TODAY'S LISTENING PLEASURES

BILL EVANS - THE COMPLETE VILLAGE VANGUARD RECORDINGS, 1961
(*****) 2003 compilation/boxed set

My first thoughts on returning to these recordings which I haven’t listened to in years--and this being a recent (2003) compilation of all existing material from the original recorded sets from August 25, 1961—is how much I love a great jazz bassist.

Since I first heard music from these sessions on various original LP releases such as Waltz For Debby and Sunday at the Village Vanguard back in the 70s when I was a college kid diving headfirst into the jazz world, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time listening and watching live performances by some of the great bass players of the past half century…Dave Holland, Charlie Haden, Ron Carter, Christian McBride, Cecil McBee, Fred Hopkins, Buster Williams, Michael Moore are some of my favorites as well as their illustrious predecessors Ray Brown and Milt Hinton. Sad to say that I missed the incredible Scott LaFaro.

His playing with the Bill Evans trio were really historically important moments in the development of the bass in jazz. Much more eloquent scribes as well as his peers and antecedents on the instrument have sung his praises more knowledgeably and poetically than I could hope to. I am just obligated to mention how much I enjoyed every moment of his playing on these spectacular sessions after so many years away.

Not to take anything away from the atmospheric, introspective vision and harmonic beauty of Bill Evans’ unique approach to the piano or Paul Motian’s delicate and concise lyricism at the drum kit but to these ears it is LaFaro’s playing in this particular group that made this the benchmark for all piano trios to follow. He’d only been on the scene for seven short years but already made his mark with a myriad crop of jazz heavyweights from Evans, Ornette Coleman, and Stan Kenton to Benny Goodman, Chet baker and Booker Little. That he died tragically at 25 just 10 days after these recordings were made is one of the major losses in jazz music.

The three discs in this wonderful collection capture the ambiance of the venerable Vanguard and can be left in your CD changer indefinitely, listenable anytime of the day or night.



(The video above feat the pre-remastered version from the Sunday Night at the Vanguard cd, not the 2003 reissued remaster but wonderful nonetheless.)

REVEREND GARY DAVIS – DEVILS & ANGELS: The Ultimate Collection
(****) 2001 compilation/box set

From the two opening tracks, which are fascinating oddities in the entire realm of recorded music, Davis’s facile picking and unique style interspersed with his unique, off-the-cuff, and funny vocal stabs that set us up for the revelatory three CDs of essential music to come, this boxed set is a pleasure for new and old fans alike.

Many have known Davis only through the more famous covers of his material by 60s icons the Grateful Dead and more esoteric well-knowns such as bluesman Taj Mahal, roots rockers The Blasters and various gospel hitmakers, his “big hits” like “Samson & Delilah”, and “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” are not to be found here. There are tunes in this set that Davis worshipper Jorma Kaukonen has later oft covered solo or with his group Hot Tuna, such as “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed & Burnin’” and “I Am The Light of This World, as well as a handful of tunes rekindled often in gospel circles.

Davis’s primal and essential 30s material is collected elsewhere. These recordings compile sessions and live sets from 1954-1966, the cusp and tail-end of “the great folk music scare” when much of the music and many of the remaining and forgotten folk and blues artists of previous generations were unearthed and given their due by a whole new generation of music lovers. Davis is one of the few who never stopped performing. Music was always his day job.

His incredible facility and stylistic distinctiveness of his guitar playing took the Piedmont style of his early Carolina roots and updated it with an aggressive soloing edge that embraced some of the sophistication of the bigger world outside of the confines of his Southern roots.

Some modern listeners may have trouble with the primitive nature of these recordings and the fluidity of the “tuning” of his guitar, but the passion, dexterity and difficulty of many of these performances will unearth a treasure trove for fans of rural blues and of Davis. For anyone newly interested in real, impassioned guitaristics, blues, gospel and Americana, this set provides a lightning bolt. As the Reverend has done over and over again to young players and music fans, neophytes will be converted. Feel the power of the spirit.

At different points in this set I’ve been either sent to my guitar in the corner to practice and practice a certain riff or to sit and consider why I would bother to try to replicate anything so unique, timeless and iconoclastic.



NELS CLINE – COWARD
(****) 2009

First, I must admit that I love psychedelic music of all stripes. I adore guitar work-out a la Fahey, Kottke, Hedges, Bola Sete, Robert Fripp. I love atmospheric touches in the studio, be they Hendrix’ innovative guitar FX, Crimson’s edgy united front, Eno’s washes of ambience, Daniel Lanois’s musty, soulful and breathy sense of heavy air around everything…and put all of these reference points into an instrumental record by one of the top guitarists of the moment, Nels Cline. For you newbies, yes, the Nels Cline of Wilco fame, who has been a major part of some of the most interesting and luxuriously special progressive and challenging music of the past couple of decades.

On first listen, this disc took me immediately back to my early college days when I was camped on the couch of a couple of college teachers who nightly opened a can of worms via my ear canals, playing everything from Robbie Basho, Seta, Fahey, Indian music, Jim Hall, and vast esoterica while their canary Mimi chirped from across their big open, doorless home.

It also reminds me of my very earliest 4-track cassette experiments, albeit with much more technique and bigger ideas. Those were days of permanent headphone hair, where the ringing and the bliss started, where the hair looked ridiculous whether the phones were on or, rarely, off. That’s when I learned 90% of my later studio chops, through open-minded experimentation, trial and error, beautiful convergences and tragic misfires. Spectacular music.

This is an album I could put on at low volume and leave it on repeat for days and never hear the same thing twice or crank it until the rogue, half-squirrel/half-beavers finally vacate my chimney they have commandeered for the past year...hmmm, I may have finally solved that p[roblem...but I digress...Gotta love it. Nels Cline is an endlessly fascinating force of nature.



AND I’VE BEEN IN A NEIL YOUNG MODE LATELY…

NEIL YOUNG – AMERICAN STAR & BARS
(****) – 1977 / 2003 remaster

I hadn’t revisited this album in years. One of Neil’s stranger mish-moshes of tunes it features some of his most endearing country-tinged numbers which set linked the hit country feel of the Harvest LP with his first full foray into the Nashville side of his milieu, Comes A Time.

Side One of the LP jumped right out of the chute with a waltz and two-step feel, Ben Keith’s pedal-steel and a bit of fiddle for a pure country vibe, surrounding simple love songs about love and loss featuring the luscious backing vocals of Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larsen… “Old Country Waltz”, “Saddle Up The Palomino” (okay albeit weird rockin’ country), “Hey Babe”, “Hold Back The Tears” weren’t hits for Neil but for a guy like me living in So. Cal and recently advancing to a semi-proficient stage on my acoustic guitar, it was a great chance to add a batch of simple and heartfelt tunes to my living room concerts with friends. That Ronstadt claims she walked in thinking they were rehearsing and didn’t know Neil was rolling tape is a wonderful testament to the infectiousness of the tunes. “Bite The Bullet” is a nasty little song about cunnilingus gets grungy a la Crazy Horse (that band's rhythm section graces side one)and heats things up in a Southern Rock kind of way. This tune wouldn’t sound out of place on a Black Oak Arkansas, Lynyrd Skynyrd, or Outlaws album if it was slicked up a bit, but of course, comes off sounding like pure Neil as does everything the man puts out there.

The sessions for side one were the last recorded, all done in April of 1977 and sound decidedly different from everything on side two where things get a bit, uh, esoteric.

The first tune was the earliest recorded (Nov. 1974) and is acoustic with the exception of Tim Drummond's bass. Karl T. Himmel on drums and Ben Keith on Dobro round out the band alongside Neil’s strummed acoustic guitar. Emmylou Harris’s harmony is as radiant and pristine as anything she’s delivered in a career of glistening moments. The secret weapon in this mellow and easy flowing folk/country is the open ended question at the end of the song which gives the track it’s name, “Maybe the star of Bethlehem wasn’t a star at all…”

Next up is what, at the time, was possibly the strangest tune in all of Neil’s large and expanding repertoire. “Will To Love’ is a very spacey, languorous piece in which Neil seems to be singing about salmon spawning and their relentless drive upstream to keep up the bloodline. I know, "Huh?" The fact that the tune seems almost formless and out of time on first listen makes it even stranger. That Neil overdubs all of the instruments and vocals himself (recorded in May of 1976, there are sounds that resemble a popping fire a la his recording of “Soldier” first heard on Journey Through The Past in 1972, but could be buttons on his sleeve hitting the guitar?) was in and of itself interesting at the time. Then, as this ends and you are contemplating just what the hell you just heard, the next tune seems to burst out mid-riff into one of the heaviest yet Crazy Horse manifestos, “Like A Hurricane”.

The evocative live video for this song featured Neil wailing on Old Black--his iconographic Gibson Les Paul--with a big fan blowing his hair back (remember this is pre-MTV days). It helped cement this rave up as one of his fans all-time favorites…and for good reason – it became a show stopper year after year tearing the roof of shed, arenas, stadiums and clubs for the next 3 decades.

The album ended with another Crazy Horse stomper this one from the “Rockin’ The Free World”, “This Note’s For you” novelty/anthem school of Neil…”Homegrown” a sprite-ly sing-a-long ode to the joys of marijuana farming at home. He’d later revisit this theme on Comes A Times’s “Field of Opportunity”.

With the songs back to back on CD, and with 30+ years of hindsight and 100s of listenings later, American Stars n Bars doesn’t sound near as odd as it first did. In fact, it sounds like late night phone call from a quirky old friend.

Not to mention it bears one of my favorite all-time album covers. Don't ya miss album covers. I remember taking this home and laughing at it over and over while i listened to the LP for the first time.