Bossa Nova - the new way

It's generally agreed that the first true bossa nova record was João Gilberto's recording of Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes' 'Chega de Saudade which was released in July 1958. (The version you see here is a much later performance). However, as is so often the case, this 'new thing' or 'new way' didn't just emerge fully formed from nowhere. As I observed in my last posting, there were strong elements of it in the work of Laurindo Almeida and Bud Shank in 1953, but the true early stirrings of it can be traced back to Noel Rosa and his fellow musicians of Bando de Tangarás, who were probably the first to bring a more progressive approach to the form known as Samba-canção. I include this extremely rare clip, not because it sounds much like bossa nova, but because it illustrates a factor in the development of the music. The essentially Afro Brazilian samba was beginning to acquire white middle-class practitioners that were taking it in a new direction, in much the same way that the 'cool school' jazz had developed in the U.S.A.

A figure often mentioned in the same breath as the more famous bossa nova practicioners is Dick Farney, and his 1946 recording of 'Copacabana' (a composition by Bando de Tangarás member - Braguinha) was another recognisable step along the route. Here is Farney performing the song sometime in the seventies, accompanied, I thought, by the great Brazilian pianist, Cesar Camargo Mariano. I now know that it is in fact Hilton Valente, and I thank the correspondents that put me right on this (see comments below). The song may well be familiar to you bossa enthusiasts out there, but how many of you realised that it predates the official birth by 12 years? I certainly didn't until I started digging!

Another significant figure is the guitarist Garoto, who was experimenting with more complex harmonies, using many of the altered and extended chords (although in the context of Samba and Choro) that were to become such a part of the bossa sound and would influence so many guitarists. I could find no clips of Garoto himself but here are two of his compositions performed by another great Brazilian guitarist, Paulo Belinatti.

Meanwhile, the Rio based singer and pianist Johnny Alf (real name Alfredo José da Silva - he had been advised to change it when he joined an artistic group at the Brazil-United States Institute) was beginning to evolve his own style, mixing Brazilian songs by the likes of Dorival Caymmi with North American influences that undoubtedly included Bebop. He played regularly in the clubs and bars that were frequented by many of the soon-to-emerge new breed of bossa nova musicians. His 1955 recording of Rapaz de Bem was another distinct milestone along the way. This performance of it recorded in 2005 shows that he continues to deliver the goods!

The stage was more or less set and the artists that would put the final elements of bossa nova in place were now beginning to emerge - Louis Bonfa, João Donato, Tom Jobim, Carlos Lyra and Roberto Menescal started to produce a string of compositions that were quickly taken up by the public in Brazil. By the time that Marcel Camus' multi-award winning film Orpheo Negro ('Black Orpheus'), with it's sound track of Bonfa and Jobim compositions, was released, the world seemed ready for this new sound. That the North American 'cool school' jazz musicians took such an interest in it is not surprising, given that the harmonic approach that drove bossa nova owed a lot to jazz in the first place: what was more surprising was the enthusiasm with which it was taken up generally. By 1963, the phrase 'Bossa Nova' had become thoroughly mainstream and was being used indiscriminately to promote all manner of things. Unfortunately, the music itself often got forgotten along the way, witness this dreadful Elvis Presley clip - 'Bossa Nova Baby" (Don't worry. It's mercifully short).

I have a few theories of my own about the development of this music and the influence of North American jazz upon it. There is no doubt that Messrs Farney and Alf were influenced by jazz, or that Garoto had visited the United States and met jazz musicians there. Laurindo Almeida was consciously trying to blend the two elements of Brazilian music and jazz together. Jobim cites J.S.Bach and Hector Villa Lobos as influences, but was also an enthusiastic admirer of many of the composers responsible for The great American songbook. The idea of taking the samba and some how 'cooling it down' was at the heart of the groove, the trick being to retain the fire of the 2/4 samba in a laid back 4/4 beat. This was achieved by stretching the basic rhythmic phrase over two bars and the addition of the kind of harmonies that were more often associated with 'cool' jazz went a long way towards completing the picture. But there was also Rio de Janeiro itself. All of those ingredients could have come together in São Paulo or Salvador and the results would have been very different.

One last element: we associate Bossa Nova with a very laid back style of singing - undersinging even - and my theory is that Chet Baker's vocal style was an influence on this. I have some recordings of João Gilberto that predate 'Chega do Saudade' and he is much more of a 'sambista' in style. We know by their own testament that many of these innovators were listening to West Coast musicians, and Gerry Mulligan is often mentioned. Could it be that Gilberto heard the 1956 'Chet Baker Sings' album and was inspired?*

If you want to know more about this subject I can recommend a book - 'The Brazilian Sound. Samba, Bossa Nova and the Popular Music of Brazil' by Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha. (ISBN 1-56639-545-3) and a new DVD -'Bossa Brazil: Stories of Love. The Birth of Bossa Nova' narrated by Carlos Lyra and Roberto Menescal. (Warner DVD 5 051442 806328).

I'll conclude this post by including a little clip from the end of Orpheo Negro, not because it's a bossa nova milestone but because it invokes the spirit of the music for me - and the spirit of an innocence that is, alas not so easy to find in Rio these days. The tune is Louis Bonfa's 'Samba Do Orpheo'. I have taken the liberty of including a comment on this video from the YouTube site that I thought was particularly pertinent:-

MP S Shanahan writes -"By itself this scene can seem too sweet. But in the film it immediately follows the death of Orfeu, Euridice in his arms. This moment of hope in the wake of tragedy, with its sense of an ancient tradition being carried forward by the children, is one of the most bittersweet endings in all of cinema. It is, to me, a much more satisfactory ending than most other retellings of the Orpheus myth (while several great operas tell this story, for example, none of them have particularly good endings)."

- and if that whets your appetite to see the film then so much the better!

* The answer to my speculation would seem to be -probably not. I have just (12/8/08) found this excellent and informative piece about him by the splendid Daniella Thompson:-

http://daniellathompson.com/Texts/Brazzil/Plain_Joao.htm

Sheer Brazilliance

I'm not one of those people who prefer the sound of vinyl to that of the CD - I won't bother to rehearse any arguments here because that's not the subject of this post - so I'm constantly on the lookout for CD reissues of favourite albums. As a consequence I was thumbing through my remaining LPs the other day looking for a particular piece of information when I came across Brazilliance Volume 1 by guitarist Laurindo Almeida and saxophonist and flautist Bud Shank. I bought this when it was reissued in the sixties but realised that I hadn't actually heard it for some 25 years or more. A brief scan of the track list fired up the memory and I was soon on line and searching. Sure enough it had been reissued and was available to buy (for those that are interested it's on World Pacific: CDP 7 96339 2). I listened to it again when it arrived the day before yesterday and immediately wished that I had replaced it years ago.

I have mentioned Laurindo Almeida before (The twang's not the thang). It was only when I read the sleeve notes for this album that I realised that he was (a) Brazilian and (b) that he did not play exclusively classical music. I immediately fell in love with this album, having recently heard and embraced bossa nova for the first time, but didn't realise that it had actually been recorded in 1953, predating the official birth of bossa nova by more than five years. Although it's not strictly a bossa nova album it has enough of the ingredients that went into that form to be clearly identified as a very close relative, in that it brings together Brazilian rhythms and West Coast or Cool School sensibilities. It is now generally agreed that many of the Rio de Janeiro based originators of bossa nova were strongly influenced by the harmonic approach of those jazz forms although at least one of their number - Carlos Lyra - wrote a song about it called Influência do Jazz which expressed a certain degree of unhappiness about this state of affairs.




A few years back I interviewed the Brazilian singer Mônica Vasconcelos in São Paulo for BBC Radio Cornwall's 'Sounds of Jazz' programme. When I asked her about the jazz influence she was not forthcoming. "We do what we do." she said, somewhat enigmatically, although it's interesting to note that her long term collaborator has been the superb German-born saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock.

Bud Shank must share equally in the praise for this album, because his openness to other musical forms (he also went on to collaborate with the great Japanese Koto player Kimio Eto) allowed him to adapt his approach to suit the music. It wasn't a forced fit, it was a genuine amalgamation of ingredients. Which is not to say that the accommodation was all one way - Laurindo Almeida had moved to the U.S.A. originally to join Stan Kenton's band, where a young Bud Shank was already beginning to make a name for himself. Although Almeida was never an improviser he was perfectly able to swing and to make what he played seem spontaneous. He had a definite feel for jazz and was to continue to collaborate with Shank on and off for the rest of his life.

Nobody has posted any of the material from this album to YouTube and I do not make links to free download sites, but here's something from Brazilliance Volume 2, which came out five years later



Here is a good example of Almeida's classical technique subtly transmuting into something else with this bossa version of Debussy's 'Claire de Lune' -


and here's Bud Shank playing his own composition, 'Elizete', on the 1963 'Brasamba' album that he made with - among others - Clare Fischer, Joe Pass and ex Jimmy Giuffre bassist Ralph Peña.


I could bang on some more about this - with hindsight - hugely significant album but I won't, except to observe that some of the tunes on the disc went in a lot deeper than I realised. When during my first visit to Brazil I heard Pixinguinhas classic choro composition 'Carinhoso' for the first time, I felt as if I had known it all my life, which of course I very nearly had. I hadn't made the connection with this album because the feel is a lot different and the title had been misspelled as 'Carinoso' on the original sleeve (and in fact the CD reissue has yet another spelling, giving it as 'Cariñoso').

I'm now inspired to pick up the bossa nova story in my next posting. Given that this year saw the 50th Anniversary of the 'New Thing' it seems only appropriate.

Regular readers of this blog will realise that I have, at last solved the mystery of how to embed the YouTube clips. I shall be revising all the previous entries over the next few weeks, which should make for a slightly less tedious viewing experience. Now if only I can solve the mystery of why the Blogger software sometimes won't let me format my paragraphs properly...

It's Trad, dad

By 1959 a lot of things were beginning to change for me. I had passed the 13+ (technical) exam and gained a place at Southall Technical College, the family had moved (instead of living in the flat over the shop we now lived in a three bedroomed semi with a large garden, about a quarter of a mile away from it) I had acquired my first guitar and I had abandoned The Eagle comic in favour of a weekly publication entitled Jazz News. I was also beginning to become politicised. These things affected me in various ways.

The move to the new school was a bit of a shock to my system. I had hated my Secondary Modern school even more than I had hated Primary school and so had made a determined effort to pass the exam that would get me out of there. Quite how I emerged as suitable fodder for the Technical curriculum is anybody's guess - and anybody less suited to such a regime than me would be very hard to find. I had (and have) no mechanical aptitude or enthusiasm, an interest in chemistry that extended only as far as the ability to create spectacular explosions from common household ingredients (under the helpful tutelage of my friend, Fen), a total lack of interest in Physics and a total lack of comprehension of applied mathematics. The only other 'grown up' discipline that I tackled was Economics and here I waded in with great enthusiasm, writing long and closely reasoned essays that were invariably marked with an 'E' and deemed 'socialistic nonsense' by the Economics master.

In my first year at Southall Tech I had developed an unpleasant and disabling skin disease that affected my hand and feet, resulting in a long period of hospitalisation and recuperation that meant that I was away from school for best part of half a year. The good part was that I was excused engineering when I returned, on the grounds that I was probably allergic to the various greases, oils and cutting compounds that one came into constant contact with in the engineering work shops. As a consequence I started spending two whole afternoons a week in the newly commissioned Art Department (The 'Tech' was soon to be amalgamated with Southall Grammar School and as a consequence their was a statutory requirement for Art facilities as the Grammar's intake started at age 11). This 'art' time was also to prove influential in my life.

Sadly, I can find no trace of information about Jazz News on line, but I remember the publication with great affection. The infamous 'Trad' boom was beginning to happen, which meant that the cover story was generally about Chris Barber, Acker Bilk or Kenny Ball, but within its pages (all of which I devoured avidly -up to and including the publishing and printing details in small print at the bottom of the last page) all forms of jazz and related musical forms were catered for. I'm pretty sure that that was where I saw a review of Red Bird Dancing on Ivory, a poetry and jazz experiment by Christopher Logue and The Tony Kinsey Quintet (an EP which I immediately went out and bought). It was certainly where I first saw an advertisement for a Topic EP entitled 'All For Me Grog' by A.L.Lloyd, which introduced me to English folk music, although this was not until about 1961). I also remember seeing an ad in the classified section which offered jazz piano lessons given by somebody with the unusual name of Manfred Mann.

The main change in my life that the guitar brought about at this point was sore fingers. It took me a very long time to master my first three chords as I am not by nature very dexterous, but I did plug away fairly determinedly, despite always having to ensure that my father was nowhere in the vicinity before I started to practice. I managed to get the E and A major chords under my belt fairly quickly, but the contortions required for the B7 chord remained so foreign to my fingers that a slick change was next to impossible for me. I recently found a photograph in my archives, taken in late 1962, of my friend Paul and I playing and singing together in a pub. As he pointed out to me when I sent a copy to him (and that's another story!), my hand is firmly locked in the B7 position although I am not actually playing at that point, whilst Paul is clearly playing E7 ( D7 capo-ed at the 2nd fret). I'm damned sure that I'm holding on to that chord shape so that I don't forget it.

I'm sure that Jazz News also heralded the Beaulieu Jazz Festival of 1959, which I have strong memories of watching on TV. That strange brief emergence of 'Trad' (or British Traditional jazz - most of which was dominated by the incessant plunking of a banjo) as a pop music fad had just started to happen and the Beaulieu event, which was a clearly recogniseable ancestor of today's pop festivals, featured quite a lot of it. Trad was also beginning to find its way onto all sorts of pop programmes on both radio and television. My father walked into the living room one day when I was watching one of these programmes. The band - probably Barber's, Ball's or Bilk's - were on a bandstand in the studio and a bunch of young and (to my father's jaundiced eye) extremely eccentrically dressed people were skip-jiving to them. "What in God's name is all that about?" said the old man. "It's trad." I replied. "Baah!" he spat. (He really did used to say Baah.) "They're just a load of pimps and panders!" Then he stalked out of the room leaving me somewhat baffled. At the age of fourteen I had some notion of what a pimp was but as yet was only aware of panda's with an 'a', and thought it quite the most peculiar insult I had ever heard.

By the start of the sixties, an increasingly 'must-have' item of apparel was the C.N.D. badge, and one was frequently to be seen adorning the baggy jumper that was part of the trad uniform. My brother, Alcohol, had recently finished his National Service and was beginning to get involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was not long before I, too, was sporting a badge and attending 'Ban the Bomb' demonstrations, where trad jazz and folk music was much in evidence. I began to meet like-minded people that lived near by and to hang out with them of an evening. Meanwhile, back at school, I was becoming more and more of an outsider. Most of my fellow pupils were into The Shadows, motorbikes and football and I had no time for any of these things. In the meanwhile I had made good use of my art room time and gained a Royal Drawing Society Diploma. On the strength of this I was offered a place at Art school but my father refused me permission to take up the offer, on the grounds that he wasn't going to '...have a damn beatnik in the family...'.

Battle lines were being drawn.

Comments and opinions...

When I first started writing this blog I did actually consider the 'ego' side of it. Who cares what I think about anything? What right have I to write? After some deliberation I decided that it couldn't do much harm. Nobody is forced to read this stuff and one or two people might actually enjoy some of it. I certainly enjoy writing and feel that I have enough knowledge and experience of my main subject to make these pages informative and interesting. I also looked forward to some lively debate where appropriate. After all, when I go into 'review mode' I am stating opinion and not fact (although I do go to considerable lengths to show how these opinions were - and continue to be - shaped.

I was vaguely disappointed when I picked up my first adverse comment (after Little Jazz Birds and other related species) - not because it was adverse but because it was illiterate, spiteful and anonymous - but I let it stand. I didn't bother to reply to it at the time because I doubted very much if the perpetrator would return to these pages (unless, of course it was to see if he/she had scored a hit and got a rise out of me). Then a couple of days ago I got another one (after Jazz, delicious hot, disgusting cold) which was again anonymous and intended to offend. Two things became apparent after reading this one - (1) The perpetrator was unlikely to be the same one and (2) he/she had patently not actually read the piece in question. I subsequently went back and posted a reply to both comments and gave as good as I got.

I'm a big boy now. I can take criticism. I can take offensive remarks come to that and hand them out. But there seems to me something very puerile about this kind of anonymous sniping on the web. A little research has revealed that this is very common practice all over cyberspace. People who plainly would not have the courage to make such remarks in person will gleefully shower bile and poison around behind the cloak of anonymity. 'But surely' I hear you cry, 'You hide behind a 'nom-de-blog' too'. Well, yes, but it's not actually very hard to work out who I am if you know me and if you don't know me then it doesn't matter that much anyway, but I DO give an email address at which I am contactable and will happily enter into a dialogue with anyone who has a serious point to make. In fact I will happily enter into a dialogue with anyone that has an entirely frivolous point to make - I am, after all, in the throws of growing old disgracefully - but in future no further anonymous remarks will be shown in these pages.

One last thing before I stop ranting. There is a major difference between 'like and dislike' and 'good and bad'. I can tell the difference. 'I like/don't like this because...' is an opinion, something which I go to great lengths to make clear at all times. Furthermore I have been - and will continue - laying out the details of the life time's accumulation of musical information that has led me to these opinions. You don't have to read them. You don't have to agree with them, but if you don't then for goodness sake tell me why you think I'm wrong. Don't just sneak past and piss through the letterbox.

Gary Burton Quartet Revisited - at The Lighthouse, Poole. 28/7/08

Left to right - Pat Metheny (guitars); Antonio Sanchez (drums); Gary Burton (vibraphone); Steve Swallow (electro-acoustic bass)

This was a gig that I had been looking forward to for some time. I first saw Gary Burton and Steve Swallow play in 1969 at the Hammersmith Odeon with his original quartet (the other members being drummer Bob Moses and guitarist Larry Coryell) and I have long been a fan of Pat Metheny. I had previously seen Antonio Sanchez playing with the Pat Metheny Group at the Poole venue a few years back. (Incidentally, Richard Bona - see Mama Africa part 2 - was also part of the group: that was my first introduction to his extraordinary talents.)

I like The Lighthouse. It's big enough to make events like these a paying proposition but small enough to retain a feeling of comparative intimacy. The acoustics are good, as are the lines of sight. I was feeling slightly anxious about the sound, given our recent concert experience (see Maria Rita at the Barbican) but I need not have worried. The mix was excellent from the start.

The band's opener was 'Reunion', a Mitchell Foreman composition from Burton's 1990 album of the same name. A smile plastered itself on to my face and stayed there for the rest of the evening (removed only temporarily when a somewhat po faced lady member of staff informed me that photography was 'not allowed'. "Then I'll stop taking photographs." I said. "I said 'photography is not allowed.'" she said, somewhat testily. "I said ' Then I'll stop taking photographs.'"I reiterated. "Oh" she said and then, after a brief pause, "Thank you". Anyway, despite all this I managed to get the picture that you see at the top of this page).

Where was I before I so rudely interrupted myself?

Oh yes. I know, as a fairly seasoned musician, that the first few numbers that one plays are part of the 'warm-up' process and it takes a while to really get 'up to speed' as it were. With musicians of this calibre they seem able to start at the top of their game and maintain the standard all night. There might be highlights but there are no lows. This band just kicked into gear and stayed there for the whole concert. That the first number was as much of a stand-out for me as the last encore (which I think was 'General Mojo Cuts Up' from the 1967 'Lofty Fake Anagram' album) illustrates the point. They weren't too big on announcing titles - they were far too busy playing.

So - I can't give you a 'tune by tune' account but I can say that all four musicians worked in total harmony (in both senses of the word). It was another example of 'gestalt'. Whenever one player took a solo the other's slotted effortlessly into providing the optimum backdrop for that that solo to stand out against. Yes - I know that that is what's supposed to happen but mostly it only seems to happen at this level amongst groups of musicians that have played together for a very long time. But then again, I suppose they have. Metheny started his career with Burton and has collaborated on projects a couple of times over the years. Steve Swallow is a long-time Burton collaborator and Antonio Sanchez has been with Metheny since 2002. Also, this is their second tour together (the first one was in 2006) and at the time of writing they had been playing together nearly every night for a month. At this stage in a tour, playing a set must seem like the resumption of a temporarily interrupted conversation.

The middle of the set was given over to a duo section. Gary Burton is a particular master of this format and he and Metheny bounced ideas off of each other beautifully, with long interweaving lines alternating with accompanist/soloist roles - except that they were never quite as straight ahead as that would imply. Burton sets up the most intricate back-drops without ever getting in the way of the other player, ducking in and out of the soloist's lines in a way that always enhances and never obscures. Metheny utilised his 42 string Pikasso guitar to great advantage, as well as bringing his unique strumming sound to bear on a superb 6/8 version of 'Angel Eyes'.

All in all it was a great night's music and two encores and a standing ovation testified to the audience's pleasure. Afterwards I was not at all surprised to bump into my old friend Pete Oxley in the bar, despite the fact that he lives near Oxford and could as easily have got to The Barbican, where the group had been playing the night before. But the Lighthouse is a great venue and given that kind of choice, most musicians will opt for the Lighthouse every time.

The group at the North Sea Jazz Festival, earlier this month, playing Falling Grace

Jazz, delicious hot, disgusting cold

When Mole (see The twang's not the thang) turned up at Dave's house with a bunch of his brother's LPs, I little thought that I would still be listening to some of that music 50 or more years later.



Dave's family lived in the flat over his uncle's greengrocery, which was next-door-but-one to my dad's hardware store. On a Saturday night my parents would go out for a drink (Gin and tonic in my dad's case and Schweppes Bitter Lemon in my mum's). My younger brother (G the D) and I would be left watching TV, with strict instructions to go to bed as soon as 'Gunsmoke' or 'Wyatt Earp' or 'Paladin' had finished. My older brother, Alcohol, was doing his National Service at this time. Dave's parents would follow a similar pattern (although I can't tell you what they drank), leaving him in the care of his grandmother, who lived with them.



Needless to say, G the D and I would stay up far beyond the agreed hour and would only turn the TV off and dash upstairs to feign sleep when we heard the family Morris Traveller Estate pulling up outside. ( We were finally caught when my parents came home unexpectedly early and went into the living room to see the slowly diminishing white dot in the centre of the TV screen, which in those early days of cathode ray tube technology lingered for a good 40 seconds or so after the set had been switched off.)



By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was allowed to go next door to Dave's house on a Saturday night (I can't account for G the D's whereabouts on these occasions and unfortunately neither can he) and there Dave and I would get together with Muff and Mole to play records, under the nominal supervision of Dave's gran, who was a fairly enthusiastic consumer of Carlsberg Pilsner and kept a crate of the brew under the stairs. Dave would generally dip into the crate and 'acquire' a couple of bottles, whilst Muff, Mole and I would pool our somewhat meagre resources and buy a bottle of cider from the local off-licence. The combined influences of Carlsberg and Television meant that gran tended to leave us very much to our own devices, emerging from her den only occasionally, to scream abuse at Dave (which he returned in kind) and to glower at us. Looking back on it I realise that she was probably a fairly unpleasant person and that Dave had inherited many of her characteristics.



Despite these random interruptions we would gather round the Radiogram and play whatever treasures we had brought to the gathering that week. At least, Mole, Muff and I would: Dave didn't actually own any records but he had the premises and the record playing equipment so that was all right. My Jai and Kai records ( see Slide by slide) had alerted us to modern jazz, so when Mole revealed that his elder brother had a lot of jazz records we encouraged him to raid the collection. This he duly did, turning up one night with LPs by Gerry Mulligan, Tal Farlow, The Modern Jazz Quartet and Dave Brubeck. Dave and Mole were not that thrilled with these records but Muff and I were both extremely taken with the new sounds. It was not long before these Saturday nights at Dave's ground to a halt. We continued to see Dave occasionally and Mole ( with his Claude Butler racing bike with centre-pull brakes and 10 speed Derailleur gears) less frequently, but music was getting to be a very important thing for Muff and me and in pursuit of it we had made friends with Paul, whose - to us - sophisticated middle class home contained a reel to reel tape recorder and a mass of recorded music (see Wonderful round, black, shiny things).



Meanwhile we were beginning to buy more records. Muff, pursuing his particular penchant for old things, purchased EPs of Ma Rainey and Victoria Spivey, and we were much taken with the accompaniments as well as with the singers. (It occurs to me that both these women could well have been included in my last posting - Little Jazz Birds and other related species) This led us to King Oliver and Lonnie Johnson, to Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson - in fact to New Orleans and Chicago Jazz - 'Traditional Jazz' or 'Trad' as it was soon to be called. Looking back on those times now I realise that we actually came to Modern jazz before we discovered the traditional variety but, unusually for then, found it all equally exciting and stimulating.



Paul's family tape collection introduced us to Josh White, Pete Seeger and The Kingston Trio. Those archives also contained recordings of Leadbelly and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and we were beginning to see how the lines between American folk music, blues and jazz were nowhere near as sharply drawn as most people thought. Within a short time we were also beginning to explore the folk music of these islands and seeing connections with the American folk tradition, but that's a strand for another posting. Mean while, that weird phenomenon, the British Trad boom, was about to manifest itself and I was beginning to acquire some political awareness. I had also acquired a guitar and despite my father's best efforts had even managed to learn a few chords ( see The twang's not the thang). My musical life was about to step up a gear.



Here are the relevant clips for this posting: until such times as I learn to introduce the YouTube stuff directly on to the page I think I'll stick with this format for the time being...



Gerry Mulligan - Walking Shoes

Tal Farlow - Fascinating Rhythm

Modern Jazz Quartet - Softly as in a Morning Sunrise

Dave Brubeck Quartet - These Foolish Things

Ma Rainey - Booze and Blues

Victoria Spivey - Handyman (?)

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band - Sobbin' Blues

Lonnie Johnson - Got the Blues for Murder Only

Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - West End Blues

Little Jazz Birds and other related species

Having waxed lyrical about Kris Gayle recently it occurs to me that I should give you, the readers of this ongoing farrago, a context for my opinion.

I have never been a big fan of vocalists generally and female vocalists in particular. Far too many of them tend to be of the view that it is 'The Singer not the Song' (to borrow the title of a Roy Ward Baker sixties Western), regardless of musical genre. The worst offenders are, to my mind, operatic singers, with pop performers running them a close second, and any singer that achieves 'Diva' status tends to be an ego on a stick.

OK, having got that out of the way - who do I like and why do I like them? Ella Fitzgerald was probably the first singer to catch my attention when I saw and heard her singing 'Summertime' on the TV programme Sunday Night at the London Palladium, around 1963. If ever there was a song that gets regularly slaughtered, the George and Ira Gershwin/Dubose Heyward classic is it. I have heard more truly appalling versions of this song than I care to remember: the worse the singer, the more convinced she (and it is generally a 'she') is that this song was created to showcase her. Ella was not like this - for her it was, as it should be, all about the music and she was one hell of a musician. In due course I bought several of her albums, with 'Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Rogers and Hart Songbook being a particular favourite.

I had heard Billy Holiday a couple of years earlier, on a recording of a live performance that was made towards the end of her life, but I was not impressed. The voice was raddled and cracked and I was too musically unsophisticated to be able to hear beneath the surface. Now, when I hear those late recordings I am frequently moved to tears by the truth of her singing. When Lady Sings The Blues, the 'biopic' of her life was released in 1972, Diana Ross played the lead and released an album of Billie Holiday songs. In my opinion the performances do not hold a candle to the originals. They are all about the singer and not the song - definitely the work of a 'diva'.

A number of singers from the folk world also grabbed my attention around this time. I loved the Waterson Family but particularly enjoyed the female voices in that group - Lal and Norma Waterson. Their singing always had a total honesty about it and a sense of joy in the music. I also liked the singing of Anne Briggs, who had a similar quality. For these performers it seemed always that it was the song that was the important thing. At the opposite end of the spectrum was Joan Baez, who may have been 'right on' politically but whose singing irritated me intensely and which, to my great dismay, was badly copied by a thousand aspiring female vocalists around the folk clubs of England.

And that was pretty much it for me and singers for a long time. Anita O'Day (You'll have to do your own search here. Blogger's link option doesn't seem to be able to cope with names that contain apostrophes) was acceptable, Peggy Lee was OK but a bit given to schmaltz. Sarah Vaughan did nothing for me and Cleo Laine did even less. Astrud Gilberto's recordings only got interesting when she wasn't singing and Judy Garland was inclined to induce violent regurgitation, as was Barbra Streisand. Of the operatic singers, the only ones I could ever listen to were Kathleen Ferrier and Janet Baker. From the popular music world I didn't mind Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin.

The early seventies produced some interesting stuff. I was impressed by Joni Mitchell, Maria Muldaur and the McGarrigle sisters, but developed a particular fondness for the less well known Wendy Waldman. I was also very taken with the vocal sound of Sergio Mendes' Brazil 66 and 77 groups. The lead female vocalist was Lani Hall and she had a voice that intrigued me, even though I didn't like a lot of the material that the group was doing at that time. When she left she was replaced by another fine singer, Gracinha Leporace, whose voice enhances one of my favourite records of all time - the 1971 album, 'Primal Roots'.

At the beginning of the eighties I came across an album called Little Jazz Bird by one Meredith d'Ambrosio. I had never heard of her so, being intrigued by the name and by the presence of Phil Woods on the album, decided to give it a whirl. What a find that was. It had a Gershwin song that I had never heard before and a whole bunch of songs by writers that were new to me, with the exception of Dave Frishberg, some of whose quirky songs I was already familiar with. It also had Hank Jones playing piano where Ms d'Ambrosio wasn't. It had some very fine string quartet arrangements, some excellent Phil Woods solos and, best of all, Meredith d'Ambrosio's singing, which was true, clear and musical, full of expression but without a hint of melodrama or artifice.

Again, there was a long gap before another singer came along to grab my attention. A combination of my growing obsession with Brazilian music and my son's move to São Paulo led to me visiting Brazil for the first time in January 1994. I returned to England seven weeks later with a welter of CDs and a passion for the country that still shows no sign of diminishing. One of the CDs was by a singer called Zizi Possi and entitled Valsa Brasiliera. It's one of those albums that I describe as 'perfect', in that as each successive track starts I think "Ah - this is my favourite one..." until the next track, when I think "Oh. No, it's this one.." and so ad infinitum through the album. (There's another possible posting there - my list of 'perfect' records. They're not necessarily my favourite records of all time but they don't have a duff track between them.) I sent cassette copies of this record to many of my musician friends and they were greeted with universal approval.

Subsequent visits to Brazil led me to the wonderful Leila Pinheiro, Joyce, Gal Costa, Ná Ozzetti, Maria Rita (see previous postings), Simone Guimarães and the sublime Mônica Salmaso. I had purchased an album by Elis Regina (reckoned by many to be the finest female Brazilian singer) before visiting Brazil and had been extremely unimpressed. As a consequence I resisted all suggestions that I might like to check out her material until about a year ago when 'Woody' (he of the blog) bought me a DVD of a TV performance of hers from 1973. I was instantly converted and regretted the stubbornness that had prevented me reappraising her work much earlier. It just goes to show what one release of substandard material can do. As so often happens in such cases, when she died every record company scoured the vaults for material that they could reissue, regardless of quality. I was unfortunate (and stupid) enough to base an opinion of the artist on one such release. Believe me, I've learnt my lesson! Incidentally, don't be put off these singers because you don't understand the language. The sheer musicality of the artist should carry you through. Treat the voice as another musical instrument and let it wash over you. I eventually began to wonder what they were singing about and started to learn some Portuguese. With the aid of a dictionary I slowly started to unravel some of the lyrics, only to discover that I was listening to poetry of the highest order, so if your curiosity does take you in to learning the language then you are in for a treat.

Meanwhile, back in England, I was involved in the running of yet another jazz club and one of my fellow organisers suggested we nip up to Exeter to see a singer that was appearing there, with a view to booking her for our organisation. The singer was Stacey Kent. We met her before the first set and had a brief chat about her availability for gigs, the likely fee and so forth. She was dressed very simply, wore little or no makeup and was very modest and unassuming. A few minutes later when she took to the stage it was as if someone had switched a light on inside her. Without ever being flash or flamboyant she totally mesmerised the audience. She has the ability to make you feel as if she is singing the song to you personally. Her reading of a lyric is impeccable and her musicianship faultless. She sings with total authority and to my mind leads the field in interpretation of The Great American Songbook.

More recently, Diana Krall has become an international success. She sings well and truthfully and plays piano to a fairly high standard. Also Eliane Elias has been recording more vocal albums. I was first aware of her as the pianist with Steps Ahead and became a fan before I even realised that she was Brazilian. Her piano playing is superb - she has made an album of duets with Herbie Hancock - but she also has a fine voice and can sing well.

Finally, I can't write about female singers without mentioning Kirsty MacColl. She had an excellent voice and a tremendous musicality which she deployed in the pop world. She was also a damn fine songwriter. Her ability to multi track her voice into what she, somewhat tongue in cheek, called her 'angel choir made her a sought-after and frequently anonymous contributor to many hit records. Her contribution to The Pogues' Fairy Tale of New York made me take Shane McGowan seriously for the first time and her final album before her untimely death -Tropical Brainstorm - just continues to grow on me every time I hear it. It's gone from 'hmmm, not bad' to 'perfect album' in the last few years. Yet she was a most reluctant performer in public and did not care for the pop lifestyle. In common with the other singers I've listed here, it's her musicianship which is the biggest factor. For these performers I'm sure, the song has always been more important than the singer - and that's what has made them such great singers.

Given the number of links involved I thought I'd give you the YouTube ones separately, so:-

Ella Fitzgerald - Angel Eyes

Billy Holiday - Good Morning Heartache

Lal Waterson - Child Among the Weeds

Norma Waterson - Aint No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears

Anne Briggs - Blackwaterside

Joni Mitchell - Free Man in Paris

Maria Muldaur - You Made Your Move Too Soon

Kate and Anna McGarrigle - Heart Like a Wheel

Wendy Waldman - My Last Thought

Lani Hall (singing lead vocal with Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66) - Mas Que Nada

Gracinha Leporace - Horizonte Aberto

Meredith D'Ambrosio - The Christmas Waltz

Zizi Possi - Lamentos

Leila Pinhero - Catavento e Girassol

Joyce - Feminina

Gal Costa - Brigas Nunca Mais

Ná Ozzetti - Felicidade

Simone Guimarães - Tamanduá

Mônica Salmaso - O Velho Francisco

Elis Regina - Corcovado

Stacey Kent - The Best is Yet to Come

Kirsty MacColl - Mambo de la Luna