Every jazz musician has a different approach to time. Some play exactly on the beat, some push ahead like commuters afraid to be late for work, and some, like the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923–1990), hang a mile back, forever threatening to grind the music to a crawl.
The L.A.-born tenorman knew that it took only that threat—the hint of a work slow-down—to keep things interesting. On his wonderful career highlight Go!, Gordon zozzles through a swinging original called "Cheese Cake" at a perfectly serene pace that almost disregards the tempo. He does the same thing on the medium bounce "Second Balcony Jump," and the ballad "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry." The music might be galloping, but Gordon just pokes along, timing his phrases to create tension with his precision-minded rhythm section, which includes pianist Sonny Clark and drummer Billy Higgins. Having played with Gordon some, they came to this date prepared: They let him ramble, and reinforce his allusions to nursery rhymes and pop songs while doing everything they can to keep the train running on time.
Go! was recorded in August 1962, just before Gordon, who'd already done time on drug-related charges and mounted at least one "comeback," left the U.S. to live the expatriate jazz life in Europe, which he did for the next fifteen years. Although his stated intention for leaving was to reach a wider audience, he also managed to miss the social upheaval of urban America in the 1960s. The isolation had an interesting impact on his art: The music Gordon made after this date, including such well-respected works as Our Man in Paris, has a time-capsule quality, as though he's willfully clinging to the sounds of a long vanished bebop moment. Jazz changed dramatically, but Gordon stayed put. This worked to his advantage when, upon returning to the States in the late '70s, he began another comeback—reinventing himself as a ballad-playing elder statesman. He capped his career acting and playing in 'Round Midnight, the 1986 film about the lives of expatriate jazzers; Gordon proved convincing in the starring role, hitting the notes of determination and dissipation that defined his own career while staying, as always, just a shade behind the beat.
Genre: Jazz
Released: 1962, Blue Note
Key Tracks: "Second Balcony Jump," "Cheese Cake."
Catalog Choice: Our Man in Paris; Sophisticated Giant
Next Stop: Johnny Griffin: A Blowin' Session
After That: Red Garland Quintet: Soul Junction
Book Page: 318
The great American credo "Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young" was the first song Faron Young recorded after his Army hitch was up in 1954. Young (1932–1996) didn't write the song (Nashville DJ Joe Allison did), but he imbued it with all the wildcat energy of one just sprung from a long-standing obligation. It is the essence of early rock rebellion, before such rebellion became a codified (and commodified) part of rock and roll.
When "Live Fast" was released, Young had a built-in audience for his work: Because he'd experienced a bit of success (with the single "Goin' Steady") before entering the service, the military featured him in a weekly radio show heard on two thousand stations. The singer and guitarist, born in Shreveport, Louisiana, said later that the publicity did him a "world of good." After his release, he capitalized on the exposure with a string of energetic honky-tonk hits, collected here, that made him a star; by late 1955, when rock and roll exploded, Young was possibly the biggest attraction in country music, and one of the form's few talents who knew, instinctively, how to appeal to younger listeners.
Young did this by bringing a bit of honkytonk rhythm and teen-idol pop sheen to his art—for a while, he was known as the "Hillbilly Heartthrob." Though he wrote (or cowrote) some singles, he was also esteemed as a sharp eye for talent, recording early songs by Willie Nelson ("Hello Walls," a number 1 hit), Don Gibson, and others. Sonically, most of Young's singles of the '50s are best described as "nothing fancy"—just nice warm vocals atop neatly appointed small-band accompaniment, following the general path of his idol, Hank Williams. But they're charming and energetic, and graced with a hint of the abandon that became a key ingredient of all the fast-living rock and roll that followed.
Genre: Country
Released: 2004, Collector's Choice
Key Tracks: "Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young," "If You Ain't Lovin' (You Ain't Livin')," "That's the Way I Feel," "I Hear You Talkin'"
Next Stop: Merle Haggard: Mama Tried
After That: Wynn Stewart: After the Storm
Book Pages: 882–883
When Latin musicians speak of "swing," they're talking about a rhythmic propulsion that's akin to—but not quite the same as—the swing associated with jazz. It's a feeling that's elusive, and impossible to notate. As in jazz, swing in salsa has to do with the emphasis on certain parts of the beat, and the spaces between the beats. But it also con-notes the ways the various percussion parts fit together, and a rhythm section's ability to spin repetitive figures into a pulse that floats along organically. "Either you have it or you don't," the pianist Eddie Palmieri once said. "It can't be taught."
Latin swing carries important regional differences—the Puerto Rican variety is tighter and more exact than the more open, loping Cuban swing, yet not nearly as jittery as the Dominican version. One of the most distinctive rhythmic approaches of any modern group belongs to El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, which has, for more than forty years, cranked out incredibly upbeat music for dancing, all of it blessed with a signature swing feel. This band isn't concerned with blazing new trails; it makes music to be enjoyed. Few outfits equal its knack for spreading positive vibes across a dance floor.
This compilation, issued to mark the band's thirtieth anniversary in 1992, is a parade of energetic contagions. There are early chant-based hits from the band's first album, Acangana, and more elaborate arrangements from the smoother salsa romántica of the '90s. Incredibly, no matter the musical fashion, the core values of the Combo—which was formed by pianist and arranger Rafael Ithier in 1962, when he and several musicians left the esteemed Cortijo y Su Combo to create a sassier band—remain the same. All share the relentless swing that makes every refrain (the best include "El menu," "Brujeria," and "Timbalero") sound like an invitation to an amazing party.
Genre: World, Puerto Rico
Released: 1992, Combo
Key Tracks: "El menu," "Son de Santurce," "Brujeria," "Un verano en Nueva York."
Catalog Choice: Acangana
Next Stop: Sonora Ponceña: Fuego en el 23
After That: Batacumbele: Con un poco de songo
Book Page: 322
People talk about the coldness of masters. How someone who has consummate command of an instrument can come off haughty, or disdainful, or otherwise unimpressed with the music he's bringing to life. In recent years this charge has been leveled at several classical performers of the mid-twentieth century, including Jascha Heifetz, the peerless (and polarizing) violinist. The logic goes like this: Listen to these Calamity Jane tempos! The flashy displays of technique! What a snob!
This recording is often held up as an example of this coolness—particularly the Brahms, which has lots of high-register hijinks. Sure enough, in the first movement Heifetz seems detached, and more than a little haughty. But check out what happens when the tempo slows down, at the start of the second movement: Here the shimmering Heifetz tone warms up, begins to glow. The violinist, who was born in Russia and became an instant sensation after his Carnegie Hall debut in 1917, goes from note to note with great caution. Heifetz pays attention to the placement of notes and their emphasis in a way that suggests the care of a rock climber stretching just a bit beyond arm's length to find secure footing. And like a master climber, he brings all of his skill, as well as his instincts as a human being, to the task. He's never going to be confused with a sappy romantic, but he knows how to set Brahms's flowing thoughts free.
Heifetz studied with Leopold Auer, the noted Russian teacher for whom the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto was written. As on the Brahms, Heifetz plays the Tchaikovsky like a chase scene, though he adds slight ornamentations to the first movement that help him stamp the piece as his own. The remainder of the concerto is rendered with a cool, evenhanded, maybe even dispassionate precision—exactly the type of authoritative execution that some find thrilling and some find soulless. Follow Heifetz through these meticulous, carefully shaped lines, and you may come to appreciate his mastery as an end in itself, the klieg light that brings clarity to every corner of the music.
Genre: Classical
Released: 1957, RCA
Key Tracks: Brahms: second movement. Tchaikovsky: first movement.
Another Interpretation: Tchaikovsky: David Oistrakh, Dresden Staatskapelle (Franz Konwitschny, cond.)
Catalog Choice: Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Boston Symphony Orchestra (Charles Munch, cond.)
Next Stop: Beethoven, Sibelius Violin Concertos, David Oistrakh
Book Page: 353
Between the demise of the Beatles and the explosion of California folk-rock in the early '70s, there was a brief period when storytellers like Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman became the locus of thinking-person's pop music. Newman was already esteemed as a genius tunesmith. Nilsson (1941–1994) was a slightly wilder character, a renaissance rogue determined to rescue pop from the straightlaced and the feckless.
Nilsson Schmilsson represents a particular peak of that arty era. A work of sheer swooning-strings opulence, it sits in the shadow of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson's then-abandoned Smile, and the Beatles' White Album. It's also a series of preposterous leaps designed to work on many levels at once: Nilsson's songs include inscrutable oompah marches, craftily arranged dime-store exotica (on the spooky "Coconut," he plays a potion-brewing island medicine man), and outbreaks of vaudeville camp.
These would be novelty numbers were it not for Nilsson's voice, which trembles, constantly, with an inner-demon anguish. Having built his songs into towering mountains of sound, Nilsson sings them in a way that melts every contrivance of the accompaniment. His take on the then-popular Carpenters-style lilting love ode, "Without You," flirts dangerously with crooner bathos, yet somehow winds up sounding like the confessions of a ripped-apart romantic. His agitated rock anthem "Step into the Fire," a Doors knockoff, is similarly facile at first, yet blossoms into a platform for angry ranting. Nilsson's irreverence, coupled with the plain and gorgeous arcs of his melodies, put him in a class by himself. Often unjustly dismissed as a stylist or a mere eccentric, he was the rare auteur who, on this record at least, made circus-sideshow songs strike a nerve the way torch ballads usually do.
Genre: Rock
Released: 1971, RCA
Key Tracks: "Without You," "Coconut."
Catalog Choice: Nilsson Sings Newman
Next Stop: Randy Newman: Twelve Songs
After That: R.E.M.: Up
Book Page: 551
Tickets for admission into Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, cost $2.75, a steep charge at the time. But this was no ordinary event. It was the first-ever jazz concert at the storied hall, and it featured not just the most popular swing band in the land, the Benny Goodman Orchestra, but the clarinetist's trio and quartet and members of the bands led by Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
This was swing's "coming out" party, and as is audible on the (alas, noisy) surviving tapes, the crowd was in the mood, to say the least. When Goodman and crew finish "Sing, Sing, Sing," the barnstorming showcase for drummer Gene Krupa that was a favorite of swing dancers, the response is thunderous. The same thing happens on Goodman's bobbing-and-weaving hit "Don't Be That Way," and an extended jam through "Honeysuckle Rose." Swing, as practiced by Goodman's "hot" band, easily warms up the rarefied setting. At least one reason is Goodman's own facility; his classical chops are audible here, as are his instincts for finding—and some-times leaning on—the blue notes.
By the time he stepped on the Carnegie stage, the clarinetist, born in Chicago to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, had already made an even more important contribution to jazz—by employing qualified musicians and arrangers regardless of color. In 1934, Goodman was hired to provide music for the NBC radio series Let's Dance; in search of an authentic swing sound, Goodman retained arranger Fletcher Henderson, whose exuberant scores gave Goodman hit after hit. The next year, with his big band in demand, Goodman put together a trio (and later a quartet) to play during the band's breaks; this group was built around pianist Teddy Wilson, the first African American to appear regularly with a white band. (Anticipating trouble in the Deep South, where Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation, Goodman simply skipped touring in the region.) Later additions to Goodman's groups included vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and the innovative electric guitarist Charlie Christian, who added a welcome dose of modernity. Goodman's moves, which came ten years before Jackie Robinson would integrate Major League Baseball, were not just headline-grabbing publicity stunts: They helped him develop and spread a suave, color-blind sense of swing that for a long time had no peer.
Genre: Jazz
Released: 1992, Columbia
Key Tracks: "Sing, Sing, Sing," "Don't Be That Way," "One O'Clock Jump."
Catalog Choice: The Complete RCA Victor Small Group Recordings
Next Stop: Lionel Hampton: Hamp and Getz
After That: Artie Shaw: The Centennial Collection
Book Page: 317
Before virtually anyone else, David Bowie understood that rock and roll of the 1970s needed an element of fantasy. He made this a personal mission, and fashioned a repertory company of alteregos in theatrical guises—among them sleazy streetwalkers, space-dwelling dope fiends, and cross-dressers tottering precariously on platform heels. These constructs are, in some ways, more memorable than the spotty albums on which they appear. Until Ziggy.
Though its "story" dissolves early on, and its sexual brazenness is long past outré, Ziggy is British rocker Bowie's urtext.
It's also one of the great glam statements of the '70s, a clever distillation of T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and Andy Warhol, in which the sublime and the sordid sit next to each other. Bowie had already grabbed attention a few times by this point, with Space Oddity, Hunky Dory, and the enduring title track from The Man Who Sold the World. Having tasted stardom, sharp social critic Bowie (né David Jones) was evidently both attracted and horrified by it; these songs are a frightened and frightening account of a space alien rock star sent to free the youth of the world from inhibition. Sometimes the places he and his entourage, the Spiders, go are a real trip ("Suffragette City," an all-time classic rocker), and sometimes they're all too real ("Rock and Roll Suicide," "Moonage Daydream"). No matter where he lands, Bowie fully immerses listeners in the freaky feel and smell of the place. He also gets the horniness and holiness of rock ritual—one more recently released bonus track, "Sweet Head," proclaims: "Before there was rock, you only had God." He also understands the yearning for meaning, and depicts the Spiders, and the freaks who pay to see them, with compassion. Like him, they're both skeptics and true believers, participants in a sordid traveling tableau. Their exploits form an allegory about stardom as phantasmagoria that seems downright prescient in our celebrity-obsessed age.
Genre: Rock
Released: 1972, Virgin
Key Tracks: "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," "Five Years," "It Ain't Easy."
Catalog Choice: Young Americans; Heroes
Next Stop: T. Rex: Electric Warrior
After That: Mott the Hoople: All the Young Dudes
Book Pages: 109–110
Some musicians are born composers. Some are hunter-gatherers, soaking up old songs and styles and repopularizing, if not rescuing, them. Huddie Ledbetter, the guitarist and singer who performed as Leadbelly, was a bit of both. He wrote or substantially rewrote several enduring pieces—"Goodnight Irene," which he performed just as "Irene," was a hit for the Weavers shortly after he died nearly penniless. But he's equally revered for renditions of folk songs he picked up while in prison, including odes to trains like "Rock Island Line" and work songs like "Cotton Fields."
The son of a sharecropper, Leadbelly (1888–1949) was born in Louisiana and first began to play guitar at age seven. He drifted as a young man, and found himself in jail more than once. He won notoriety in 1924 when he petitioned Texas governor Pat Neff for early release and won by writing and singing a song. In 1933, Leadbelly was "discovered" in Louisiana's Angola prison by folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan, who'd come to the prison to document folk songs. Leadbelly performed "Irene," a song he said his uncle taught him, for the Lomax tape recorder, and upon his release went to work with the Lomaxes as a chauffeur and assistant on field recording trips. Eventually (after more troubles with the law), Leadbelly left the Lomaxes, and in 1936 took up residence in New York, where he was embraced by a group of activist folk and blues artists, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee.
Leadbelly recorded off and on during the 1930s, but it wasn't until 1941, when he joined up with Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways records, that he documented decent representations of his signature pieces. This disc, compiled from the original masters, features many Leadbelly classics as well as the waltz-meter title track, one of the most harrowing pieces in his songbook. These show why Leadbelly is so revered: His voice is authoritative and bracingly clear, and his playing has the drive of a fearsome rhythm section even when, as per his custom, he is playing alone. All its songs, both originals and covers, reveal Leadbelly as one of the few figures in American music to function the way griots do in Africa—preserving the heart and the essential narratives of a people by passing along, and, crucially, reanimating, their songs.
Genre: Blues, Folk
Released: 1996, Smithsonian Folkways
Key Tracks: "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?," "Rock Island Line," "Good Morning Blues."
Catalog Choice: King of the 12-String Guitar
Next Stop: Woody Guthrie: Dust Bowl Ballads
After That: Blind Boy Fuller: Truckin' My Blues Away
Book Pages: 440–441
Before Johnny Paycheck (1938–2003) hit paydirt with his 1977 version of the rebel anthem "Take This Job and Shove It," he was a Nashville singer and songwriter with a honky-tonk heart and a penchant for recalling relationships that dissolved in dimly lit bars.
You can hear this on the (mostly unsuccessful) singles for the Little Darlin' label, which Paycheck founded with producer Aubrey Mayhew in the mid-'60s. One early session yielded a zippy celebration called "The Lovin' Machine." Another paired Paycheck with George Jones's rhythm section, the Jones Boys, and featured a Hank Cochran jukebox song, "A-11" ("if you push A-11, there'll be tears") that had recently been a hit for Buck Owens. The Paycheck version, which is a touch grittier, reached the Top 20 on the country singles charts, and launched his career. Over the next several years the Ohio-born singer issued an "A-11" follow-up, "The Meanest Jukebox in Town" and a tongue-in-cheek plea to Cochran for more great songs ("Help Me Hank, I'm Falling").
Those songs form the backbone of this anthology, which collects all the singles that sent Paycheck "on his way," many of which never appeared on any album. One, a dismaying account of addiction entitled "The Wheels Fell off the Wagon," was (until recently) totally unreleased—a major loss, considering the way Paycheck's nuanced, deeply affecting vocal redeems a too-common country narrative. As "Take This Job" and his other later successes make clear, that was Paycheck's enduring gift—the ability to render some low-rent, heard-it-all-before, cheating-heart ode as the saddest song in the world.
Genre: Country
Released: 2005, Koch/Little Darlin'
Key Tracks: "The Wheels Fell off the Wagon," "A-11," "The Lovin' Machine," "I'd Rather Be Your Fool."
Catalog Choice: The Gospel Truth: The Complete Gospel Sessions
Next Stop: Merle Haggard: Mama Tried
After That: Bobby Bare: The Best of Bobby Bare
Book Pages: 587–588
This 1965 recording from Brazilian composer, arranger, and saxophonist Moacir Santos offers ten generically identified selections. "Coisas" means "things" in Portuguese, and each song is assigned just a number— there's "Thing 1," "Thing 2," etc. It's a device, to be sure, but it has at least one positive effect: It encourages no preconceptions about what's coming.
That's exactly the way to approach this often beautiful coupling of Brazilian rhythm and jazz harmony. Santos's pieces begin with lighthearted melodies floating over rhythms derived from bossa nova. The themes seem slight at times, like caprices dashed off on a whim. Santos surrounds them with airy orchestrations that use the colors of the big band in new ways. His compositions reflect the influence of jazz legend Duke Ellington: Born in poverty in rural Brazil of the 1920s, Santos ran away from a foster home at fourteen. He learned saxophone, and as a young man supported himself by playing in marching bands in Rio. He began writing music after hearing the Ellington band on record, and landed his first big job—writing music for Brazil's Radio Nacional—in the late 1950s.
Like Ellington, Santos wrote with the specific strengths and sonorities of his players in mind. For the ensemble passages, he seeks a kind of pastel lushness, and then asks the soloists to provide the heat. Many of these pieces feature ad-libs from Santos (he's remarkably dexterous on the big baritone saxophone), or the taciturn piano of Chaim Lavak. Recorded in three days, at a time when jazz in Brazil wasn't terribly adventurous, Coisas influenced such future giants as Sergio Mendes. It remains a shining example of cultural cross-pollination that enriches—and expands upon—its sources.
Genre: World, Brazil
Released: 1965, Universal International
Key Tracks: "Thing 3," "Thing 5."
Catalog Choice: Saudade
Next Stop: Abdullah Ibrahim: African Space Program
After That: Chico O'Farrill: Cuban Blues
Book Pages: 673–674
On the great big spectrum of sound, how many points are there between the pianissimo of a butterfly's fluttering wings and the triple forte of a subway screaming into the station? Are these split into discrete increments, as on a guitar amplifier where "1" is quiet and "10" (or in the case of Spinal Tap, 11) is loud? Or is volume better understood as an unbroken, continuous arc?
These two concertos showcase a pianist whose art grapples with (and, indeed, depends upon) such considerations. The Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920–1995) was respected for his technical command; but he was revered for his precise attention to volume and shading, the ability to illuminate key phrases just by changing the tone ever so slightly.
Both pieces are late masterworks by their respective composers, and both offer Michelangeli lots of chances to engineer marathon shifts. His entrances on the Ravel start out reserved, as though he's choosing a level that will allow him to maximize the music to come. The piece, which Ravel wrote around the same time as his Concerto for the Left Hand, is one of the wildest rides in the orchestral repertoire: After the pastoral calm of the second movement, the third shuttles brazenly into the bustle of a jazz-age city. The Rachmaninoff has similar flashes, and here Michelangeli's technique is the catalyst, knitting the composer's small and frequently isolated melodic "cells" into a fast-moving and highly satisfying whole.
Michelangeli fought in the Italian army during World War II. His career took off after the war, and though he developed a following in Europe, he didn't perform frequently in the U.S. and remains significantly less known here. These lovingly recorded performances were captured during Michelangeli's late-1950s peak, and they helped establish him among the world's great soloists, alongside Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. They are also considered among the best-ever concerto discs (perhaps out of respect, no other pianist has paired these two works on the same recording). Michelangeli's performances earn that respect, not only because the lines themselves arrive so well polished, but because he enlivens them with such vivid contrasts. You almost wonder whether there's a volume knob hidden somewhere on the piano.
Genre: Classical
Released: 1958, EMI (Reissued 2000)
Key Tracks: Ravel: second movement. Rachmaninoff: first movement.
Catalog Choice: Michelangeli Plays Grieg and Debussy
Next Stop: Vladimir Horowitz: At the Met
After That: Monique Haas: Plays Debussy, Ravel, and Bartók, Orchestre National de l'ORTF (Paul Paray, cond.)
Book Pages: 501–502
When the musicians of Joy Division first met in 1977, at a Sex Pistols show in Manchester, punk was everything cool, the prevailing expression of disaffected youth. Two years later, singer Ian Curtis (1956–1980) and his three musicians presented this astonishing counterargument, which amounts to the beginnings of a new rock and roll language.
Joy Division seized the blunt expressions and me-first narcissism of punk, then filtered them through restrained, and at times elegant, melodies. Its tunes build from pulsating war-drum tom-toms, and share grim narratives that describe deep and inescapable existential quagmires. Most punk productions are a poke in the eye with a sharp stick; Joy Division hovers in a predatory stance, the menacing stalker in the background.
Curtis's baritone emerges out of the blanket of fog, spreading dread before he even gets started on his tales of urban isolation and romantic betrayal. Like Jim Morrison and very few other rock singers, Curtis—who hanged himself shortly before the release of Joy Division's second and final album, Closer—commands the spotlight with just his presence, his weighed-down tone. The musicians and producer Martin Hannett seize on this, and through skillful use of reverb and other soundshaping effects position that foreboding voice at the center of music that broods and oozes, yet remains several sizes larger than life.
The thick and at times impenetrable wash of sound wasn't exactly a huge hit right away. But it resonated with an extraordinary number of musicians who became rock stars in the '80s and '90s, among them the Smiths, U2, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and Nine Inch Nails. Just about any rock that carries more than a veneer of darkness owes some debt to Joy Division and this still-surprising album, which makes despair and other dire emotional straits seem frighteningly alluring.
Genre: Rock
Released: 1979, Factory
Key Tracks: "Disorder," "She's Lost Control," "New Dawn Fades," "I Remember Nothing."
Catalog Choice: Closer
Next Stop: Bauhaus: Mask
After That: Echo and the Bunnymen: Heaven Up Here
Book Page: 414
It couldn't have been easy out there on the gospel highway in the America of the 1940s and '50s. The quartets and quintets of singers, most of them African American, heard the call and went on the road intending to spread the joy they'd found. Inevitably, this took them to the South and other places where black strangers, even those singing songs of joy and faith and forgiveness, were not exactly welcome. What they encountered along the way—routine bigotry, meanness, mistrust—would test anyone's faith. Singer Marion Williams, who was a key member of the Clara Ward Singers during the 1950s, recalls travel as a daily trial. "We couldn't use the bathrooms on the highway. If they did have one for us, there was a sign on the door that said 'Colored.' "
Somehow these challenges did not adversely affect the Ward Singers, five powerful women whose unflappable enthusiasm and intricate harmonizing can still raise goose bumps. One of the early gospel acts to perform in nonchurch venues (and the very first to work a Las Vegas lounge), the Ward Singers appeared onstage wearing glittering dresses and lavish jewels, and within minutes their exceedingly determined vocalizing would melt any resistance in the room. They had help, of course: a songbook filled with just about every revival-meeting standard, as well as current gospel hits, imaginatively arranged by leader Ward to take advantage of the theatrical whoops of her soloists.
This disc showcases many of the Ward Singers' signature songs. It's divided between studio recordings made in the late '50s and a sizzling live performance (featuring the dynamic lap-steel guitarist Sammy Fein) at new York's Town Hall from 1958. The program offers a comprehensive picture of one of gospel's most sparkling ensembles. The Wards were solid on the fundamentals of traditional gospel, and at the same time not content to preach to the converted. Like the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe and others, they take the word from the amen corner, pump it up to overdrive, and send it out into the world beyond church. Where it might actually do some good.
Genre: Gospel
Released: 1996, MCA
Key Tracks: "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," "You'll Never Walk Alone," "I Found the Keys to the Kingdom."
Catalog Choice: Meetin' Tonight
Next Stop: The Caravans: The Best of the Caravans
After That: The Fairfield Four: Standing in the Safety Zone
Book Pages: 845–846
Ska is a mongrel. Though often described as the Jamaican response to American rock and roll, it also contains traces of New Orleans swing, as well as elements of R&B mento music, the Jamaican folk dance style. When gently stirred together, and framed by the steady lilt of an electric guitar hitting the offbeats, the result is a buoyant, instantly uplifting groove.
Ska coalesced in the mid-'60s around musicians assembled by the producer Clement Dodd, first at Federal Records and then at his famed Studio One. These players, among them reggae guitarist Ernest Ranglin, saxophonist Tommy McCook, and keyboardists Jackie Mittoo and Aubrey Adams, understood that the music had to be at once loose, like island music, and tight, like Southern R&B, to succeed. As this compilation demonstrates, the collective caught that elusive balance right away, both on kicky instrumentals (the set opener "Nimble Foot Ska") and when backing one of the scene's emerging vocalists (like Alton Ellis, whose "My Heaven" is a straight-up doo-wop ballad).
This two-disc survey captures a wide range of early ska, augmenting the radio singles with more experimental material. Among its treasures are several tunes featuring the "house band," the Skatalites, early ska attempts by Bob Marley and the Wailers, and agitated jive outbreaks by Don Drummond. Like many ska entertainers, Drummond recognized that he needed great musicians to put the sound across, and he sought to keep them happy by showcasing their talents. As a result, many of his singles have instrumental breaks featuring such enchanting soloists as Roland Alphonso, whose talkative saxophone was a key part of "the sound of young Jamaica."
Genre: World, Jamaica
Released: 2006, Heartbeat/Rounder
Key Tracks: The Skatalites: "Black Sunday." Alton Ellis: "My Heaven." Don Drummond: "Man in the Street"
Next Stop: Desmond Dekker and the Aces: Action!
After That: Jackie Mittoo: Wishbone
Book Page: 821
From Louis Armstrong through Dizzy Gillespie and the hard bop master Woody Shaw, the trumpet has usually attracted extroverts and dazzlers. Kenny Wheeler, the enormously talented trumpeter and composer, began to change that in the 1970s—his playing emphasizes softer textures and less grandstanding approaches. On the astounding Gnu High, he plays the flügelhorn, a close relative of the trumpet that has a slightly more rounded tone, and favors scampering, musing phrases over reveille bursts that scream, "Look at me!" With this record and several that follow it, Wheeler suggests that brass can sing, and sing sweetly.
Few jazz musicians treat it that way. And even fewer write tunes that demand such tonal nuance. Wheeler specializes in languid, questioning themes that practically force him to think in expansive terms when soloing. The title suite, which lasts nearly thirteen minutes, moves through long rubato passages into broken samba-like grooves and, eventually, a more assertive choppy swing. When Wheeler makes his entrance, he doesn't barge in; rather, he glides, taking care not to step too heavily on any one beat. Follow closely as he develops his solos, however: Wheeler frequently ventures into the trumpet's extreme upper register, where brute force is often needed, and somehow hangs onto his innate sense of lyricism. Believe the title: His high notes are a new kind of high.
Gnu High is also notable as the rare date from this period where Keith Jarrett appears in a supporting role. The pianist totally "gets" Wheeler's tunes—at times on "Smatter," which features a solo-piano interlude, Jarrett generates flowing melodies with such facility, you might think he wrote the tune. That's also a function of tone: Because Wheeler's sound is so warm and inviting, everyone around him plays that way too.
Genre: Jazz
Released: 1975, ECM
Key Tracks: "Smatter," "Gnu Suite."
Catalog Choice: Double, Double You.
Next Stop: Keith Jarrett: My Song
After That: Woody Shaw: Rosewood
Book Pages: 855–856