Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1959
by Scott Miller

"Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)" - Frank Sinatra
The famous February plane crash in which Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper perished was Don McLean's famous "day the music died"; a new, cooler musical vocabulary could be heard taking shape in 1959—this would be the native language of the creative explosion that occurred in the sixties—but for on-message pop, the year was bleak. Rock and roll must have seemed at risk of being over. Certainly times were never better for the ever-resurrecting Frank Sinatra, who followed the nuanced Sings For Only the Lonely with the smash hit cocktail party swing of Come Dance With Me! This upbeat lost-love shrug about the night "friends come to ball" reads as backward-looking today, but the precision of the band, the audio, and of course the vocals, are timeless.

"Sea Cruise" - Frankie Ford with Huey "Piano" Smith and Orchestra
Smith is the originator here, and his authentic New Orleans boogie is utterly indespensible. However, to be completely honest, I think Frankie Ford's flown-in vocal is what really makes this special. With rock intangibles going wrong left and right as the fifties waned, Ford got the sheer phrasing of key words righter than right. The little—not overdone—yelp on "oo wee," the emphatic plosive of "baby," the snarl and tiny power-vibrato on "won't": perfect energy. That horrible ship's fog horn sound effect is just crazy enough to work.

"Chronology" - Ornette Coleman
The Shape Of Jazz To Come was one of the more audacious and successful acts of musical originality. Although carefully composed and faithful to the theme-solos-theme jazz composition pattern, the rules of chord basis and modulation were largely thrown out. Once you get used to it, the theme of a bop-derived piece like "Chronology" is spirited and forthcoming—and even before that much absorption, the material gives no impression of being either tossed-off or contentious, but rather of setting up for some unusually fancy playing, sax playing that hints at something like an articulate person talking fast and making good points.

"Climb Ev'ry Mountain" - "The Sound Of Music" Original Cast Recording
To citizens of the intervening years of pop music mainstream, Patricia Neway's trilling operatic warble sounds no less Martian than Ornette Coleman. Fine performance though it be, there are some fatigued signifiers of pomp and circumstance to listen through to get to one of the most sublime Richard Rodgers melodies and Oscar Hammerstein's well-tuned lyric set. "Follow every rainbow till you find your dream," in the wrong hands, is just encouragement to be selfish, and corny encouragement at that; Hammerstein shapes that with, "A dream that will need all the love you can give/Every day of your life for as long as you live." Thus qualified in terms of loving commitment, we can feel good about this coming from a Mother Abbess.

"Come Go Home With Me" - Lightnin' Hopkins
Here's the most entertaining track from the informal, personable Folkways session (it also includes, for instance, a track of nothing but spoken reminiscinces of mentor Blind Lemon Jefferson). Besides flurries of amazing guitar work, Poor Lightnin' does what is more or less a stream-of-consciousness stand-up comedy routine through the whole song. "I wouldn't lie for nothing/Before I lie, I'll shut my mouth/My wife she tells me you're lying, Sam, every time you walk about/Don't call me no liar/Make me mad." It's very hard not to crack a big smile as all of this goes on.

"Sleep Walk" - Santo and Johnny
A beautifully evocative palm-trees-and-moonlight doo-wop instrumental, "Sleep Walk" takes the bold step of turning the lead melody over to steel guitar—which must have led directly to those pungent moving fourths after the high notes that are so essential to the melodic arc.

"Twisted" - Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross
This ought to threaten embarrassment as badly dated swinger humor, but it's just far too good: Joni Mitchell covered it on tastemaker gold standard Court and Spark some fifteen years later, and no one blinked. Loosely in the breezy, conversational style of Bobby Troup's "Route 66," it's a piece of analyst's-couch humor set to piano bar jazz, and like a lot of recordings of the period, it sounds like a million bucks just from an audiophile perspective, and it's an all-around fine piece of music, too.

"El Paso" - Marty Robbins
With its expert Spanish guitar and an impressively personalized start-to-finish verse narrative about a flare-up killing over a girl in a cantina, this is a true ballad, with that genre's full storytelling entertainment value. More remarkably, in a year with quite a bit of competition, I would guess that more people would be able to recognize and hum "Out in the west Texas town of El Paso..." than any other song here ("I Only Have Eyes For You" would be competition, but that's a standard from 1934).

"Desperate Man Blues" - John Fahey (Blind Joe Death)
Fahey's pressing of 100 copies of his independent "Blind Joe Death" album turned out to be a milestone for the outsider music aesthetic. With both an unprecedented scrupulousness for these solo acoustic guitar performances' stylistic place in history and a love of making up stories about their creation (like the fictitious personage Blind Joe Death), Fahey was the perfect architect of a fantasy league style that worked to preserve the elements to which it paid homage. Beautifully performed, almost entirely American—sometimes Celtic in precedence, this music was always at least 50% blues, but allowed for opportunities to show off modern classical mood swings and intricate Appalachian picking. Fahey's beautiful recordings of blues legend Skip James were probably responsible for people like me knowing about Skip James, and Fahey's work shows signs of being as enduring as the blues greats—with strong support among people with ears as good as Jim O'Rourke's.

"I Only Have Eyes For You" - The Flamingos
Nate Nelson was the singer on what is perhaps the most fully-realized doo-wop recording, even if the doo-wop elements themselves are arguably not absolutely integral. It may be more thematic to say this is one of the nicest and most atmospheric uses of reverb and tremolo in a pop recording. There's a mad genius to the little sequence of guitar chords in the beginning—they don't give much of a clue where they're going—followed by the "my love must be a kind of blind love" verse, followed by the hook verse. But the very coolest moment is about 25 seconds from the end, on the last "for you"; the situation calls for a corny resolution, but the lead vocal hangs on the same note and the band goes to the opening pattern, a bracing fourth away.

"What'd I Say, Pt. 1" - Ray Charles
The first four notes of that Wurlitzer riff really say it all; this is a new standard for low and lean grooves that would be the benchark for years. It makes such a point of that minor seventh in the major chord, achieving a synthesis of blues and Latin inflections. From there, it's all execution: Ray Charles's solid gold playing, singing, and capturing what feels like the energy of a fully engaged live audience in a studio, improv-like call and response pattern intact.

"All Blues" - Miles Davis
I like "All Blues" a little better than the perennial favorite "So What"; I guess it comes down to finding the famous "modal" decisions more exotic and compelling; they bring a lot to mind. A famously easy entry for non-fans of jazz, Kind of Blue is no more challenging than the average Steely Dan song; for years, it has been one of my favorite albums to put on during a nice dinner.

"Take Five" - Dave Brubeck
Another indelible main theme, Paul Desmond's cool-jazzy "Take Five" is part of Dave Brubeck's Time Out concept album of odd time signatures, and one of the few natural-sounding 5/4 time signature songs (another amazing success at that is Jethro Tull's "Living In the Past").

"Syeeda's Song Flute" - John Coltrane
One of the more playful pieces on Giant Steps, the Thelonious Monk influenced theme of "Syeeda's Song Flute" segues to a glorious moment of that trademark Coltrane almost-sharp tenor on the fundamental, giving way to a devastating cascade of allusions, harmonics, and undefinable mastery on the all-too-brief lead sax solo. I don't blame myself too much for getting antsy waiting through the piano and bass solos for those little toots of Coltrane reprising the theme.

"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" - Charles Mingus
Listening to producer Teo Macero, one of the people responsible for studio projects getting out-of-this-world results in a way that—for reasons I don't fully understand—doesn't happen in the ostensibly superior computer recording age, you get a feeling for the living entity that a studio was in those days. Besides the sheer magic of electro-mechanical response, the process of having to achieve an engineering design innovation to get a sound is different from the process of downloading a plug-in to get a sound. As much as I love ProTools, there's too much room in many contexts to fail at the level of priorities. It's kind of like, what if Orson Welles had a program that converted a script into images of actors giving perfect performances, so all Welles worked on all day was which way the lighting was coming from in each scene, because someone still has to decide that? If a project's decision matrix isn't somehow mapped so as to coincide with decisions talented people make when they deploy those talents, it just becomes too hard a job to direct. With that in mind, I think of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," its title a dedication to the recently deceased Lester Young, with its miking capturing the measured flow of air through John Handy's and Booker Ervin's tenor sax. The engineering is right next to the music, and the music is right next to life, which is in a state of awareness of loss of life. It's probably my single favorite jazz recording, and a record of a great past intelligence of process.