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.

CD REVIEW: CSNY / Déjà Vu LIVE (Reprise Records)

Boy, did I SO MUCH want this to be a masterpiece. Granted, it’s a live album i.e. a picture of a moment, a glimpse of an evening, a facsimile of an experience. Nostalgia for those who were at the shows of CSNY’s 2006 Freedom of Speech tour, which by all accounts of the long-time fans I’ve spoken to who attended, was very moving, inspirational and impassioned.

And yes, if you are a right-wing fan of CSNY (there must be some...those who just like good music, or perhaps some who don’t get what they hear or pay attention to the words – like those who thought BORN IN THE U.S.A. was a pro-Reagan song), you should probably stay away from this CD, and I’m sure if you're a neo-con who happened to find yourselves in attendance at these shows you will run from this CD in due course.

For you old hippies, left wingers, hopeful idealists, cynical rebels, believers in free speech and democracy this just might be your cup of organic chai. Now, it’s not the best CSNY musically, but then again, they have always been about capturing moments, not necessarily striving for perfection. Some nights (years, projects) there are more illuminating moments than others.

And if you couldn’t make it through Neil’s recent LIVING WITH WAR aural diatribe against the current administration’s veil of b.s. then this outspoken revisiting of many of that records songs and ALL of the invective stance espoused by that release than this outing may soon replace TRANS as your least favorite Neil experience.

As a window into the place where art and politics, the 60s, rock n roll and outspoken creative, humanistic stances meet then this is a CD-long glimpse into what is the bread and butter of what has fueled CSNY for 40 years of sporadic interaction and inspiration—not just a nostalgia trip—but the belief that as artists, part of what you do is seek truth. You investigate, observe, spill your guts, take a stand, remain fearless in the eyes of those who observe you, those who criticize you, those who look to your for insight and inspiration.

So thanks to these guys, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg..those who at one time or another could not help themselves but observe and investigate, explore and seek some kind of truth beyond the egos, the in-fighting, the girls and drugs and glow of success and put something on the line for what they believe.

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Now, musically, there’s not much you haven’t heard from these guys before (especially if you’ve been paying attention to Neil lately), but this won’t be the album to turn around any new, young listeners who wonder what the fuss has been about, unless of course, they are recently politicized and looking for messages they can rekindle into their own passions. The longed-for ferocious guitar interplay between Stills and Young is not the focus here though there are glimmers. In fact Stills is all but non-present here with only three of his tunes in less than remarkable renditions and his guitar and harmoniy voc al work takes a decided low profile. Neil is, as always insane on the guitar. The opening notes of his first solo on AFTER THE GARDEN just cracked me up. So audacious and appropriate (like the ballsy, dirge version of BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND from Neil’s Arc-Weld tour during the first Gulf War), explosive, war-like edge.

Now, back in the day, being a huge David Crosby fan, the first thing I’d do when I got back from a CSN or CSNY show or cracked the cello off of a new LP or CD was to count how many songs each of the four proponents contributed. Soon realizing that I’d never get enough Crosby songs, whether because his brilliance came in less prolific spurts than the foaming flow of Neil's output, the hooky craftsmanship of Nash or the brazen macho of Stills' writing, or because he just couldn’t win those internal battles over running order, minutes available and such. Each album and tour had a figure who seemed to lead the fray in the perspective department, at least until the CSN of the later, Neil-less years became more of a nostalgic live experience than a viable group with something NEW to say.

The fact that the disc starts with a Woodstock-y audience chant over which the band harmonizes on an acapella rendering of Croz’s timeless WHAT ARE THEIR NAMES is a wonderfully timely opening. This followed by Neil’s studio-tracked solo piano (with minimal overdubbed synth and bass by Neil) piece LIVING WITH WAR-THEME is curious. I wonder if this was taped and added to bookend the message of the CD or if it was perhaps piped into the p.a. at the start of the shows or as soundtrack to a pertinent video? I would love to see some DVD of this tour since I unfortunately missed it.

The fact that the four of them are coming together more often in the last decade than ever before has been just a good sign and sure, Neil’s direction has predominated, being the force of nature that he is and by far the most prolific and visionary artist of his generation.

Musically, it is nice to hear the harmonies of these guys together on some of Neil’s new stuff as well as the old stand-bys. The vocal version of LIVING WITH WAR is especially nice as is the aforementioned AFTER THE GARDEN. What I just don’t get is the trumpet. PLEASE leave it at home. Or at least get someone who can play in tune. I get the idea of it…I like and actually adore the mariachi punch that this kind of coloration gives the tunes what would work best on one tune as coloration gets old when so shabbily executed each time it rises out of the mix. Perhaps, I was just SO looking forward to hearing these great songs without the horn with perhaps Steve Stills filling in with riffs or Spooner Oldham filling the spot with a tasty B-3 fill. But hard to second-guess Neil. ROGER & OUT is gorgeous and haunting, somewhat like a cross between a poignant and mournful version of Dylan’s KNOCKIN ON HEAVEN’S DOOR fused with the melancholy edge of CORTEZ THE KILLER’S softer huge guitar sentiments. This is the highlight of the disc for me, I think, on first listen.

This is followed by a gorgeous rendition of FIND THE COST OF FREEDOM missing only the transcendent high harmony of their earlier years’ versions. TEACH YOUR CHILDREN, while apropos and a ready anthem, is also a bit tossed off sounding, as the huge anthemic hits tend that get troded out towards the end of shows often are. More about connecting with the fans than actually nailing something stunningly musical. And again, with the original studio version being a signpost of a generation, always a hard one to top.

The album ends with the second instrumental version of the LIVING WITH WAR-THEME. This is a very evocative and hauntingly beautiful Neil melody. Simple and moving. Here with some subtle synth strings as opposed to the earlier versions more active effects.

All in all, this album, while musically not their most compelling of output (always their first two studio records and Four-Way Street must be deemed essential along with the black CSN record—and I won’t even get started on their solo output which is filled with a wealth of treasures), this album makes me proud to be a long time fan, proud to be someone who can still believe in the power of art--be it Picasso’s Gurenica, Hunter S. Thompson’s political writing, Robert Mapplethorpe’s stunning visual images, or CSNY’s “Ohio--to observe, inspire, pontificate, push buttons and allow the audience to see another point of view on the road to forming one’s own ever-developing opinions.

At the outset of this review, I was half way through my first listen and I was feeling a bit disappointed. Now by the end of the first spin, as I hit the play button once more, I am sitting peaceful. Nostalgic, hopeful, and impassioned on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention. Forward into the fray. One day at a time, head held high, heart a-flutter.