime bedroom with a sleepy protagonist relaxing/studying. What makes these so popular? The clue is in the name. These streams and the music within aren’t really used to be listened to as much as they are to be heard. They provide a background noise that’s meant to manipulate the listener’s thinking: the chilled, atmospheric sounds of the music are interesting enough to divert some attention while being relaxed and predictable enough to still ‘fade into the background,’ meaning that any distractions from the outside world are drowned out while still allowing the conscious brain to focus on something else. It’s perfect, then, to ‘relax/study to.’ For a lot of listeners, these lofi beats don’t even really register as ‘music’ at all; they don’t listen to it because they enjoy the music, they put it on because it fulfils a function and it works. There are two particularly interesting articles on this aspect of lofi hip-hop: one on JSTOR, which takes a positive view on it, and one in the New Yorker, which is much more negative, but I highly recommend both of them.

As that New Yorker article hints at, the popularity of this style of music has also had a backlash, with people angry at the musical movement for its perceived lack of musicality or creativity, for turning the noble art of music into insipid background noise fit only to be ‘used’ like a tool, and for just being plain boring. But it’s impossible to deny its success. For me, all of these reactions are really fascinating, from the music’s quiet but incredible popularity to the venom with which its detractors attack it. Personally, I actually really enjoy listening to the music, even in an engaged, ‘active’ capacity – I just think it’s chill.

As we reach the end of 2019 and get ready to roll on to a new decade, everywhere is full of retrospectives of the past ten years, everyone looking at the best, the most influential, the most definitive. I reckon that, regardless of anyone’s individual opinions on its merits or quality, the phenomenon of the lofi hip-hop YouTube stream as exemplified by lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to is one of the most iconic musical forces of the 2010s. It’s just not something that could have existed at any other time, and certainly not with the same amount of success.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend the last few days of the year writing intermittently in a notebook, wistfully looking out of the window with my plump ginger cat, feeling drowsy and listening to some slightly wonky but incredibly comfortable chill af beats.

346: Bags & Trane, by Milt Jackson & John Coltrane

Milt Jackson & John Coltrane (USA)
Bags & Trane (1961)
8 tracks, 56 minutes (1988 CD version)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

When you read the hard info about this album, the auspices are good. It’s a double-header from vibes player Milt ‘Bags’ Jackson and saxophonist John Coltrane, whose statuses as the all-time greats of their instruments can hardly be in question; the rhythm section is an impeccable trio of Paul Chambers on bass, Hank Jones on piano and Connie Kay on drums; it was even recorded in that magical year of 1959, although it didn’t see light for another couple of years. Stats like that would lead to some pretty high expectations. And you know what? It lives up to every one of them.

How much more can you say about Bags & Trane than that it’s…Bags, and Trane? It was the only time the two masters met in the studio, and of course it’s fantastic. It was before Coltrane’s big musical/spiritual/cerebral revolution that tore the fabric of jazz and opened up a portal to another universe forever, but still when he was at the top of his game as a hard-bop player, and Bags subtle playing is nevertheless slightly less restrained than when he’s in full-on third stream mode. Both musicians pull the other into their own sphere a little bit, to the detriment of neither and the benefit of the album as a whole. Neither do they suffer from the clash of egos that is a common side-effect of such meetings: both players are as gracious as they are virtuosic, clearly revelling in each other’s skills and allowing room for the magic to take place in its own time.

The two tracks that allow each musician to shine so much are the succinctly named pair of ‘Bags & Trane’ and ‘Bebop’. They both have very different feels. The first is a cool, slinking blues at 120 beats per minute; the second a heavy bop, originally by Dizzie Gillespie, at a stonking 150 beats per minute, but with most of the playing itself in double time. In both settings, each musician’s solos (including turns from Jones and Chambers) could only be their own, unmistakably, but they hit the groove of each track exactly right, even down to their positioning in the solo order. Perhaps most importantly, neither overshadows the other.

It says two things to me. It’s mad that Bags and Coltrane only recorded with each other just this once, as their chemistry feels as if they’ve known and explored each other’s playing from a hands-on basis for years. And then that it just shows what immaculate geniuses the two were; to be able to slip so comfortably into such a close collaboration as if it were no thing, as a mere diversion from their own respective musical journeys, and then to go on just as easily in their separate directions is surely a sign of what other level they were on, able to connect with each other on some telepathic level through the medium of jazz. We’re so lucky that they did decide to come together this one time, to create this record that still makes me as excited to listen to it as I’m sure the jazz fans of 60 years ago were when they first heard this meeting of masters.

334: Cool Spring, by David Rothenberg, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Jay Nicholas

David Rothenberg, Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Jay Nicholas (USA/Germany)
Cool Spring (2016)
5 tracks, 51 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

David Rothenberg’s music challenges the accepted – or, rather, assumed – definitions of what music is or can be. In fact, he goes further and adds questions about who or what musicians are or can be. Big themes, then. You can see why Rothenberg is not just an accomplished musician but a professor of philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Using his clarinets, a sharp mind for jazz and improvisatory music and, most importantly, an attentive and unfaltering ear, Rothenberg has plumbed new depths in research into non-human music. Over the past 15 years, he has released books, films, articles and albums about the music inherent in the lives of insects, marine mammals and birds, including creating majesterial, uncanny and ultimately ephemeral collaborations between himself and the animals, performing together on equal footings. I have been lucky enough to witness several performances by Rothenberg; by far the most memorable have been several occasions, from late night to early morning, where he created stunning improvised music with nightingales in the parks of Berlin, some of which have been captured in the recent album Nightingale Cities and film Nightingales in Berlin.

That was somewhat of a diversion. In Cool Spring, Rothenberg’s collaborators are a pair of sapient hominids like himself, electronicist Bernhard Wöstheinrich and bassist Jay Nicholas. The music is deep and intense while still managing to be relaxing in its own way; it’s chill-out that relieves parts of your mind and fully engages others. It does this as a combination of ambience, free jazz, broken downtempo beats, avant-garde, environmental sounds, spacey electronica and even hints at styles as varied as dubstep, folksong, classical. It’s surely art music in every sense of the term.

But even though this album is inescapably humanly organised sound, Rothenberg’s adventures into the sonics and songs of the animal kingdom are all over it. The most direct evidence is in some of Wöstheinrich’s samples of birds and insects, but the way Rothenberg approaches the clarinet, in his phrasing and his melodiousness, the way his lines flit and flirt with each other, obeying their own rhythmic rules but never clashing with the rest of the created aural environment. The whole flow of the pieces on this album, the shapes they trace and the stories their developments tell, is impacted by the natural world around us.

In all of his work, with humans or other animals, David Rothenberg creates in harmony with the sounds of our living planet, rather than operating above it, and is always compelling while he does it, be it in the medium of music, film or words.

327: Savu, by the Ilkka Heinonen Trio

Ilkka Heinonen Trio (Finland)
Savu (2015)
8 tracks, 49 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Ilkka Heinonen is one of the leading exponents of the jouhikko, the Finnish bowed lyre. It’s a beautiful instrument. It has a very guttural sound, and often quite a scratchy one too. Where this can often make an instrument sound rather fragile, I don’t think the jouhikko does; it sounds ancient and powerful, which is helped, I think, by the fact that out of the three (traditional) or four (modern) strings, one is always reserved as a drone string, which gives everything it plays a firm, meaty backbone. It’s quite a unique instrument too. The jouhikko has very few relatives around the world: the only other surviving bowed lyres in the world are the Estonian hiiu kannel and the Welsh crwth, and the latter is only played by a handful of medievalists. Even the jouhikko was on the verge of extinction before it was brought back into fashion by musicians such as Pekko Käppi, Rauno Nieminen and Heinonen himself.

The thing about a revival, though, is that it doesn’t just keep the instrument in the past, it embraces it as part of the modern traditions. For Pekko Käppi, that means bringing the jouhikko into a metal context (it is Finnish, after all); for Ilkka Heinonen, it means jazz. The Ilkka Heinonen Trio is Mikko Hassinen on drums and electronics, Nathan Riki Thomson on double bass and Heinonen on jouhikko. The compositions that the group play are very much influenced by Finnish traditional and folk music – they all have a spatiality to them, they are weighty yet echo as if carried by an icy breeze – but it’s all explored within a contemporary jazz idiom.

There are a few different moods at play on Savu, the trio’s first – and so far only – full album, from driving and jostling to quiet and complex (I like those the best), but there is one particular piece that I want to bring to your attention, the one that turns this album from a good album to a great one.

It’s called ‘Rutto’, which is Finnish for ‘plague.’ At first, that name may seem out-of-whack with the tune itself. It starts with a brisk march on the drums and a perky, if minor-key, melody on the jouhikko that always puts me a little bit in mind of ‘Sosban Fach’. Then the double bass enters, just stomping on that tonic note in time with the bass drum. There’s a slightly creepy semitone-heavy sections before it goes back to the first tune, and this time it’s even more strident, the march more aggressive and the bass more punchy. The repetition of the melody makes it fall into headbanging territory. But then things start to change, slowly and subtly. The bass becomes more distorted, the rhythm becomes less like a march and more like a nervous heartbeat, the jouhikko begins to lose its perkiness and starts slurring, its sharp bow strokes blurring into one. The whole thing begins to slide into some sort of madness, a scary and cacophonous noise. The sound itself becomes infected by the plague. By now the tune is almost a memory within the noise, barely discernible over layers of screeching harmonics, chaotic electronic sounds and wordless primal screams. Then quiet. The heartbeat remains and a percussion that sounds like a ticking clock. The sound sighs, like a release of pressure. And slowly, the melody as it was intended returns, with the same stridency as it once had before but perhaps with more of a frazzled energy. The knowledge of the devastation just past hangs heavy over the whole thing. And that way, with a crash of cymbals, the track ends.

It’s a fantastic composition, made of just two short melody fragments, but its deterioration and reformation tells a potent story through sound alone, and makes the piece completely gripping for nearly seven minutes of runtime. It is a real centrepiece of the album, and it shows how this ancient instrument, so indelibly connected to the tradition, can be used in a way that both honours that past while creating something that is stunningly, uncompromisingly and sometimes unsettlingly modern.

317: The Hottest New Group in Jazz, by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross

Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (USA/United Kingdom)
The Hottest New Group in Jazz (1960)
10 tracks, 29 minutes (original release); 39 tracks, 123 minutes (1996 extended edition)
Extended edition: Spotify ∙ iTunes

You know jazz is my bag, but it’s mostly the instrumental styles that stir me. While I appreciate the skills of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Sarah Vaughan and the likes, they never raise my heart-rate in the same way as a crack small-band hard-bop group does. The crooner style of the Rat Pack does even less for me.

That said, there is one group of jazz singers that really turn me on in a way that can compare to Coltrane, Coleman, the MJQ and all the rest. That’s the trio of Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross. And I reckon I know why – ‘singers’ isn’t strictly the right adjective. These musicians are vocal instrumentalists. They use their voices in the same way as those great soloists do, to create wonderful musical adventures that twist and turn and blossom forth from improvisation. They do this in two ways, and all three singers are masters of both.

Firstly there’s scatting. This is one of the most well-known types of jazz singing. The vocalist sings without using words; usually they use vocables (nonsense syllables), but they can also use open vowels or humming instead. This way they can improvise in the same manner as any other melodic instrument, and the syllables they employ allow them to shape the texture and timbre of the solo as well as its tune.

And then there’s vocalese. LHR didn’t invent this style, although they perfected it, and the term ‘vocalese’ was first coined to refer to their work. It’s essentially the practice of making songs – with real, sensible lyrics – out of jazz solos. That is, instrumental jazz solos are transcribed and lyrics are written for them that match the rhythms and melodies of that solo. It’s a ridiculous skill that is really uncanny when it’s pulled off well.

That’s exactly what Lambert, Hendricks and Ross do, and they show off the best of both techniques on their 1960 album The Hottest New Group in Jazz. There are 10 tracks on this album, and each of them is perfect. Their voices – each with their own qualities – weave between each other or huddle into close harmony or even jump about to create one multi-layered melody. They go through all sorts of jazz styles, from swing to bop to gospel to jump blues, and all of it suffused with incredible fun to match the virtuosity. It’s near impossible to pick a highlight of this album, as the quality never wavers, but on sheer impressiveness I’d have to point to ‘Cloudburst’. It’s performed at a blistering pace to start off with (I make it at 300 beats per minute) and then Hendricks takes off into his solo. In the main chunk of the solo, he spits 280 words in just under 48 seconds. That’s averaging 5.83 words per second, and that’s even including a few particularly tricky tongue twisters. And every single word is crystal clear. How one man’s tongue can move that fast I have no idea. It’s quite literally awesome. But that’s the party piece – every other track on the album lives up to it in sheer musical quality.

Although the original version of The Hottest New Group in Jazz is a perfect 10, nowadays it’s easiest to come across the extended edition, where that album is packaged together with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross Sing Ellington from 1961 and High Flying from 1962 and a few extra tracks at the end too. That’s a total of 39 tracks and just over two hours of music. It’s a whole lot, and there’s so much to love in there too. I won’t go through the whole thing, but here are some particular favourites that I just had to pick out:

‘Come On Home’

One of two covers from Horace Silver’s Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet to appear on High Flying (the other is ‘Cookin’ at the Continental’), I love this one because it’s a distillation of what vocalese can be. It is almost exactly the same as Silver’s original in every way. The solos are replicated note-for-note – Lambert takes Blue Mitchell’s trumpet solo, Hendricks takes Junior Cook’s tenor sax solo and Ross takes Silver’s own piano solo – and each one is sung with lyrics that reflect one situation as told from three points-of-view. I find that an incredible feat of songwriting. I also find it fun listening to it as a pair with the original, too; you can literally sing LHR’s lyrics along with the instrumental solos. Very satisfying.

‘Swingin’ Til The Girls Come Home’

This cover of Oscar Pettiford’s tune has two amazing solos. The first is Dave Lambert’s nod to Pettiford in the way he sings just like a bowed cello, with just the right amount of buzz from his tongue, and even incorporating a sneaky quote of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Then it’s Jon Hendricks’ turn and he takes things down a notch: he’s the double bass. After a few cycles of all-purpose double bass-like scatting over stop-time from the band, he stops and declares, "Percy Heath." Then he proceeds to solo using Heath’s inimitable phrasing and rhythms, before doing the same with "Paul Chambers," "Ray Brown," and, simply, "Mingus!" How ballsy is that?! He’s going through the best bassists of their generation, hitting each of their unique styles to a T. It could be heard as being so arrogant if it wasn’t done with such obvious love. After two minutes of this jaw-dropping stop-time solo, he brings the band back in, wraps up and they go back to the song. As so often with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, I come away from it thinking ‘well now, that’s just showing off.’ But I’m so glad they did.

‘Popity Pop’

This one stands out because of yet another Jon Hendricks genius moment. For the most part, it’s a typical LHR piece. Written by Slim Gaillard, it has a frenetic pace, uplifting tune, nonsense lyrics and a big bunch of unhinged and improvised scatting. But right in the middle of it all, everything drops out and it’s just left with Hendricks on his own, completely a cappella. He drops the tempo a little bit, and sings a melody that sounds as if it could be lifted from an American patriotic song. His voice is so pure and so sweet that you can’t help but pause when you listen to it. It makes you concentrate and reflect, and your mind just about begins to cloud over into whistfulness…until he’s back scatting at breakneck speed with the full band again and it’s like a bolt of electricity zaps it back into place. Magnificent.

I think I’ve used every superlative in my vocabulary to describe this package of albums, so I think I better stop. And you know what your job is now. I’ve hyped it – now get on to Lambert, Hendricks and Ross – there’s two thrilling hours of amazing vocal jazz waiting for you. How exciting!

306: Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack, by Peter McConnell & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Peter McConnell & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (USA/Australia)
Grim Fandango Remastered: Original Soundtrack (2015)
37 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

With bony hands I hold my partner

On soulless feet we cross the floor

The music stops as if to answer

An empty knocking at the door

It seems his skin was sweet as mango

When last I held him to my breast

But now we dance this grim fandango

And will four years before we rest

Olivia Ofrenda

Well. Surely this is serendipity at its finest? Today is the 2nd November, otherwise known as Día de Muertos – the Mexican day of the dead – and here we have an album dedicated to just that day. Surely there have been some ancestral forces at play in determining that. Thank you, ancestors!

I say the album is dedicated to it, it’s actually the game of which the album is the soundtrack that is dedicated to it. Grim Fandango, originally released in 1998, is one of the best video games of all time. The gameplay itself is in the classic LucasArts puzzle-solving adventure style, but it is its aesthetic and narrative that make the game truly iconic. It is a stunningly beautiful world with a unique and genius set of influences. The setting is the Land of the Dead whose architecture is a mix of art deco, Aztec and Latin American styles. The story is a classic film noir conspiracy and its cast the souls of the departed, making their way to the next world. They are reapers, gangsters, beatniks, revolutionaries, grizzled seadogs, colossal elemental spirits driving tricked-out hot-rods, and many more innocent dead caught in the crossfire. And all of this is set across four days: the Day of the Dead, four years in a row. I’m getting excited about it just writing about this game: that’s how much it impacted me.

The music is such an important part of this world building too. It suits the locations and the atmospheres to a T, and it uses just as many (if not more) influences. Throughout the soundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell, are elements of Mexican son and mariachi, Andean music, Indian classical, surf rock and tango, which all fit in and alongside the main sounds – cool and smoky jazz, frenetic bebop and dramatic and occasionally avant-garde classical orchestral music. Not only is it the perfect soundtrack to Grim Fandango, but it’s also just an amazing album.

The particular album is actually not the soundtrack as heard in the original 1998 release of the game, but of the 2015 ‘remaster,’ in which the game underwent a full clean-up, transforming the incredibly polygonal models for shiny, round, high-definition ones without losing any of its unique visual style. The music underwent an overhaul, too. The original soundtrack had been created with a handful of musicians and a huge library of sampled sounds to recreate the immense textures of orchestras and big bands. The problem was that, although the music sounded real enough for a 90s video game (when gamers were still used to music made up of bleeps and bloops), the timbres sounded dated in the 2010s. So, they went back to the original scores and re-recorded the lot of it from the ground up, with all live musicians and a full symphony orchestra. It sounds absolutely luscious.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t really intending to buy the remastered album; after all, I already had the original soundtrack and those slightly clunky sounds had their own charm to them. I had the remastered version of the game to listen to the new recordings if I wanted to, so what’s the point. But then I heard the new version of the piece ‘Casino Calavera’. Here is the 1998 original:

And here is the 2015 remaster:

For the first chunk of it, it’s pretty much what I expected: the same piece of music in every way, a swanky big band toe-tapper with a slightly dark edge to it, sounding lovely and polished by its performance by human musicians rather than computers. But then…an extended, improvised Latin jazz trombone solo! I wasn’t expecting it at all, and to hear a piece of music you know so well and love changed up in that way is like finding that your favourite book had a handful of equally-enjoyable chapters at the end of it that you’d never noticed before. The solo finished and I was already getting my bank card out to buy that soundtrack when…a clarinet solo! Oh man. Is it silly to be that blown away by the soundtrack to a video game?

I love it, I love it, and I will recommend Grim Fandango to absolutely anyone. If you have any interest whatsoever in video games, film noir, jazz culture or just great storytelling, you owe it to yourself to experience this game. Delve into its world and you’ll find something truly wonderful and a spectacular piece of art. And if all you want is a great and varied hour of music to divert you, the soundtrack will do just that too. Happy Day of the Dead!

295: The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, by Ray Charles

Ray Charles (USA)
The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years (2017)
23 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify playlist

During his time signed for Atlantic Records – from 1952 to 1959 – Ray Charles blossomed from a promising jazz and blues singer and pianist to a hero of R’n’B and arguably the inventor of soul music.

As with so many releases in the Rough Guide series (as we’ve covered here and here), this is just a stellar collection. Full marks to compiler (and top-tier music journalist) Nigel Williamson for putting it together, but one has to imagine that this was one of the easier Rough Guides to put together – by focussing on Charles’ eight-year stint at Atlantic, there’s not too much you can do to go astray. It was an incredibly exciting and fertile time for Charles’ music.

In fact, considering his long career, this compilation still manages to feature almost all of his biggest hits. The only two that would be missing would be ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ and ‘Unchain My Heart’, which were both made slightly later, for different labels. That this is a Rough Guide and not a ‘best of’ actually works in its favour, featuring tracks that would not usually get a look in otherwise. Although it only looks at a relatively short period, we get to hear how Charles explored his musical influences, maturing them into his own style and ultimately starting whole movements. We hear him experimenting with his sound, too: in small-band mode with tracks such as ‘What’d I Say?’, ‘Mess Around’ and ‘I Got a Woman’; with a big band for ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ and ‘Let the Good Times Roll’; and eventually playing with a full-scale string and wind orchestra like ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’. Nor are these ensembles used ‘just because’; instead, they serve only to heighten whatever emotion is being put across, from the rocking and rollicking piano-based small band stuff to the sentimental orchestral repertoire.

This compilation is so enjoyable and encompasses such a range of styles and approaches despite covering only a few years of Charles’ career that it is hard to argue the assertation that these ‘Atlantic Years’ were also Charles’ musical golden years. If you’re looking for an all-purpose, one-disc set of Ray Charles, you could do a lot worse than this album.

291: Mockroot, by Tigran Hamasyan

Tigran Hamasyan (Armenia)
Mockroot (2015)
12 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

It’s easy to describe Tigran Hamasyan’s music in a sentence and difficult to explain it at length. He is a jazz pianist, widely hailed as one of the greatest and most inventive players of his generation, who draws heavy influence from the music of his native Armenia as well as metal, electronica, prog and classical music. See, easy, right?

The tough bit is explaining why exactly it works so well. I’ve lots of jazz that incorporates music from the Middle East, and even lots of jazz specifically from the Caucasus, but none of it really comes close to the interconnectedness of style that Tigran Hamasyan achieves. What he creates is not jazz folk or folk jazz; it is something that is entirely both in an inseparable way. Fjoalzkz, you could say (I doubt you could say that).

The Armenian music that finds its way into Hamasyan’s style sounds incredibly ancient. He draws upon folk songs and church music and classical poetry that date back to the 9th century. Because the Armenian church was one of the very first organised Christian denominations (dating back even further to the 4th century), it is no surprise that the music it used in its worship and ceremony acts as a blueprint for many of the oldest Christian styles – and thus the classical music that descended from them – throughout Europe. When the beautiful, ornamented melodies from these Armenian traditions find a home within the ultra-extended harmonies and highly technical rhythms of contemporary jazz, all in one keyboard and the ten fingers of Hamasyan, they don’t sound like a collision of modern and ancient but instead like music that is both simultaneously.

That’s more than enough to wrap your head around during his solo piano pieces – such as the track ‘Lilac’ on this album (which also has more than a hint of Satie to it) or the entirety of his 2010 album A Fable – but on the rest of Mockroot he isn’t content with that. This is where the trio set-up comes in. Together with drums, bass and a load of synthesisers and other electronic effects (and a couple of guests too), this intricate, elegant jazz becomes the host for a very different monster. Crazy time signatures that overlap across various instrumental parts; basslines that wouldn’t be out-of-place in dubstep; 8-bit-style drum patches and synth runs; aggressive and irregular staccato chords and heavily compressed drum rhythms. The two closing tracks, ‘The Grid’ and ‘Out of the Grid’ are the ones you need to get this full-on mutant jazz vibe. I’m not the first to compare Hamasyan’s more out-there compositions to the extreme metal genre of djent, but that soundworld is so clear to me on pieces such as these. He even prepares his piano to get that classic metal palm-muting sound.

Even in combining traditional Armenian folk and religious music and jazz, Tigran Hamasyan creates something unique but with such a delicacy that keeps each style entirely intact. Then to bring in different styles that are in many ways antithetical to the gentleness of this fusion, to ramp it up to headbanging extremes and to still have each style involved upheld with equal integrity is an amazing feat of composition and performance from all involved. One of the greatest and most inventive players of his generation indeed. Simply stunning.

289: Hip Harp, by Dorothy Ashby

Dorothy Ashby (USA)
Hip Harp (1958)
7 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes…just £2.49!

Finding out about good music you’ve never heard before is a drug. Sometimes it can be in a totally unexpected place like being dragged around a high-street clothes shop and hearing them pumping out groovy Sudanese pop (that happened, turned out it was Sinkane. Thanks Bonmarché); sometimes it’s a friend hipping you to something they know you’ll like. Other times, it can literally be an idle thought that turns into a YouTube search.

One day for me, that idle thought was ‘I wonder if jazz harp is a thing.’ Of course it is. Within seconds I was listening to Hip Harp by Dorothy Ashby, which had been uploaded to YouTube in its entirety. Wow!

I had heard jazz harp before, but that was in the hands of Alice Coltrane, and while her music takes you on a spectacular spiritual and orchestral journey, this album hit me in an entirely different way. From the very first piece, ‘Pawkey’, it was exactly what I had in mind – the classical harp used as a solo hard-bop instrument, with just as much verve as a saxophone or trumpet but with its own unique characteristics.

In Ashby’s hands, the harp lends the bop a slinky and silken edge. Her melodies are elegant and dignified, often bringing in classical elements (such as on the flowing cool jazz version of ‘Moonlight in Vermont’), but she’s not afraid to make it dirty when it needs to be by digging out some deep blues or teasing insistent dissonances out for as long as possible before resolving them with a playful flick of the wrist. As an additional bonus, this album was made alongside flautist Frank Wess, whose impish lines also reflect Ashby’s slight classical inclination.

Hip Harp is probably not as well regarded as Ashby’s more experimental records such as Afro-Harping or The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (where she also plays the koto), but for me, it’s the one that stands out for its ultimately chilled vibe. It’s a really fun album, made with passion and skill and an evident joy in its music – it’s hard to imagine worries when you listen to this. And if you’re ever in a place where you simply need to hear some hard-bop harp, this album will hit exactly that spot.

285: Learning How to Fly, by Tuck & Patti

Tuck & Patti (USA)
Learning How to Fly (1995)
13 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Most jazz is cool. In fact, jazz is clearly the epitome of cool. Tuck & Patti’s Learning How to Fly is jazz, but it’s not cool. But that’s okay. It’s still a Good Album.

It’s a brave album to make. The sound is sparse. For 12 out of the 13 tracks, it’s just Tuck Andress on clean-toned electric guitar and Patti Cathcart on vocals. It’s not just song and accompaniment either – these are the duets of two highly accomplished musicians. Tuck’s guitar is incredibly intricate and technical without becoming robotic and Patti’s deep soul-infused voice gives echoes of Sarah Vaughan. Together they approach a variety of styles from jazz funk (‘Live in the Light’) to bossa nova (‘Learning How to Fly’)

The covers here are some of the highlights. Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Up From the Skies’ is turned into a fun bounce-along with Tuck playing a different crazy jazz chord every beat, and ‘Yeah Yeah’ (made famous by Georgie Fame) is a smooth groove with nice – although miniature – solos from both musicians. It’s ‘In My Life’ that is my favourite. It’s a very poignant song however it’s played, but Patti’s rich, soft voice brings out so much more emotion, elevating it into a temple of the bittersweet – it maybe even gets to me more than the Beatles’ original. Is that sacrilege? To top it off, Tuck’s classical-style guitar provides beautiful backing and manages to perfectly recreate the original’s harpsichord solo with astonishing technique.

So for all that, why do I say it’s not cool? It sounds really dated. Not in Tuck or Patti’s performances (although that smooth soul-jazz certainly had a vogue), but the production. There is so much reverb on it all, and it doesn’t even sound like a natural reverb either. It puts the whole thing incredibly squarely in the 1990s, and not really in a good way. Tuck’s signature long perm doesn’t do many favours in terms of datedness either.

If 12 tracks are just Tuck & Patti on their own, then what is the other? Well, that’s the last track on the album, a remix with incredibly reverby drums, keyboards and saxophone. It’s achingly cheesy. I’d say the additional instrumentation means that this track doesn’t fit with the rest of the album, but its atmosphere actually does. It’s just that the cheesiness is more apparent with more musicians. It’s less impressive than the duets though.

If it’s at all possible for you to listen past the 90s production values, please do. There are some captivating performances here from two great musicians. It’s just a shame that the intervening years have added a substantial amount of mustiness to it all. Ah well. We’ll all sound like that looking back in 25 years’ time.

284: Pixvae, by Pixvae

Pixvae (France/Colombia)
Pixvae (2016)
8 tracks, 45 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

There so many fusions, combinations and admixtures all across the world of music. We’ve considered a fair few on this blog, and there will be many more to come. Some fusions are incredibly effective and frequently successful due to many inherent and obvious similarities in their constructions – think jazz hip-hop or West African blues. Some take such wildly disparate styles, smush them together and fall flat on their face to the surprise of hardly anyone. And then you have fusions between musical genres that should never work, from very different times, places, and culture, but that end up creating mad, previously unthought-of mid-point that sounds so natural and potent you feel a fool for ever having doubted it.

To that end, stick Pixvae in your ears. Their music is Afro-Colombian math rock with a death metal jazz edge. The band is actually a six-piece collision of two groups, with guitar, drums and baritone sax/synths from the group Kouma and three voice and percussion from Bambazú. Why does it work? I don’t know, but it does.

The Colombian element is currulao, a style from the Pacific coast of the country. It is based on percussion polyrhythms and interconnected vocal lines that duck and dive over each other as well as making sweet harmonies. Having developed among the Afro-Colombian population, the music still retains a strong African vibe. In the original style, it is all held together with the marimba xylophone, but instead, in Pixvae, that place is filled by noise.

Great noise, mind. The ‘math’ element of the rock means that even more complex polyrhythms are added to those of the currulao, meaning at some points there can be three or four different beats going on at the same time, all shifting in and out of phase with each other. The guitar, saxophone and synths are very loud and all have their own rawness to them – the reedy honking of the sax, the overdriven distortion of the guitar, the sawtooth waves of the synth – but they still manage to add to the sound in a subtle way, mostly focusing on short and interesting riffs that loop around and around. Again, these riffs are usually of differing lengths but played simultaneously so that the effect is ever-shifting and evolving.

When both of these come together, they fit together in a really pleasing way. They don’t always fit together easily – there are lots of crunchy dissonances created in all of the different overlapping vocal and instrumental patterns – but the shifting nature of the melodic and rhythmic cycles mean that each piece contains waves of tension and release. Even the sweetness of the vocals against the noise of the instruments provide a juxtaposition that doesn’t need a resolution, they’re just two very different flavours that nevertheless combine perfectly, like chocolate and salt.

Afro-Colombian folk music and heavy math rock jazz seem too far removed to birth a successful fusion, but Pixvae found the elements that link them and exploit them to the grooviest ends. Maybe no musical fusion is too ambitious to work, perhaps it just needs the right musicians to find those connections. Pixvae do it in the most exciting way possible.


N.B. In my research for this album I came across the review in Songlines Magazine…and they gave it a one-star review! Bollocks to that. What do music journalists know anyway?!

275: Careless Love, by Madeleine Peyroux

Madeleine Peyroux (USA)
Careless Love (2004)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Listening to Madeleine Peyroux creates a particularly calm sense of enjoyment. The songs on this album don’t get you up and dancing or get you pondering politics or your own mortality. The songs themselves are full of feeling, but don’t manipulate your emotions to uncomfortable extremes. This is the music of a particularly elegant, lowly lit but still friendly and welcoming cocktail bar – perfect for lounging with a slight buzz and letting your mind drift away through the music like lazy coils of smoke.

Careless Love is a set of covers of old jazz songs, country music and American folk (plus one original song), all conducted in a mellow, jazzy manner that suits Peyroux’s equally mellow voice. In fact, the pervading thought that I have when I listen to this album is that she sounds almost exactly like Billie Holiday. Her tones are warm and gentle, and her phrasing has enough of a swing to it to get your foot tapping without raising your heartbeat above a pleasant resting rate. The resemblance is at times uncanny, but aside from one or two Holiday favourites, the songs here usually help the album steer clear of feeling like a tribute act.

And the song choices are inspired. They bring a new slant onto classic songs but retain enough of the originals’ edge as to stop it descending into ‘a bunch of songs covered in a wacky, unusual way’ territory. Peyroux’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ are both given different atmospheres but allow the lyrics their original weight, whereas ‘Lonesome Road’, ‘Careless Love’, and ‘No More’ capture the charm of the originals while updating their sound. Most impressive for me is ‘Weary Blues’, a cover of Hank Williams’ ‘Weary Blues From Waitin’’. The song is a heartbroken call into the empty night from an abandoned lover. Peyroux’s rendition is a slow and mournful blues, and the pain in her voice gives you the idea that this is a song of bereavement. So you go to listen to Williams’ 1951 original to hear how it sounded in its fully countrified manner…and in comparison, it sounds as if he got the complete wrong end of the stick – and he wrote it! The original seems bizarrely frivolous, as if he’s having too much fun for the upsetting lyrics. It’s fairly quick, it’s in a major key…it even has yodelling in it! Somehow, it feels that Peyroux did the song much more justice on this album than Williams did in the first place.

As much as I dislike the term, Careless Love is a great ‘easy listening’ album. It’s one that you can stick on and enjoy in the simplest way – these are sweet sounds that can balm the ears. And if you want to extend your listening experience, her previous album, 1996’s Dreamland, is also a very nice recommendation: listen out especially for similarly chilled versions of ‘Walking After Midnight’ and ‘La Vie En Rose’.

270: Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2, by Art Tatum

Art Tatum (USA)
Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2 (1992)
15 tracks, 63 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

There’s a great story that Oscar Peterson used to tell. Peterson himself was a child prodigy of both jazz and classical piano. Once, his father thought he was getting a bit too big for his boots, he sat him down and put on a record of Art Tatum playing ‘Tiger Rag’. Understandably, it blew little Oscar away. ‘Who are these musicians?’ he asked; ‘Not musicians, one, one man,’ was the answer. That’s enough to break an ego. The addendum of ‘also he was blind’ was probably unnecessary, but certainly adds to the humbling experience. Peterson couldn’t play for several weeks, and had nightmares – all his preconceptions of what great piano, great jazz and great classical music were exploded. Eventually he came back to the piano with renewed fervour, became a true master and then, about 80 years later, was written about in a blog called 365 Good Albums, surely a pinnacle of a storied career.

What music can scare a piano prodigy into crying themselves to sleep at night? So many jazz musicians could be described as virtuosic in their performance simply because jazz itself often requires virtuosity, with high technicality and a constant pushing of boundaries almost innate within good jazz, but Art Tatum was something else. He did things with a piano that were barely thought possible.

As per little Oscar Peterson’s misunderstanding, the way Tatum plays sounded (and still does sound) as if ten digits and one brain just isn’t enough. For starters, just the way he played the notes is astounding: changing complex chords every beat (or more); incredibly intricate runs played with lightning speed; layering many levels of syncopation and polyrhythm on top of each other like a musical moiré; even the way he could play two parts of entirely distinct rhythmic and melodic shape at once. His original training as a classical pianist is very evident in the way he approached the keyboard and his arrangements. It works the other way, too: he had such a heavyweight jazz mind that his performance of pieces from the classical world are infused with a jazz that’s completely inherent in his playing – you can hear that in his stampeding version of Massenet’s ‘Élégie’ from Les Érinnyes that opens today’s album.

That’s because his virtuosity reached beyond even his extraordinary playing skills. His use of harmony changed the way jazz worked forever. This wasn’t him playing things that people thought were impossible, instead he was playing things that were possible, but shouldn’t sound good. His harmonisations are built in a way that, out of context, would sound strange, clashing and chaotic. Chords were extended so far to include dissonant intervals such as tenths, elevenths and thirteenths (for the musicologically uninitiated, the basic chord goes up to the fifth interval), he changed the shape of the chords so that the notes were spread out in entirely new ways, and he swapped up chords that the brain would expect for ones that were sometimes only vaguely related, allowing the ear to hear colours that would otherwise have been inaccessible. On top of all that, he also enjoyed using bitonality – that is, playing the melody in a different key than the chords. Put it all together and it should have sounded cacophonous, but it didn’t. It certainly sounded dissonant, but those dissonances were beautiful rather than aggressive. Don’t ask me how he did it – chords have always baffled me – but whatever it is, it became the blueprint for generations of jazz musicians since.

The way Art Tatum played could – and probably will – be studied for centuries. How rare for one person to completely change the direction of any discipline, let alone one as multifaceted as jazz, but Art Tatum did it, and those ramifications are still heard today, in jazz, classical music, hip-hop and beyond. And he did it all while being mind-bendingly virtuosic and a showman at the same time. No wonder it broke Oscar Peterson’s brain.

266: How to Speak Hip, by Del Close & John Brent

Del Close & John Brent (USA)
How to Speak Hip (1959/1961??*)
13 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Learning different languages is essentially essential in our globalised world; not only does it allow you to communicate with a wider number of people, but it also allows you to view life and the world from a different perspective – by expanding your vocabulary into different languages, it opens up entirely new emotional resonances.

To that end, today’s album is an instructional record. How to Speak Hip offers valuable guidance ‘for English-speaking people who want to talk to – and be understood by – jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents and the criminal fringe.’ It is filled with language instruction and vocabulary building, as well as deeper dives into the wider culture, and we’re helped down this path by esteemed linguist Del Close and ‘actual hipster’ Geets Romo. Along the way, we discover the key differences between ‘cool’ and ‘uncool,’ learn how to properly identify the differences between ‘put ons,’ ‘put downs,’ ‘come ons,’ ‘come downs,’ and ‘bring downs,’ and really get to the bottom of the nuances inherent in the concept of ‘dig.’ We also learn about the hipster lifestyle on a series of field trips and exclusive access to a real hipster gathering to observe the spinning of a live riff or three. At the end of the journey, you should have all the starting tools to ‘convince a real hipster that hip is your language.’

Yes, this is a comedy record. It is devilishly funny and that it still holds up so well 60 years* after its first release is an amazing feat. Where a lot of the contemporary lampoons of hip culture really do seem naff and dated today, I think the reason that How to Speak Hip still works is that it is a lampoon made with love. Both Close and Brent were members of that same bohemian fringe, meaning that this album is comedy about hipsters, by hipsters and for hipsters – the joke is as much on straight society as it is the hip. In that way, it does actually offer a window into the hip scene in a ‘satire is a mirror’/‘many a true word is spoken in jest’ sort of way.

I consider How to Speak Hip to be one of the coolest records I own. Not only is it hilarious and eminently quotable (samples from this album show up in many unexpected musical surroundings, and I’ve slipped in Geets Romo quotes in lots of my professional writings too), it also has the feeling of being a real cultural artefact direct from one of the coolest subcultures of them all, just as much as a Charlie Parker record or a Beat novel.

Del Close and John Brent are laying down these riffs, and if you’re into jazz, hipsters or anything cool, you better pick up on it – let these cats hang you up. And above all: dig it.


* Time for me to get a bit nerdy about dates. This is a mystery I have yet to solve and I wonder whether it ever could be, if it’s even possible. Almost all sources – even bona fide academic texts – list the album as being released in 1959. 1959 was so important for jazz and it would stamp this album as being one of the many scene-defining works of that year. However, near the end of the album is a really short clip – just four seconds – of the solo from ‘We Free Kings’ by Roland Kirk…which was recorded in 1961. Therefore, in this particular state, How to Speak Hip couldn’t have been released in 1959. A few places, such as discogs or the British Library list the record as being from ‘1961?’ but those revisions only happened after I sent emails/comments to the same effect. So who knows when this is from? Not I. It doesn’t really matter. But it’s definitely a puzzle!

260: Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet, by the Horace Silver Quintet

Horace Silver Quintet (USA)
Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet (1959)
8 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I think Horace Silver is probably one of the most famous jazz musicians that could still claim to be underrated. While most music fans would probably recognise John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk as important figures in music (even if they may not be overly familiar with their output), Silver’s name never really seems to come up in that sort of context. In that way, he’s sort of a jazz fan’s musician – incredibly popular and influential but with an acclaim that never really exceeded the jazz sphere.

Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet – yet another classic jazz album from 1959 – is a wonderful distillation of everything that made Silver great. As a pianist, he is in top form here, but really, it’s the whole ensemble that are on fire, and Silver’s compositions and leadership is at the heart of that; there’s a reason why this line-up (Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor sax, Gene Taylor on bass and Louis Hayes on drums) became the nucleus of his most fruitful period.

In many ways, this album sounds quite simple compared to the mad mathematic experiments so excitingly pioneered at this time by Coltrane and Coleman, and without the fragile subtlety of Miles’ cool period that was in full swing. Instead, Silver came out with a jumping collection of hard bop, with a couple of blueses and sultry ballads thrown in for good measure. It’s not that he wasn’t making his own experiments with this album – elements of Brazilian and Cuban rhythm and harmony sneak their way into his playing and the whole feel of the ensemble in a way that would go on to become his distinctive sound, together with the music of his father’s native Cabo Verde – but that wild experimentation wasn’t necessarily the goal of this one.

For me, Finger Poppin’ is a terrific example of the joyousness that could be imbued into hard bop. It is played with serious minds and serious chops, but the music itself is less serious – you can feel the enjoyment in the studio leaking out of the speakers and into your ears. This album isn’t one that requires you to recalibrate your internal gyroscopes to understand a whole new jazz dimension, it’s just great music played really well and with a lot of fun.

If you're well into your music but are less of a jazz nut, dig this album. You'll be able to impress the jazz cats with your knowledge and you never know, maybe you'll discover your new favourite pianist.

255: The Contemporary Fortepiano, by the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio

Rembrandt Frerichs Trio (The Netherlands)
The Contemporary Fortepiano (2018)
15 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

One musical cross-section that intrigues me in particular is the continuum of styles between Western classical music and jazz. It’s a meeting of two highly complex musical forms, each with their own, often rather antithetical, ways of performance, composition and ceremony, but which can permeate each other’s worlds with beautiful results. We’ve examined it a little bit before with the Modern Jazz Quartet and Miles Davis and Gil Evans as they voyaged the Third Stream in the 1950s and 60s, but today’s album shows how musicians are still exploring the jazz-classical continuum with exciting results in the 21st century.

To see them from a distance, the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio may look like your standard jazz trio – keys, bass, drums. But get a little closer, and really listen to those timbres, and the standard becomes unique: the instruments they play are all from the baroque era of European music. Bandleader Frerichs plays the fortepiano, an almost-forgotten cousin of the modern piano with a slightly more muted tone but with the ability to have a sharper attack somewhat like a harpsichord; Tony Overwater plays the violone, the forerunner of the double bass with six strings and frets; Vinsent Planjer plays a self-designed drum set called a ‘whisper kit,’ using historical drums and percussion whose sound is somewhat softer and more spacious than a standard drum kit. With these unusual sonic textures at their disposal, the trio can approach various musical styles from a different angle, and by doing so illuminate different and unexpected connections.

As such, it’s not just jazz and classical that the trio work within on this album. For the most part, they have created a tridimensional music that draws on the art music of three cultures, the European (baroque), the American (jazz) and the Arabic (maqam). There are further stylistic journeys throughout the album – through French musette, Latin jazz, Armenian folk music and more – but it is those three traditions that permeate and mingle most often, and in the most pleasing ways.

Just by bringing their instruments into play and playing classical music with jazz harmonies, or jazz melodies with a classical construction, would have been an interesting enough experiment, but the profundity of the trio’s music comes from a purposeful lack of distinction between the two artistic traditions. The pieces here are solutions rather than mixtures – they cannot be pulled apart into their component parts, too deeply entwined are they. Somehow by bringing in the third, Middle Eastern dimension, the jazz and classical elements are bound tighter, as all three styles can work with each other for mutual influence, like musical trigonometry.

Although it wasn’t the trio’s first album together, The Contemporary Fortepiano is an amazing statement for modern developments in jazz-classical music, musical fusions in general and, yes, a bold new contemporary repertoire for the fortepiano. The Rembrandt Frerichs Trio’s intelligent and subtle experimentation continues, too, with this year’s album It’s Still Autumn in collaboration with Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor solidly within my favourite albums of the year so far. They’re playing with Kalhor at London’s Southbank Centre in October; it’s sure to be a whirlwind of intense invention and brooding, twisting, worldwide art. I can’t wait.

242: Sketches of Spain, by Miles Davis & Gil Evans

Miles Davis & Gil Evans (USA/Canada)
Sketches of Spain (1960)
5 tracks, 42 minutes
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Although Miles Davis had been defining and revolutionising jazz for a decade when he made this record (and he would continue to do so until his death in the 1990s), Sketches of Spain was his first large-scale experimental work. And large-scale it is – his stripped back quartet of Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums and Elvin Jones on percussion is joined by a 22 piece orchestra, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans.

With an orchestra comes orchestral music, and this album is one of the best examples of orchestral jazz to date. All the way through the album, the amount of actual ‘jazz’ – in terms of a definable musical style – is surprisingly small. Instead, the dominant sounds are of classical music and orchestrations based on Spanish folk music. Most notably, the pièce de résistance is a performance of the Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez,’ second movement. While the piece is certainly an arrangement and does exhibit jazz vibes now and then (although only in a couple of short sections), it is also remarkably true to the original piece, and played with the utmost reverence by Miles, who takes the original’s solo guitar parts on his flugelhorn and trumpet.

The genius of Miles Davis is that whatever music he plays, he makes it Miles music. It’s a subtle manipulation of context that allows him to achieve this. In a way, when I listen to this album, I perceive it as the equal and opposite of the works of George Gershwin. Whereas Gershwin took jazz and contextualised it as classical music, on Sketches of Spain, Miles took classical music and contextualised it as jazz. It's not even that he necessarily played the classical music in a jazz way, but the whole fact that he was Miles Davis means that this music was always going to be considered as jazz, no matter what he came out with. Therefore, when he releases an album of folkloric-inspired classical music, we listen to it in a different way, our ears are already attuned to expect one thing and the record gives us, mostly, something else. That way, the classical exists in the jazz context regardless of its own style, and it causes us to think about the sounds in a different way. In his own way, Miles made this music jazz, just by telling us it was.