ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL: Wheelin' and Dealin'. Asleep at the Wheel (vocals and in strumentals); Johnny Gimble (fiddle, man dolin); Joel Sonnier (accordion); other musi cians. Route 66; Miles and Miles of Texas; The Trouble with Lovin' Today; Shout Wa Hey; Blues for Dixie; and five others. CAPITOL ST-11546 $6.98, 8XT-11546 $7.98, 4XT-11546 $7.98.
Performance: Good and stylized
Recording: Very good
Asleep at the Wheel is pretty much Bob Wills' Texas Playboys revisited; it's the best country swing band there is, probably, which makes it a slave to form and formula. Country swing, or "hillbilly jazz," seems to me theoretical music. Your head can tell you it's "good," but your heart doesn't tell you a damned thing-the stuff is cold, dry, academic. Dan Hicks used the precision of it as a fo rum for his offbeat sense of humor, and I liked that, some of it, while it lasted. Asleep at the Wheel plays it straight, being "funny" in prescribed ways on schedule but mostly being clean and machine-like. I realize in an academic sort of way that it's possible to have a set of prejudices so different from mine that you'd like having this done to music, but I can't imagine what that would feel like.
Maybe someday I'll be so cool I'll play this re cording on my own time, but I have no inclination to do that now. N.C.
BEE GEES: Children of the World. Barry Gibb (vocals, guitar); Robin Gibb (vocals)
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Explanation of symbols:
= reel-to-reel stereo tape
= eight-track stereo cartridge
= stereo cassette
= quadraphonic disc
= reel-to-reel quadraphonic tape
= eight-track quadraphonic tape
Monophonic recordings are indicated by the symbol
The first listing is the one reviewed; other formats, if available, follow it.
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Maurice Gibb (vocals, bass); Blue Weaver (keyboards); other musicians. You Should Be Dancing; You Stepped into My Life; Love So Right; Lovers; Boogie Child; Love Me; and four others. RSO RS-1-3003 $6.98, 8T1-3003 $7.98, CT1-3003 $7.98.
Performance: Pointless
Recording: Good
The Bee Gees have turned themselves into a disco band. I assume that means either that their attention span has become fragmented and spasm-wracked the way their music (par don the expression) has, or they think your attention span has gone bust. There are those who claim a steady diet of television can do that to a race. And then there is this new vocabulary around now that has to do with how the right hemisphere of the brain, which handles the hunches, intuition, instantaneous, nonlinear, and un-wordable concepts, etc., is taking over in Western man from the left half where logic and empirical thinking reside. Or you can fit an album like this into a slightly messy thesis tying disco to Marshall McLuhan. So go ahead-I'd much rather hear the thesis than this album. I doubt if anyone is supposed to listen to it; it seems to be Muzak for the feet, and not happy feet either, but bored feet, jaded feet. Make pop music this impersonal-particularly if you're a band with a strong reputation for nice old harmonized schlock-and the words in it about love, or anything else human, are a travesty. This is my idea of decadence, which is boring.
Beyond that, the Gibb brothers have snatched up a style that has no use for the mostly melodic special gifts they have. I've seldom seen a group work so hard at throwing away its uniqueness. N.C.
BUCKEYE POLITICIANS: Look at Me Now.
Buckeye Politicians (vocals and instrumentals). Only You; Getaway; Unity; Take My Hand; Be Home; and five others. UTOPIA BULL-1823 $6.98, BUS1-1823 $7.98, BUK1-1823 $7.98.
Performance: Good
Recording: Good
All the high-tension excitement produced by this six-man group can't quite hide the fact that their material, mostly written by lead vocalist and guitarist Rosco (that's it, just Rosco), is as earthbound as a lead balloon. The musical blend is often sensational; it ranges from gospel to rhythm-and-blues to jazz to quasi-classical, and it is all performed at white heat. But despite the expert sound and fury, a certain boredom eventually creeps in. You have to have something to set your fireworks against. These are Roman candles at high noon. P.R.
CHER: I'd Rather Believe in You. Cher (vocals); orchestra. Knock on Wood; Spring; Borrowed Time; Flashback; It's a Cryin' Shame; and five others. WARNER BROS. BS 2898 $6,98, (.) M8 2898 $7.98, MS 2898 $7.98.
Performance: Boring
Recording: Elaborate Here's Cher, looking just great-and sounding just awful. Singing lessons won't help, the fussily elaborate arranging and conducting here by Michael Omartian certainly don't help, nor, apparently, will anything ever help until she learns somehow to project her special kind of flip, sexy, impertinent charm vocally. Her records must sell to the all-day hair-curler set who just can't get enough of her in movie magazines and her TV variety show. There's no question that in many respects Cher is a star in the old-time razzle-dazzle sense, but on recordings she is just a gorgeous bore. P.R.
RY COODER: Chicken Skin Music (see Best of the Month, page 83) DEADLY NIGHTSHADE: F & W-The Deadly Nightshade. Deadly Nightshade (Helen Hooke, Anne Bowen, and Pamela Brandt, guitars); Funky & Western (vocals and instrumentals).
Comin' Thru; I'm Feelin' Fine; Murphy's Bar; No Chicken Today; and seven others. PHANTOM BPL1-1370 $6.98, CD BPS1-1370 $7.98, BPK1-1370 $7.98.
Performance: Fun
Recording: Good
Here's a tidy trio of girl-persons, benign enough despite their Agatha Christie-ish name, running through a group of their own songs. Ain't I a Woman is about the best of them-"I stand on no more auction blocks or other pedestals"--a bit hard-breathing but nonetheless effective. No Chicken Today is a rowdily amusing caper about four waitresses in an eatery who neatly skewer a "hard drivin' diesel cowboy" and his lecherous ideas. Most of the album is good fun, but man(person)-oh-man(person), have we come a long way from the days of the Andrews Sisters! P.R.
BRYAN FERRY: Let's Stick Together. Bryan Ferry (vocals, keyboards, harmonica); Chris Spedding (guitar); Paul Thompson (drums); Chris Mercer (tenor sax); John Wetton (bass) other musicians. Let's Stick Together; Casa nova; Sea Breezes; Shame, Shame, Shame; 2 HB; The Price of Love; Chance Meeting; and four others. ATLANTIC SD 18187 $6.98, TP 18187 $7.98, CS 18187 $7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Sumptuous
Bryan Ferry is an interesting songwriter who's coming into his own now, apparently getting past the fear of making what he has to say coherent. There are five of his own songs here, not a clinker among them, each one hinting at a fresh individualism. He's also picked out a bright sampling of other people's songs and assembled an agile little studio band. The only thing that bothers me is his singing, which, stylistically, is still blobbing from one shape to another. The easiest way for him to do it makes him sound too much like Marc Bolan (Ha! You'd already forgotten T-Rex, eh? Good for you!), which is to say unnecessarily ugly. Here he risks some other approaches, but they seem peremptory, as if he has no clear idea of what he sounds like.
He does seem to be trying to get beyond mannerisms, though, and communicates a jaunty feel for several of these tunes, and the band picks up on that. Ferry has a good ear, which he should now train upon himself and work his problem out. This album, contrasted with some he's been involved with in the past, should prove to him that he doesn't have to do something silly to get your attention. N.C.
DAVID FORMAN. David Forman (vocals, piano, guitar); orchestra. Dream of a Child; Treachery; Rosalie; The Seven Sisters; End less Waters; and six others. ARISTA AL 4084 $6.98, 8301-4084 H $7.98, 5301-4084 H $7.98.
Performance: Fair
Recording: Good
David Forman dispenses heavy-handed, blues-inflected music with lyrics, most of which he provided, that are gummy with a weighty "meaning" and "sensitivity." Most of his vocal performances have a throaty, drained sound that fairly well fits such things as Dream of a Child ("When I was a boy I dreamed of Phillip Marlowe/He took me as his partner, took me as his friend . . .") and Treachery ("You take my life, then you are free . . ."). On If It Take All Night, how ever, he suddenly adopts an archly coy falset to that sounds like a cross between Butterfly McQueen and the Maharishi. It's probably just Forman's attempt at "lightness," but it isn't any more successful than his attempts at "seriousness." P.R.
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Don McLean: Simply Terrific
DON MCLEAN, one of the pop world's Real People, has deliberately kept a very low profile since his initial smash hit American Pie in 1971. That's a sign of a lot of good things:
his taste and self-possession, his healthy disdain for the wheeler-dealer cannibals of the music biz, his confidence that his work is strong enough to speak for itself, and his evident intention to stay around for a long, long time, focusing his energies on creating rather than exploiting himself (and his public) as a get-rich-quick Personality.
McLean's latest United Artists release "Solo" is a stunning retrospective of his work. In it, he sings twenty-seven of his (and others') songs in that oddly affecting voice of his, punching through credibly with the drama of Masters of War, toying teasingly with the gentle fantasy of Wonderful Baby, and ironically narrating The Legend of Andrew McCrew without ever lapsing into one of those character impersonations so many pop performer-composers offer us as proof of Everything points to his becoming a major force in pop music . . . 5 their "seriousness." We'll never know, for example, just where Bob Dylan picked up that hokey Okie accent or what, precisely, it is supposed to add to his performances.
McLean has the enormous good sense to stay himself, and he therefore becomes that much more convincing.
He sings alone here, accompanied only by his own banjo or guitar, and the resulting intimacy gives even more power to performances of this mostly familiar material. The tracks were picked up from appearances McLean made in Manchester, Bristol, and Oxford, and the responses of the English audiences are uniformly respectful and enthusiastic: pin-drop quiet during the performance, a slight breathless pause at the finish, and then bursts of appreciative applause.
There is none of that wah-hoo! yippee!! look-Ma-I'm-at-a-rock-concert!!! exhibitionistic racket so often heard on live recordings.
That's probably because McLean's audiences seem actually to listen to him, as well they might-he has much to say and he says it well.
McLean is already an important artist, and everything points to his becoming a recognized major force in pop music within the next couple of years, United Artists willing.
That's only one reason why you should have this album. All the other reasons you can figure out for yourself while you listen to it.
He is, simply, terrific.
-Peter Reilly
DON McLEAN: Solo. Don McLean (vocals, banjo, guitar). Masters of War; Lovesick Blues; American Pie; On the Amazon; Circus Song; Empty Chairs; Till Tomorrow; Magdalene Lane; Wonderful Baby; Where Were You Baby; Geordie's Lost His Penker; Babylon; And I Love You So; Mactavish Is Dead; Cripple Creek/Muleskinner Blues; Great Big Man; Bronco Bill's Lament; Happy Trails; Birthday Song; Over the Waterfall/Arkansas Traveler; Castles in the Air; Homeless Brother; Three Flights Up; Winter Has Me in Its Grip; The Legend of Andrew McCrew; Drei del; Vincent (Starry Starry Night). UNITED ARTISTS UA-LA652-H2 two discs $9.98, UA-EA652-J $9.98, UA-CA652-J $9.98.
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RICHIE HAVENS: a bonded whiskey baritone with the grace of experience
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
ARLO GUTHRIE: Amigo. Arlo Guthrie (vocals, guitar); Russ Kunkel (drums); Bob Glaub (bass); Waddy Wachtel (guitar); Jai Winding (keyboards); other musicians. Guabi Guabi; Darkest Hour; Massachusetts; Victor Jara; Patriots' Dream; Grocery Blues; Walking Song; and four others. REPRISE MS 2239 $6.98, M8 2239 $7.98, M5 2239 $7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Very good
Arlo Guthrie projects one of the most appealing personalities I can imagine. He is perfectly in tune with the kind of humor that washes best with his generation, and that attends the way he extends Woody's social conscious ness into modern times. He has Woody's gentleness and persistence and his own feel for irony, and his head has not been turned by commercial bonanza or even by motorcycles, much. Here he seems not terribly ambitious, but his album takes on a little more charm each time I play it. It's a little warmer-which string arrangements reflect but don't cause than his studio albums usually are, a little more like the way he seems in real life. And I do believe he's singing better. What happens, when an album stays out of the way as this one does, is you don't sit there evaluating Arlo, you sit there and spend some time with him. This one just lets his humor and his healthy skepticism come through in addition to being surprisingly varied and tuneful and pretty well produced. It has personality, in a word, and that's precisely what I like about Arlo. N.C.
DARYL HALL/JOHN OATES: Bigger Than Both of Us. Daryl Hall and John Oates (vocals and instrumentals); orchestra. Crazy Eyes; Rich Girl; Falling; Kerry; Room to Breathe; and four others. RCA APLI-1467 $6.98, APS I-1467 $7.98, APK 1-1467 $7.98.
Performance: Entertaining
Recording: Good
This lively, danceable music augmented with forgettable lyrics goes down with all the ease of a melting Smith Bros. cough drop. Hall and Oates write most of their own material, and their obvious purpose is to please, which they do. Aside from You'll Never Learn, a grim but very well-done little number about self destruction, the album is an energetic, skillful piece of pop entertainment-ephemeral as a producer's promise but still gratifying for the moment. P.R.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
RICHIE HAVENS: The End of the Beginning.
Richie Havens (vocals, guitar, piano); William D. Smith (keyboards, vocals); Booker T. Jones (keyboards); Steve Cropper (guitar); Donald "Duck" Dunn (bass); other musicians. I'm Not in Love; We Can't Hide It Any more; Dreaming As One; You Can Close Your Eyes; I Was Educated by Myself; and five others. A&M SP-4598 $6.98, 4598 $7.98, 4598 $7.98.
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Clean
Richie Havens' bonded whiskey baritone has seldom been put to as good a use as it is on this album, nor assigned to such generally tasty material wrapped in such evocative arrangements. Havens' ability as a balladeer is especially well displayed on I'm Not in Love, a strong tune from that excellent British group 10cc, and on James Taylor's You Can Close Your Eyes. The arrangements for eight of the ten selections are by keyboardist-writer-singer William D. "Smitty" Smith, the former captain of the (alas!) def act Canadian group Motherlode. Smith is a first-rate talent with a highly personal style. The remaining two arrangements are by rock's original chamber-music group, Booker T. & the MG's (sadly missing their original drummer, the late Al Jackson, Jr.).
The performances by Havens and his backers are low-key and mellow, even on the up-tempo selections, and they're presented with the calm assurance that the remarkable talents assembled dispense with the grace of experience. Ah, there's nothing like a pro, and pros together are welcome indeed. J.V.
LABELLE: Chameleon. Patti LaBelle, Sara Dash, Nona Hendryx (vocals); instrumental ...
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Russ Columbo, "Radio's Valentino"
THE saxophone and its human equivalent, the crooner, filled the airwaves all through the Thirties. The chief practitioners of the art of mooning and moaning love songs into the microphone were Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, and Russ Columbo. In 1931, Al Du bin and Joe Burke wrote a song about the whole thing, which Morte Goode quotes in the fascinating booklet that accompanies RCA's recent Columbo collection, "A Legendary Performer": "Who always sings about a couple 'neath the stars above?/Crosby, Columbo and Vallee./And though I call it nonsense they insist it is love,/Crosby, Columbo and Vallee. . . ." Russ Columbo, who studied violin as a child in Los Angeles, started his career fiddling "emotion" music for Pola Negri on the sets of silent movies. He looked a lot like Valentino, who was Negri's screen lover at
------------ . . . he was tops at putting over a schmaltzy serenade ------
the time, and he later replaced the screen ac tor in her boudoir. By 1929 he was playing the violin and sharing vocal stints with Bing Crosby and a band at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood. He went on to sing in movies and night clubs billed as-what else?-"Radio's Valentino," eventually replacing Bing Crosby on NBC's Blue Network. Meanwhile, there was a whole series of love affairs, culminating in the celebrated one with Carole Lombard and a fictitious liaison with Garbo dreamed up by his manager. At twenty-six, he was visiting his friend Lansing Brown, a Hollywood photographer, when Brown, demonstrating a dueling pistol from his collection, accidentally shot Columbo in the eye. The whole of the entertainment world kept the news of his death from his mother, who had just suffered a heart attack. Reports of his imaginary successes abroad were read to her regularly by the family, and she went to her grave ten years later without ever knowing her son was dead.
So much for the legend; how does the voice of this once-popular crooner hold up today? The original recordings, dating back to 1931 and 1932, provide the singer's murmurous pipes with lush settings in the sumptuous manner of the period. Big studio orchestras led by Nat Shilkret and Marlin Skiles back his day-dreamy treatments of I Don't Know Why, All of Me, Time on My Hands, and other heartfelt ballads of the period. From his violin-playing days Columbo borrowed the trick of supplying a kind of vocal obbligato when repeating a chorus; it's still effective. And some of the songs he sings on this carefully remastered disc he wrote or collaborated on himself-haunting old-time favorites of a sentimental nature including You Call It Mad ness, My Love, and Prisoner of Love. All this may be faintly embarrassing to today's resolutely tough-minded Spartans, but to me it's as relaxing as a nice hot bath. Columbo never displayed the soignee detachment of Vallee or the sly humor of Crosby, but when it came to putting over a schmaltzy serenade he was tops in his class. Even the modern liberated woman may find something here to swoon over.
-Paul Kresh
RUSS COLUMBO: A Legendary Performer.
Russ Columbo (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. I Don't Know Why; You Call It Madness; Time on My Hands; Prisoner of Love; Where the Blue of the Night; Just Friends; Save the Last Dance for Me; All of Me; Auf Wiedersehen, My Dear; Paradise; Just Another Dream of You; My Love.
RCA CPL1-1756(e) $7.98, CPS1-1756 $8.98, CPK1-1756 $8.98.
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... accompaniment. Get You Somebody New;
Come into My Life; Isn't It a Shame; Who's Watching the Watcher?; Chameleon; and three others. EPIC PE 34189 $6.98, PEA 34189 $7.98, PET 34189 $7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Good
Labelle is a vocal trio fronted by Patti La Belle, an experienced performer of meteoric vocals who possesses an unusual range. What occasionally makes the group notable, aside from Ms. LaBelle's tonsil artillery, is the orig inal material by trio member Nona Hendryx and the gusto the ladies give to the delivery of her songs, some of them paeans to outer space, some comments on things mortal and fallible.
Three excellent examples in the present al bum are Who's Watching the Watcher, A Man in a Trenchcoat (Voodoo), and Going Down Makes Me Shiver. The first parallels the sentiments of a line from an Ayn Rand novel: "Beware of those who ask you to make sacrifices, because someone is always collecting on the sacrifices." The second is a charming and slightly spooky fantasy about a young girl's initiation into something that is never directly defined. The third number is also open to interpretation (hoo boy!) as to subject matter: a guess that it's about baptism and religious conversion is just as good as one that it concerns erotic delights. Ms. Hendryx is one of the more interesting writers around these days; she isn't always as good as these three tunes show her to be, but her score is better than average. She is, perhaps, the trio's most valuable asset.
As performers, Labelle have polish and craft, but they sometimes operate on the premise that a scream will do for a whisper and there are moments when they spoil the best of their material with shrieking folderol.
Exuberance is fine, ladies, but please watch the decibels!
J. V.
LYNYRD SKYNYRD: One More from the Road. Lynyrd Skynyrd (vocals and instrumentals). Workin' for MCA; I Ain't the One; Saturday Night Special; Sweet Home Alabama; The Needle and the Spoon; Crossroads; Free Bird; and seven others. MCA MCA2-6001 two discs $7.98, MCAT2-6001 $9.98, MCAC2-6001 $9.98.
Performance: Mechanical
Recording: Good
This is a well-drilled outfit, and I admire precision of execution in bands, but technique can't make up for pale material. Listening to the first few cuts of this double-disc live al bum is okay-you can admire the crispness and zip of the band's delivery-but shortly thereafter things get dull: the material doesn't improve, and the rendering of it sounds more and more mechanical. At the end of the fourth side, I applauded-with relief. J. V.
MANHATTAN TRANSFER: Coming Out. Manhattan Transfer (vocals); orchestra. Chanson d'Amour; Scotch and Soda; S.O.S.; Poinciana; Helpless; and six others. ATLANTIC SD 18183 $6.98, TP 18183 $7.98, CS 18183 $7.98.
Performance: Chic
Recording: Excellent
Gawd! But we'd all be dead with boredom if it weren't for groups like the Manhattan Transfer, wouldn't we? I mean, they make every thing such fun, and at just the right noise level so we don't really have to listen to them. Yes, the favorite group of the Fun Crowd is back, sleek and glossy as patent leather, and their recent TV exposure (where just anyone could see them) doesn't seem to have affected their chic composure one iota. No rough edges at all here, just beautifully produced (by Richard Perry), superbly engineered jive coasting of the sort that probably only technically good performers are capable of-and Tim Hauser, Laurel Masse, Alan Paul, and Janis Siegel are technically good performers. Anyway, you've got to have this new one. After all, Ringo shows up playing his drum on Zindy Lou and S.O.S., and we all know what fun he is. . . . P.R.
THE WALTER MURPHY BAND: A Fifth of Beethoven. Walter Murphy (composer, adapter, arranger, conductor); orchestra. A Fifth of Beethoven; Flight '76; Russian Dressing; Night Fall; California Strut; and five others.
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Labelle caught in an exuberant moment: airborne Nona Hendryx (left) and Patti LaBelle with down-to-earth Sara Dash
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The Extraordinary Stevie Wonder
The ingredients for an exceptional single album are here …
PATTI PAGE was waltzing-Tennessee U style-off the charts and Les Paul and Mary Ford were giving us How High the Moon in the second week of May 1951 when Stevland Morris was born. Few black artists had access to the national charts in those days, though much of the music that did make it was directly traceable to black roots.
Twelve years later, when Stevland--as Little Stevie Wonder--made his vinyl debut with I Call It Pretty Music, Ruby and the Romantics topped the charts briefly with a "soul version" of Our Day Will Come, but in the main the radio stations-the holders of the keys locked most black artists out in favor of white derivatives. I Call It Pretty Music didn't make any of the charts, but it gained Stevie Wonder some attention and marked the start of an illustrious career that has made the blind singer something of a cult figure, one whose record releases are as eagerly awaited by black people as Bob Dylan's used to be by white people. And if Wonder's youth and blindness were factors contributing to his early success, genuine artistry has long since taken over.
By the end of 1963, more singles-most notably Fingertips-and an album entitled "Twelve-Year-Old Genius" had endeared Little Stevie Wonder to a vast, mostly black audience. Packaged and choreographed in characteristic Motown fashion, he became a headliner on the soul circuit, playing the harmonica and singing about puppy love. By the end of the Sixties, Wonder had emerged as Motown's most original property, with a string of hits including Uptight (1966), I Was Made to Love Her (1967), You Met Your Match (1968), and For Once in My Life and My Cherie Amour (1969). As these songs at test, Stevie Wonder-no longer "Little" developed tremendously as an artist between 1963 and 1969, but he was to grow even more with the arrival of a new decade.
UNLIKE many Motown acts, Wonder resist ed regimentation and consistently expanded his horizons. After studying composition and theory at the University of Southern California, he began to reveal in his music, if not his lyrics, a degree of sophistication and maturity that belied his tender age. No longer restrict ed to three-minute chart contenders, his com positions became longer and more complex, and with his 1971 release of the album "Where I'm Coming From" (Tamla TS308) he reached a turning point similar to that which the Beatles had previously marked with their "Revolver" album. Subsequent album releases-"Talking Book" (1972), "Innervisions" (1973), and "Fulfillingness' First Finale" (1974)-put Stevie Wonder in a class by himself, gained him a more mature audience, and won him the respect of an industry that in 1974 awarded him four Grammies.
The release of a new Stevie Wonder album came to be looked upon as a special event, but all of 1975 and most of 1976 went by without a release from the Wunderkind, which of course considerably heightened the amount of attention given to his new "Songs in the Key of Life" when it finally saw daylight recently.
Was it worth the wait? Well, perhaps the question should be, is it worth the weight? The album contains twenty-one songs totaling one hour, forty-four minutes, and thirty-eight seconds of playing time; they are spread over two twelve-inch and one seven-inch 33 1/3-rpm discs. That is a generous portion by any body's standards, but one that is praise worthy only if the material presented on all that vinyl warrants so much of one's time. In this case it doesn't.
Let me point out right away that I am a Stevie Wonder fan. In fact, I went out and bought this album as soon as it became available, and buying albums is something people on my end of the record business rarely do.
Though I confess to being disappointed, I must add that I don't feel the expenditure was a total waste-the album, besides representing the latest work of an important artist, does contain material of musical value, and, had I been given the opportunity to hear it before hand, I would still have bought it.
Starting at the top of the program, side one provided me with my first disappointments.
Village Ghetto Land attempts, in semi-baroque Beatles fashion, a social comment, but it is on an embarrassing high-school level; an instrumental aptly named Contusion sounds like a bad Weather Report out-take; Sir Duke seems to have something to do with Ellington, Basie, (Glenn?) Miller, and some one the printed lyrics call Sachimo (sic); and there are two other songs of Love and God that are best forgotten. I Wish, a highly rhythmic, catchy recollection of childhood, starts off the second side in a more promising vein, but, with the exception of that and Past Paradise-featuring the twenty-four voices of a Hare Krishna chorus and the West Los Angeles Church of God Choir-this side, too, is dispensable.
The Wonder of the Sixties opens side three with Isn't She Lovely-and she would be, if she didn't go on so interminably. There follows a mildly interesting six and a half minutes called Joy Inside My Tears, but it is followed by a wretched eight and a half minutes of Black Man. This pits no less than forty three vocal participants against one of those "we-all-must-live-together" message songs;
the theme is tiresomely common, and this ex ample is among the worst examples. Much has been said and written lately about pop lyrics as "poetry," but reading Wonder's lyrics in the accompanying booklet I was struck by their puerility-and they do seem to be a little worse this time around. However, Stevie Wonder usually manages to rise above even the most inane lyrics, so their inadequacy is less noticeable in the listening.
The song As here must be considered Wonder's piece de resistance, for it is a marvelously infectious, exciting song that will surely be remembered long after most of the others are forgotten. It leads right into Another Star, a spirited song of love-and Stevie Wonder's new album finally comes alive. But look, we've reached the end of side four, and, though there is something arresting about the tango rhythm of Ebony Eyes (one of the four selections on the seven-inch "bonus record"), the party is, I'm afraid, over.
IN the final analysis, "Songs in the Key of Life" is a disappointment, but bear in mind that we have come to expect the extraordinary from Stevie Wonder. If this album does not live up to expectations, much of it is still noteworthy when measured against most of the other pop offerings of the day. The ingredients for an exceptional single album are here, but like its accompanying booklet (on one page alone 176 people are acknowledged by name) this latest Stevie Wonder offering is marred by excess.-Chris Albertson
STEVIE WONDER: Songs in the Key of Life. Stevie Wonder (lead vocals, keyboards, and harmonica); various musicians, including Hank Redd (reeds), Bobbi Humphrey (flute), Herbie Hancock and Ronnie Foster (key boards), George Benson (guitar). Love's in Need of Love Today; Have a Talk with God; Village Ghetto Land; Contusion; Sir Duke; I Wish; Knocks Me off My Feet; Pastime Paradise; Summer Soft; Ordinary Pain; Isn't She Lovely; Joy Inside My Tears; Black Man; Ngiculela-Es Una Historia-I Am Singing; If It's Magic; As; Another Star; Saturn; Ebony Eyes; All Day Sucker; Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call). TAMLA T13-340C2 two twelve-inch discs plus one seven-inch 33 1/3-rpm "bonus" record $13.98, T15-340ET $15.98, T15-340EC $15.98.
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PRIVATE STOCK PS 2015 $6.98, PVS 8300-2015H $7.98, PVS 5300-2015H $7.98.
Performance: "Ludwig! You've finally made the discos!!"
Recording: Loud
That anything as bad, as hokey, as incredibly clumsy as Walter Murphy's disco "adaptation" of a theme from Beethoven's Fifth could hit as high on the charts as it has would seem to challenge reality. But reality it is. It is also a gruesome reality that this album has been released featuring a parade of such globs of wurst as Murphy's Flight '76, an "adaptation" of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee; Russian Dressing, "based on" Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1; and Night Fall, a karate chop on a Chopin prelude. There are some Murphy "originals" included here, such as California Strut and (dig this one, Clyde) Suite Love Symphony. The ripped-off composers and Mr. Murphy will survive all of this-but will we? P.R.
ANNE MURRAY: Keeping in Touch. Anne Murray (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. Things; Caress Me Pretty Music; Dan cut' All Night Long; Sweet Music Man; Sun day School to Broadway; and five others. CAPITOL ST-11559 $6.98, 8XT-11559 $7.98, 4XT-11559 $7.98.
Performance: A good girl kept down
Recording: Very good
Anne Murray has as attractive a voice as I have heard any season, and, on the basis of her many previous records, I am sure she is thoroughly capable of putting over any good song in her vibrant, quasi-country way. Un fortunately, there aren't many good songs to put over on this particular program. The al bum really should have been titled "Songs for (by?) Losers." There's one about a ship that's never going to come in, one that mutters gloomily that there will be "ten thousand tears till I dry my eyes," one about the painful memories of a long-dead love affair brought on by hearing a "golden oldie" on the radio.
When the ballads aren't downbeat, they are downright truculent, as is Sweet Music Man, in which a pop singer is berated for the das tardly act of changing the dedication of one of his songs from his old girl to a new one. It isn't only that the songs are downers in subject matter, but that their quality seems to match. Once only does Murray get the chance to show the warmth of her personality and her marked ability to make persuasive music: in a song called Shine!, which just happens to be about smiling away the day instead of, as on the rest of this sullen record, sobbing through the night. There may be something to say for positive thinking after all. P.K.
THE NIGHTHAWKS: Nighthawks Live (see Best of the Month, page 82)
OZARK MOUNTAIN DAREDEVILS: Men from Earth. Ozark Mountain Daredevils (vocals and instrumentals). Fly Away Home; You Know Like I Know; Breakaway (from These Chains); The Red Plum; Mountain Range; Noah; and four others. A&M SP-4601 $6.98, 0 4601 $7.98, 4601 $7.98.
Performance: Disappointing
Recording: Very good
Just as I couldn't get over my delight with one side of their last album ("Car over the Lake," A&M SP-4549), so I find it hard to shake off my disappointment with both sides of the Daredevils' present release. Though the band is still commendable for its arrangements and its execution of instrumental portions, the material is a stock-market plunge below the value of some of the songs on the previous effort, and the singers mewl and whine where they should croon and bawl. I hope they come up with something better next time. Much better. J.V.
DOLLY PARTON: All I Can Do. Dolly Parton (vocals); instrumental accompaniment. All I Can Do; The Fire That Keeps You Warm; I'm a Drifter; Falling Out of Love with Me; Preacher Tom; Hey, Lucky Lady; and three others. RCA APL1-1665 $6.98, CD APSI-1665 $7.98, APKI-1665 $7.98.
Performance: Less than she can do
Recording: Good
Dolly Parton finally is getting the recognition she's deserved for years as one of the most engaging, stylish, and convincing musicians in any genre, but the songs in this album are al most mindless compared to what she can do.
I'm a Drifter has a nice sound to it, and what it has to say is mostly beyond words; you listen that way and it works. Shattered Image is a fair example of how Parton can say a little and imply a lot and of how deftly she handles metaphor. But I feel uneasy with a Dolly Parton album in which the strongest, most moving song was written by someone else-Boulder to Birmingham, by Bill Danoff and Emmylou ...
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BRIAN PROTHEROE
Songs with the surreal quality of a Magritte painting Harris-even though I realize the mountain grace in Parton's singing helps make it moving. Her own songs here are sometimes catchy, always performed well, but disappointingly shallow. She's a hunch player, I suspect. This sounds as if she was too tired or rushed to really sort those rascals out and play them. N.C.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
BRIAN PROTHEROE: I/You. Brian Protheroe (vocals); orchestra. I/You; Battling Annie; Evil Eye; Lucille; Hotel; and five others. CHRYSALIS CHR 1108 $6.98.
Performance: Interesting
Recording: Good
Brian Protheroe's work here is interesting, intelligent, and imaginative. His songs often have the quality of a Magritte painting: the commonplace rendered with absolute fidelity but transformed by a surreal repetition or juxtaposition of the unexpected. Battling Annie, for instance, is about a mysterious and fear some lady at a typical English county fair described in atmospheric detail-who challenges young men to box with her. Young Billy ("He was a shy boy") decides to give it a try. Once in the ring he is floored, literally, simply by Annie's request, "Billy, look at me. .
." Well, authentic sirens never do have to lay a glove on their victims, do they? Then there is the eerie, vaporous charm of Hotel, a series of non sequiturs that is like some sort of half-remembered dream of displacement. Granted, Protheroe's talent is a special one, but it is consistently intriguing and involving, and his voice fits his material perfectly. This is an album for those who can think and listen . . . er . . . spatially. P.R.
MARTY ROBBINS: El Paso City. Marty Rob bins (vocals); instrumental accompaniment.
El Paso City; Ava Maria Morales; Kin to the Wind; Way Out There; and six others. Columbia KC 34303 $5.98, CA 34303 $7.98.
Performance: Dull in the saddle
Recording: Good
Marty Robbins sings synthetic ballads of the Texas border, each outfitted with a plot suffi cient for a full-length Western horse-opera, in a sleepy voice and to bucolic accompaniments that lope along at the gait of a doped-up horse.
One is about a cowboy in El Paso who comes back to life to avenge his murder by a rival in have; another deals with the disillusionment of a girl named Ave Maria Morales when she finds out that the rancher she adores has been supplementing his $30-a-month pay with dubious enterprises. The plots are good, but the dirge-like pace, the singer's monotonous way with a stanza, and the exaggerated arrangements sway the listener to sleep in his saddle along the lonesome trail to Long Yawn. P.K.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
ROD STEWART: A Night on the Town. Rod Stewart (vocals); the Garage Band (instrumentals); other musicians. Tonight's the Night; The First Cut Is the Deepest; Fool for You; The Killing of Georgie; The Balltrap; and four others. WARNER BROS. BS 2938 $6.98, CI M8 2938 $7.98, M5 2938 $7.98.
Performance: Agreeably tense
Recording: Good
Part of the appeal of Rod Stewart is you can sense he's self-conscious about the contrived way he looks and sounds and you can some times sense the struggle going on within him over what to do about it. Wearing a white suit but no shirt and singing the boyishly leering Tonight's the Night (which lets it slip that the chick, as Rod would call her, is a virgin, as if the detailed description of slobbering anticipation weren't enough without some ultimate gimmick) are two things to do about it. Not, in principle, bad things, either, since they amount to fighting the grossness of one's demons with a little grossness of one's own facing them, anyway.
Then too, Stewart has associated with some of the better musicians in rock and has developed some attitudes about quality and some musical judgments that collide, sometimes, in the 'excesses in the way he styles himself. All this has to go: through the final filter, his physical limitations: his voice is so simply distinctive and singular that it isn't very versatile. A movie producer wouldn't hire Andy Devine to play the headmaster of a snobbish Eastern
academy, and you wouldn't want Rod Stew art to sing certain words and melodies. Here he works well within those limitations, tossing off an occasional potboiler for the kiddie aspect of his audience, but exercising a rather fine care and control over song selection and production. The result is a sketch from a limited palette. Look for line instead of color and you may decide this is a durable album. N.C.
STRAWBS: Deep Cuts. Strawbs (vocals and instrumentals). I Only Want My Love to Grow in You; Turn Me Round; Hard, Hard Winter; My Friend Peter; The Soldier's Tale; Simple Visions; and four others. OYSTER OY-1-1603 $6.98, 8T-1-1603 $7.98, CT-1-1603 $7.98.
Performance: Prissy
Recording: Clean
If we ever get out of this depressing era of lousy rock music still trying to live off its reputation from the Sixties, we may be able to take comfort in the fact that the era at least produced some remarkable album-cover photographs and paintings. I hope, for their sakes, that the painters and photographers have retained the rights of possession to their works; they might be valuable someday.
The album cover for "Deep Cuts" is a case in point. It would be a disservice to the painting to describe it, so I suggest you go to your record store and see it for yourself. You need not buy the album unless you intend to be a pop-art collector, for the ersatz music inside is limp and conceited. The songs, as usual these days, depend on the rock mystique and The Musician as Hero, since they cannot stand by themselves. Greeting-card versifiers have written better lyrics, and tone-deaf whistlers in the shower have come up with better melodies. The vocals are smug and glottal. J. V.
TANYA TUCKER: Here's Some Love. Tanya Tucker (vocals); orchestra. Short Cut; The Gospel Singer; Holding On; Comin' Home Alone; I Use the Soap; and four others. MCA; MCA-2213 $6.98.
Performance: Very professional
Recording: Excellent
Here is Tanya Tucker offering another of her essays in absolute, on-the-button professionalism. She's matched by the arranging perfectionisms of Bergen White and the super efficient soundless hum of Jerry Crutchfield's production. If all that sounds a bit cut and dried, I'm afraid that's because it is. Tucker's strongest appeal, since her astonishing youthful debut several years ago, has been her complete understanding and communication of the real and basic feelings and emotions that even the average c-&-w lyric is all about. But of late her albums have been getting fancier and fancier, with the result that such things here as the title song and Round and Round the Bottle evoke only admiration at the way she performs them instead of that old familiar down-home heart tug. What she hopes to gain by all of this haute professionalism is hard to guess. What she's lost is pretty obvious. P.R.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
JESSE WINCHESTER: Let the Rough Side Drag.. Jesse Winchester (vocals, guitar, key boards, flute); Marty Harris (bass); Chris Castle (drums); Bob Cohen (guitar); Ron Dann (steel guitar); other musicians. Let the Rough Side Drag; Damned If You Do; Step by Step; Lay Down Your Burden; Everybody Knows but Me; Blow On, Chilly Wind; Working in the Vineyard; How About You; and four others.
BEARSVILLE BR 6964 $6.98, M8 6964 $7.98, MS 6964 $7.98.
Performance: Very good
Recording: Very good
Jesse Winchester is one of those songwriters whose words sometimes have a special sparkle behind them and whose tunes generally can be relied upon to go somewhere. He hasn't been consistently at top form, though, and the depth of some of his albums, as they age, seems to be spotted in certain songs. I'm not sure how this one will age, but it seems to have its depth spread about pretty well. I never get a major revelation from it and don't know exactly why I keep expecting one, but Step by Step has that sparkle (". . . Jacob's ladder gets slippery at the top . . . And many a happy-go-lucky saint has made that long, long drop"), some lovely twists on your basic blues tune, and such sidemen as Paul Butterfield brought in to flesh out Winchester's sound a bit. The production still has the characteristic Spartan quality, though; it has a little more muscle here, but no suggestion of fat. The Brand New Tennessee Waltz is re done in a warm, sentimental way; all the other songs are new, and there's something-some thing short of a major revelation, but some thing-worth waiting for in almost every one.
The overall tone or feeling of it is slightly abstract; I suspect it would be more concrete if we could get Winchester, a Vietnam War draft exile, back in the U.S.A. and closer to his sources. This shows, though, that he isn't merely killing time up in Montreal; he's keeping his eyes open. N.C.
NORMAN BLAKE: Old and New. Norman Blake (vocals, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, viola); Tut Taylor (dobro); James Bryan (fiddle); Ben Pedigo (banjo); Nancy Blake (cello, viola, bass). Widow's Creek; Bristol in the Bottle; Billy Gray; Forked Deer; Rubagfre; Cuckoo's Nest; Witch of the Wave; My Old Home on the Green Mountain Side; and nine others. FLYING FISH 010 $6.98.
Performance: Mostly agreeable
Recording: Good
Norman Blake strums a sassy guitar and sings folk songs in rural arrangements devised by himself and his colleagues, who play the do bro, fiddle, and banjo along with such less back-woodsy instruments as the viola, cello, and bass. Blake also writes "folk songs" (as if there weren't already enough of them) which sound just as rustic as the real thing.
When he and his friends are whooping it up to a whirlwind finish in such instrumental numbers as his own Rubagfre and the traditional Cuckoo's Nest, their excitement is contagious, and when Blake sings such time-honored material as My Old Home on the Green Mountain Side, the going is still agreeable though the idiom and the singing style are al most painfully familiar. When he starts mourning the passing of the "iron horse," though, and the takeover of the tracks by freeways in Railroad Days, the results are simply dismal. One interesting ballad Blake resurrects here is Sweet Heaven, with its chorus of "Let her go, let her go, God bless her" and the lines, "She may search this wide world over/She'll never find a friend as true as me," which all these years I had supposed traced their origin to the St. James Infirmary Blues. Something blue turns out to be some thing borrowed.
P.K.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
MEXICO--FIESTAS OF CHIAPAS AND OAXACA. Various musicians recorded on lo cation by David Lewiston. Son Suenta N'a hual San Lorenzo; El Chinito; Bats'i Son Martomail; La Jota; Son Sventa Ch'ul Na; Valse Chiapaiiecas; K'in Suenta Ch'ul Me'tik Kwadulupe; Son Sventa Cajvaltic; Christmas in Oaxaca; Nuoco; Son Alegre; Carreta de Flores; Cantares de Mi Tierra; Danza de la Malincha. NONESUCH H-72070 $3.96.
Performance: Exciting
Recording: Remarkable
It is December in the town of Nabenchauc. At the fiesta in honor of Mother Guadalupe, musicians lead the long procession of religious officials in glorious robes and women carrying flowers. The town bell resounds while reeds and flutes pipe strange melodies and a tambor pounds out a rousing rhythm. Suddenly the earth is shaken when fireworks explode to waken the rain god, exhorting him to send water to the parched ground. That's how this remarkable recording of fiesta music from the regions of Chiapas and Oaxaca opens. Then come tunes beaten out on marimbas with rubber-headed hammers, a song for a church wedding, a jota from Carranza, a native waltz, music for priests to drink wine by, family songs, music for flute and percussion to accompany the progress of a flower cart in a parade. The climax is Christmas in Oaxaca, as children chant carols, floats from nearby villages go by in splendor, and the merrymakers approach the main plaza-the Zocalo--as a brass brand resounds.
Never have the color and variety of Southern Mexico been so authentically and excitingly captured as in this field recording brought back by David Lewiston and his field advisor, Walter F. Morris. Flutes, drums, harp, guitar, the sound of fireworks, a tortoise-shell instrument struck with deer antlers, local singers, and lines of marchers join in an authentic aural spectacular to prove once again that there is more to the music of Mexico than a mariachi band. A worthy addition to the distinguished Nonesuch Explorer Series. P.K.
TEXAS-MEXICAN BORDER MUSIC, VOL. 5. Orquesta Colonial: Cielito Lindo. Mariachi Coculense Rodriguez: La Cuatro Milpas. El Trio Alegre: Peores Nada. Orquesta Frontierza: Adios Amor Mio. Lydia Mendoza: Panchita; Se Murio la Cucaracha. Mariachi Acosta: Ojitos Chinos y Negros. And nine others. FOLKLYRIC 9007 $6.98.
Performance: Variable
Recording: Variable restored mono
This collection of sixteen tracks recorded be tween 1927 and 1940 is a retrospective survey of the small string bands that played a mixture of Mexican, American, and European music which can loosely be termed "chicano" or multicultural folk. A few of the melodies, such as Cielito Lindo with its "ay-yi-yi-yi" chorus, are familiar. The performances, like the aural quality of the recordings (the jacket says they were "originally made monorally"!) are variable. The disciplined bands sound a bit too polite, and the amateur, street-corner groups sound like Tia Juana versions of the Grand Old Opry (the rhythm guitarists have a common difficulty with under-tuning, so that they are always a trifle flat). But there are many fine moments in nearly all the selections. Part of the joy of listening to Latin mu sic is to hear to what degree the performers balance the two greatest elements of the style: dignity and passion. Mexican music is especially rich in examples where the balance tilts toward one or the other, whether according to plan or not.
Producer/editor Chris Strachwitz has contributed detailed and highly interesting liner notes. While few people are likely to be fascinated with this border music to the point of excluding everything else from their collections, a sample of music such as this is certainly worth having.
J. V.
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Director Sherrin, singers McKenzie and Martin, pianist Higgs, singer Kernan
Side by Side by Sondheim
THE new RCA album "Side by Side by Sondheim" is a tribute, bouquet, what-have-you to the work of Stephen Sondheim, probably the most gifted and productive creative force now at work in the American lyric theater. It is a collection of songs from an astonishing career that began-at the top-with West Side Story (he was then only twenty-five years old) and has continued on to the recent Pacific Overtures.
The release is a recorded version of the "musical entertainment" first presented at London's Mermaid Theatre last year by three young English performers. In the recent past we've also had original-cast recordings, from that same stage, of evenings devoted to the works of Noel Coward and Cole Porter. If this last go with Sondheim is the least successful of the three, it is so for reasons that have little to do with the quality of his work or with Ned Sherrin's direction of his three talented per formers. It has to do, oddly enough, with the problem of translation. Just as the plays of Montherlant are so very much the quintessence of all that is French that they are, even in English, rather mystifying experiences for British or American audiences, so Sondheim's work is so characteristic a dissection of the overexposed nerve endings and quirky responses of the genus "New Yorker" that any transplantation, either geographical or simply out of the context of such strong "books" as Gypsy, West Side Story, or A Little Night Music, is likely to disorient the audience from a necessary frame of reference.
Further, as Sondheim himself observes in the album's liner notes, "I like writing songs that take place in dramatic situations within the proscenium arch. I'm not particularly interested in art songs or pop songs that stand on their own." I am prepared to take him at his word on that, for the songs in this album don't work nearly as well as the Coward and Porter songs do in theirs. Those two were, of course, interested in the popular song as a kind of vernacular "art song," sharing both the determination and the ability to create "hits" that could sustain themselves apart from the shows they were written for.
Again, Porter and Coward were charter members of what used to be called the Inter national Set, a rather motley crew, to be sure, but one quite serious in its determination to shake off any lingering traces of Victorian provincialism-or any other kind, for that matter. Their particular brand of gossamer sophistication and arch playfulness traveled beautifully-it was equally at home in New York or London or, indeed, anywhere that speakers of English thirsted for the champagne sparkle of their cheerful fatalism.
Sondheim, on the other hand, coldly brilliant, rigidly committed to intelligence-above-all, and with the eye and ear (and heart) of a night-desk detective sergeant laying out the evidence in a crime of passion, is hardly a lighthearted boulevardier. He is New York.
He is also-dare one say it?-more than a lit tle provincial in being trapped in the very small, very select, very social reaches of New York's upper Bohemia. So much of his work reflects the attitudes of that milieu: at once .. . somewhat adrift in the new-worldly scorch of Sondheim's lyrics clever and mistrustful, intelligent yet oddly disdainful, crisp and chic but still wildly, un predictably (and only temporarily) sentimental. Perhaps one remark he makes in the liner notes will clarify this: "Bach was an acquired taste for me, Mozart I don't understand. It doesn't reach me." (Yet one of his most successful shows is named after one of Mozart's most "reachable" musical entertainments.) "I admire it, but I don't like it." Admires it but doesn't like it! God, how that detachment comes through in his songs for such characters as Rose in Gypsy, Leona in Do I Hear a Waltz?, and in practically every song he wrote for every character in both Follies and Company! There is much understanding-no, comprehension-but little pity, gentleness, or compassion in Sondheim's work.
Performers Millicent Martin, Julia McKenzie, and David Kernan seem somewhat adrift in the (for them) new-worldly scorch of Sondheim's lyrics. Everything goes well enough when, for instance, Millicent Martin can have a jolly romp through I'm Still Here, a hymn to a Hollywood dragoness that enlivened Follies, or when Kernan and McKenzie trot through We're Gonna Be All Right, a cheerful (the music is Richard Rodgers') number about a young couple counting their blessings. But when the program gets around to the Real Stuff, the brooding anger of You Could Drive a Person Crazy, Everybody Says Don't, There Won't Be Trumpets, or even the obsessional Losing My Mind, then the company is as out of its depth as three schoolchildren doing a Strindberg play. If you really listen to Sondheim's lyrics-and you have to listen, they are that good-then you know that his is a very dark talent indeed, that it needs a very specific kind of instinctive, indigenous, New York performance to put it across. Otherwise, the result is what we get here: singing actors trying to fake emotions that are utterly for eign to them.
THE success or failure of this particular al bum makes no real difference, for Sondheim is still, if for no more than his mastery of lyric techniques (and there is a great deal more), one of the contemporary greats. But what he does is quite special, traveling a course that is parallel to without being a part of the main stream of the American musical theater. This is not, in other words, the kind of place you want to show up at without a firm invitation.
-Peter Reilly
STEPHEN SONDHEIM: Side by Side by Sondheim. Millicent Martin, Julia McKenzie, David Kernan (vocals); Tim Higgs, Stuart Pedlar (pianos). RCA CBL2-1851 two discs $12.98,0 CBS2-1851 $9.98, CBK2-1851 $9.98.
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SIDNEY BECHET: Sidney Bechet Album. Sid ney Bechet (soprano sax); Wild Bill Davison, Oran "Hot Lips" Page (trumpet); Albert Nicholas, Mezz Mezzrow (clarinet); Jimmy Archey (trombone); Ralph Sutton, Sammy Price (piano); Danny Barker (guitar); "Pops" Foster (bass); Sidney Catlett, .."Baby" Dodds (drums). Baby, Won't You Please Come Home; Sheik of Araby; Dardanella; I Never Knew; House Party; Perdido Street Stomp; and four others. SAGAPAN 6900 $6.98 (avail able from CMS Records, 14 Warren Street, New York, N.Y. 10007).
Performance: Uninspired Recording: Variable reprocessed mono Sidney Bechet was a distinguished jazz reed-
man from New Orleans who settled in New York in the 1920's and spent the latter part of his life in France, where he was adored. He was adept at several instruments but was best known for his playing of the soprano saxophone, which he "invented" for jazz purposes as his contemporary Joe Venuti "in vented" the violin and Eddie Lang the guitar as a melody instrument.
Unfortunately, this collection of odd pick up sessions from the 1940's doesn't display Bechet to much advantage. He plays as a sideman in some excellent company, but the performances don't have much energy; the music is rather tired and tinny neo-Dixieland.
Occasionally one of the players sounds interested-trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page has a fine solo on House Party-but things generally just grind along and muddle through. The selections on the second side of the album un fortunately feature Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, a clarinetist of limited ability but with a talent for self-advertisement and a line of jive about the Meaning of Jazz that caused him to be revered by French jazz intellectuals. Mezzrow's playing on these sessions is dull-when it isn't ghastly.
There is some comic relief, however, in the hilariously stuffy and overwritten liner notes, the mauve prose of which is rendered by an English jazz intellectual. European fans and critics of America's Only Native Musical Art Form, Inc. tend to approach the subject of jazz as an apocryphal chapter of Genesis and the musicians as so many Adams and Noahs.
Bechet was a fine musician, but his memory is better served by many of the other recordings he made throughout his long and productive career. J.V.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
ART BLAKEY: Jazz Messengers '70. Art Blakey (drums); Bill Hardman (trumpet); Carlos Garnett (tenor saxophone); Joanne Brac keen (piano); Jon Arnet (bass). Moanin'; Blues March; Whisper Not; and four others.
CATALYST CAT-7902 $6.98 (from Spring board International, 947 U.S. Highway 1, Rahway, N.J. 07065).
Performance: The Messengers deliver
Recording: Good remote
Art Blakey's first Jazz Messengers began their delivery of effervescent romps in 1955 with an album recorded by Blue Note at the Cafe Bohemia. Blakey had actually used the Jazz Messengers name as early as 1947, but the group of 1955 is generally regarded as the one that began the long succession of Messengers. The horns on that auspicious occasion were played by Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley, but the replacements that followed Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Benny Golson, and Wayne Shorter among them-were no less impressive.
This is the only existing recording of a 1970 Jazz Messenger group featuring the horns of trumpeter Bill Hardman, who has been an on-and-off Messenger since 1956, and tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett, who has since made his mark-on alto and soprano sax as well with Mingus, Miles, Norman Connors, and (since 1974) his own group. The recording was made in Japan and has not previously been available in this country. Going on the premise that the audience is less likely to have been Art Blakey today: he keeps the Jazz Messengers young overexposed to his staple repertoire than the folks at home, a bandleader tends to serve a more familiar menu at overseas concerts.
Thus, with the exception of Garnett's What the World Needs Now Is Peace and Love, what we hear here are new (well, six-year-old) versions of tunes that have been in the Blakey repertoire since the Fifties. But the fifty eight-year-old drummer's ear for budding talent has kept the Jazz Messengers young for all these years, and the periodic infusion of new blood has given the group an ever au cou rant sound. The version of Night in Tunisia heard here is therefore significantly different, stylistically, from the 1954 Messenger version, and neither can be said to repeat what was offered in the performances recorded in '57, '59, and '60. While I prefer the 1958 Blues March (on Blue Note, with Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, and Bobby Timmons), the present version of It's Only a Paper Moon is a step above the one made ten years earlier with Morgan and Wayne Shorter.
Pianist Joanne Brackeen-whose predecessors include Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, and Cedar Walton-has matured considerably since this concert took place, but she need not
(Continued on page 106)
be embarrassed by her work here. Bill Hard man is another musician whose growth has not been stunted, and rarely have I heard him play as effectively as in this welcome delivery by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. C.A.
CLAUDE BOLLING AND ALEXANDRE LA GOYA: Concerto for Classic Guitar and Jazz Piano (see Classical Reviews-BOLLING) DUKE ELLINGTON: His Most Important Second War Concert. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. Ring Dem Bells; The Star Spangled Banner; Moon Mist; Black, Brown and Beige (excerpts); and eight others. SAGAPAN PAN 6902 $6.98 (from CMS Records, Inc., 14 Warren Street, New York, N.Y. 10007).
Performance: Good vintage
Duke Recording: Low-fidelity mock stereo
The date was December 11, 1943. It was the Ellington orchestra's second Carnegie Hall concert, and someone was there to preserve it on acetate discs while the recording industry hibernated under the now famous AF of M ban. Judging by a 1%7 release of this material on a Swedish bootleg album, whoever made the original recording did a better job of it than the Sagapan people did of mastering there is an annoying rumble throughout this edition, and the so-called stereo processing only muddles things further.
The music, however, is good-except, of course, for The Star Spangled Banner, which even Ellington can't salvage-and there is a fine crew to spark it. Just why this concert is regarded by the Sagapan people as more important than the band's previous one at Carnegie Hall escapes me, but no Ellington collection should be without it, for it does rep resent an edition of the Ellington band not available on any commercial recordings, and it has some fine solos by Johnny Hodges, Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Taft Jordan, and other Ellington regulars.
Finally, even if you hate Ellington's music, you must read a Mr. Colin Grogan's absolutely incredible piece, "The Saga History of Jazz," which appears on the back cover of this album and is like no other history of jazz you've ever read. Jazz literature is rife with nonsense and dribble, but this tops them all for naiveté and conjecture. C.A.
FRASER MACPHERSON: Fraser-Live at the Planetarium (see Best of the Month, page 85) PAT METHENY: Bright Size Life. Pat Methe ny (guitars); Jaco Pastorius (bass); Bob Moses (drums). Sirabhorn; Midwestern Night's Dream; Round Trip/Broadway Blues; and five others. ECM ECM-1-1073 $6.98, 8T-1-1073 $7.98, CT-1-1073 $7.98.
Performance: Searching
Recording: Excellent
Guitarist Pat Metheny is from Missouri, and I have enjoyed his playing as a member of vibist Gary Burton's group, but I am somewhat disappointed in this, his recording debut as a leader. The support from bassist Jaco Pastori us and drummer Bob Moses is excellent;
Moses, of course, is a long-time associate of Burton's, and Pastorius recently made his first album as a leader. But put them all together-that is, Metheny, Pastorius, and Moses-and the result seems to be three talented musicians in search of something they can't find, at least not here. C.A.
JEAN LUC PONTY/STEPHANE GRAPPELLI: Ponty/Grappelli. Jean Luc Ponty and Stephane Grappelli (violins and violas); rhythm section. Bowing-Bowing; Valerie; Memorial Jam for Stuff Smith; and two others. INNER CITY IC 1005 $6.98 (from Inner City Records, 43 West 61st Street, New York, N.Y. 10023).
Performance: Mostly boring
Recording: Good
I have had a fondness for Stephane Grappel li's playing ever since I first heard a record by the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, and of all the modern jazz violinists no one comes close to Jean Luc Ponty for that magic combination of imagination, swing, and vitality.
Given all that, I should really love this album, but, as it is, I love only parts of it-small parts where the two violinists (who also double on violas) get a chance to play without too much interference from the stereotyped, electrified (in the literal sense) rhythm section. As I say, the album has its moments, very good moments, but. . . . C.A.
STEVE REID: Nova. Steve Reid (drums); Ahmed Abdullah (trumpet); Joe Rigby (reeds); Les Walker (keyboards); Luis Angel Falcon, Richard Williams (bass). Lions of Juda; Long Time Black; Sixth House; and two others. MUSTEVIC SOUND MS 2 001 $5.98 (from Mustevic Sound, Inc., 193-18 120th Avenue, New York, N.Y. 11412).
Performance: Lofty
Recording: Good
As the major labels move farther and farther away from jazz and sink deeper and deeper into that stagnant pool of electronically generated "sounds," more and more dedicated musicians are finding it necessary to finance, record, and release their own albums in order to be heard as they want to be heard. Such ventures rarely bring the artist a measurable financial reward, but they do give him the satisfaction of having a record done his way and of knowing that possible profits won't have to be shared with a faceless corporation or someone whose only interest is a material one.
The un-credited notes for this album are hopelessly amateurish, but I am happy to re port that the music is not. In fact, this is a very worthwhile album of what can perhaps best be described as "loft jazz," a term that may not mean much to you unless you have had the experience of taking in the music currently thriving in the lofts of New York's Lower East Side. Steve Reid has drawn praise from some of the newer critics, but I don't find his drumming exceptional-good, perhaps very good, but not exceptional.
Trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah, on the other hand, does have a quality that stands out; his name is new to me, and chances are that it's new to him, but I don't think I have heard his playing before. Les Walker's ascoustic (sic) piano work, generally much better than his organ playing, is most effective on Sixth House.
I'm sorry that we only get a total of thirty minutes in this album and I wish the engineer hadn't ended each selection quite so abruptly, but I hope Steve Reid and his colleagues soon come back with more. C.A.
JACK REILLY: Tributes. Jack Reilly (piano). Someone to Watch Over Me; Nabla; Suffering; and seven others. CAROUSEL CLP 1002 ... $6.98 (from Carousel Records, 125 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11215).
Performance: Polite
Recording: Good
This is, as far as I know, Jack Reilly's second album. Recorded last April, it contains more of his own compositions, dedicated to com posers and artists whom he obviously ad mires: Leonard Bernstein, Anton Webern, John Coltrane, Lee Konitz, "Zoot Simms" (sic). The pieces-ranging from Nabla, a one-and-a-half-minute tribute to Alban Berg, to the ten-minute In Memoriam/Ben Webster contain only flashes of original thought. Mr.
Reilly, who counts David Hollander, Hall Overton, and George Russell among his mentors, has obviously done a great deal of listen ing, and he seems to have absorbed styles and techniques rather well, but there is a lack of feeling in what he does. In my review of Reilly's previous album ("Blue-Sean-Green," Carousel ATM-1001) I found that he had more to offer as a composer and stated that I would like to hear his music played by a less formal performer. That still goes-Reilly is simply too rigid for his own good works.
BUD SHANK: Sunshine Express. Bud Shank (flute, alto saxophone); Bobby Shew (comet, trumpet, flugelhorn); Mike Wofford (piano); Fred Atwood (bass); Larry Bunker (drums).
John C.; Flim Flam; Here's That Rainy Day; and four others. CONCORD JAZZ CJ-20 $6.98 (from Concord Jazz, Inc., P.O. Box 845, Concord, Calif. 94522).
Performance: Excellent
Recording: Unnatural
Bud Shank has been on the professional mu sic scene some thirty years. He was born in Ohio, but he moved to the West Coast in the late Forties and soon became identified with that vaguely defined arm of jazz allegedly peculiar to California. He is an excellent com poser/arranger as well as a fine performer whose work you can hear on many and varied albums recorded under the leadership of such performers as Maria Muldaur, Harry Nilsson, Andy Williams, and Julie London. He also participates--more fittingly-on albums by the excellent L.A. Four, of which he is one.
Shank's past associations have included the bands of Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan, and Gerald Wilson, and he has had distinguished albums of his own, but this is his first in quite a while.
The five musicians here sound like more, which may be the result of added tracks but could also be an aural illusion caused by the apparent use of an echo chamber for the en semble passages. I wish Shank, who produced the album himself, had given us a more realistic presence. Even so, this is a fine al bum with good, hummable if somewhat strait laced arrangements and excellent solos. Bud Shank's work is characteristically tasteful, and I especially like his faster-than-usual treatment of Here's That Rainy Day. And trumpeter Bobby Shew, whom I had not heard of before, bears watching. The album is worth acquiring, and it is also, I hope, an overture to more by Shank. C.A.
RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT
SONNY STITT: Forecast: Sonny & Red. Sonny Stitt (tenor saxophone); Red Holloway (alto and tenor saxophones); Art Hillary (piano); Larry Gales (bass); Clarence Johnston (drums). You Don't Know What Love Is/I'm Getting Sentimental Over You; Lester Leaps In; and four others. CATALYST CAT-7608 $6.98 (from Springboard International, 947 U.S. Highway 1, Rahway, N.J. 07065).
Performance: Cooking
Recording: Very good
Sonny Stitt's recent album on the Flying Dutchman label ("Stomp Off Let's Go," BDLI-1538) was an ill-conceived, sloppy mess for which he here makes amends. Teaming up with saxophonist James "Red" Holloway, Stitt really does stomp off this time, evoking fond memories of another saxophone team, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Johnny Griffin. If you liked the excitement created by Davis and Griffin on those Prestige and Jazz-land albums of the very early Sixties,' you will undoubtedly receive this album favorably.
The Way You Look Tonight, Lester Leaps In, and All God's Chillun Got Rhythm are neck-and-neck romps from the first to the last bar, but the album also contains some very fine, relaxed blues and ballad work. Pianist Art Hillary, and the rhythm section cook comfortably at any speed. As far as I'm concerned this team is welcome any time. C.A.
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SONNY STITT: good cooking at any speed
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Also see:
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (Feb 1977)
AUDIO BASICS: The Greater Good
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)