Vive Quebec

Nice to see The Awl taking note of the great Ike Quebec (and specifically, Phil Freeman's concise and usefully opinionated rundown of Quebec's Blue Note "comeback" period).  I made brief mention of Quebec's work with Sonny Clark and Grant Green in this post, but Freeman's piece has given me some ideas for what to listen to next.

Recent Listening - Somewhat Lesser-Known Names From The Jazz Canon

A quick rundown of some albums I've been enjoying lately from the classic, "hard bop" era of the late '50s to early '60s (the exception, Hank Jones' I Remember You, was recorded in 1977 but is stylistically not too far removed from the earlier era):

Sonny Clark - Cool Struttin', Sonny Clark Trio, Sonny's Crib, and especially Leapin' & Lopin' (musicians on these four albums include Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, Billy Higgins, Art Taylor, and Philly Joe Jones)

Hank Jones - I Remember You (recorded in France w/ George Duvivier and Oliver Jackson) and Relaxin' at Camarillo (w/ Belgian flautist Bobby Jaspar, Paul Chambers and Kenny Clarke)

Phineas Newborn, Jr. - We Three (w/ Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes - probably should be considered a leaderless or co-led session, but sometimes listed as a Roy Haynes album as his name is first on the cover)

Ike Quebec - Blue & Sentimental (w/ Grant Green, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones) and his exquisite (and apparently career reviving) solo on "Deep in a Dream" from Leapin' & Lopin'

If there's something like a common denominator here, other than the fact that all of the above artists are less well known than they deserve to be (though there was a small surge of interest in Hank Jones upon his death at age 91 and Sonny Clark has apparently always been big in Japan), it's Paul Chambers, who plays bass on six of the eight albums mentioned, in three instances with Philly Joe Jones (a pretty much unbeatable combination) and with three other all-time-great drummers (Art Taylor, Kenny Clarke, and Roy Haynes) on the other records.  Chambers is well-known for his work with Miles Davis and for playing on a million other classic sessions in a short but brilliant life (I love Charlie Haden's comments on him at the end of this interview), but George Duvivier's superb playing with Hank Jones caught me off guard because I wasn't as familiar with him.  I'd heard him on a few things, including records with Bud Powell and Eric Dolphy (along w/ Ron Carter on cello!), but hadn't paid him much mind until hearing I Remember You.  I guess there's never been a major surplus of world-class bassists, so it shouldn't be surprising that, like Hank Jones, Duvivier played with a wide range of musicians over a long career - still, it's a fun list, including Cab Calloway, Moondog, Janis Ian, Barry Manilow, and Tom Waits.

Re: my Sonny Clark binge, the undeniable-but-not-fully-explicable greatness of Leapin' & Lopin' is an interesting case.  When he recorded it, Clark was coming off a period of reduced musical activity (apparently due to his drug problem), and the band for the date consisted mostly of musicians who, while top-notch professionals, were a tier down from the big names on many of his previous albums.  Great as they may have been, Charlie Rouse and Butch Warren were not John Coltrane and Paul Chambers.  On paper, L&L seems like it would be a solid effort by an artist in premature decline, good but not up to previous standards.  In fact, it's probably one of the best records of its era, an era when classic records were being recorded on a weekly basis.  One of those records where, by some mysterious (chemical? alchemical?) process, everything came together.

Part of the record's success, obviously, has to do with the way that this group of musicians fit together (having Billy Higgins on drums is always a good start), but Clark's strong compositions, making up half the album, are also a big factor, especially the instantly memorable "Melody for C".  The aforementioned "Deep in a Dream" (why hasn't this standard been recorded more often?) is one of the archetypal romantic ballad performances.  Set slightly apart from the rest of the album, in its own smoky ether, by the substitution of Ike Quebec for Tommy Turrentine and Charlie Rouse, this track is the thing that puts this album in a special category for me.  Quebec's own Blue & Sentimental, one of the only albums from his post-Leapin' & Lopin' comeback era not to feature organ, is a very successful pairing of old skool tenor (hearkening back to the pre-bop, Hawkins/Young/Webster era while looking forward to the soul jazz trend) with some then state-of-the-art talent in Grant Green and Chambers/Jones.  It's a moody, enveloping listen and leaves me wanting to hear more Grant Green (I've got my eye on this in particular).

Ebert in Esquire

So, the Esquire profile of Roger Ebert I read yesterday is really sticking with me.  I keep thinking about it.  I don't think it's necessarily a great piece of journalism, but the material, the story itself, is just very compelling stuff.  Especially if, like me, you've been keeping up with Ebert's blog. 

I suppose the story could be made into some kind of rote, trite inspirational thing, but the details of it, and Ebert's own personality, keep that from happening.  Or more specifically, they keep it from becoming trite.  Ebert is, in a real, non-trite way, inspiring.  I certainly recommending reading the profile, but more than that, I recommend Ebert's blog (on which he's now posted a response to the profile).  Anyone with even a trace of Anglophilia should find his recent pieces on London hard to resist.   

Funky Quote of the Day

From an underrated entry in Rufus Thomas's "Funky _____" series, "Funky Mississippi":


"We don't have hippies, down in Mississippi
but we funky funky just the same"


At some point, I'd like to track down all the Funky Somethin's and do a list.  Watch this space.

Underrated, Underappreciated (#5 in a Series) - The Bobby Fuller Four

The Fantastic Mr. Fox, with its final scene use of "Let Her Dance" rivaling but not quite surpassing Rushmore's "Ooh La La" finale, reminded me that I hadn't listed to my copy of The Best of the Bobby Fuller Four in years. Produced by '60s indie mini-mogul Bob Keane, Fuller's records feature heroic scale reverb, doubled guitars (and, I think, vocals), and some unusual mixes (in "Never To Be Forgotten", the cymbal seems about twice as loud as the vocals, though maybe I just need to tweak my equalization). The result is a big, enveloping sound, like Buddy Holly updated from the Jet Age to the Space Age. In fact Fuller did more with the Holly template than anyone I can think of outside of The Beatles and Marshall Crenshaw (a Fuller connoisseur himself), developing one of the great Stratocaster sounds of all time. Unfortunately, Fuller also followed in his hero's footsteps by dying young - his death is one of rock'n'roll's strangest, most compelling mysteries, unsolved after more than 40 years.

The idea of the BF4 as "one hit wonders", encouraged by oldies radio's reduction of their career to "I Fought The Law", is easily countered by listening to the concise wonders of "Let Her Dance", "Another Sad and Lonely Night", or "Julie" (covered by Crenshaw on his excellent My Truck Is My Home live album). Although the guitar work is always the first thing to jump out at me from Fuller's records, he was also a fine singer - witness his thoroughly convincing, lovelorn crooning on "A New Shade of Blue", a masterful retro (even then) doo-wop-y slow dance number.

Although love and girl songs were his specialty, Fuller also had quite a few car songs (with titles like "Phantom Dragster") that I haven't heard yet (the older Best Of that I have skips them). There are also a couple of volumes of early Texas recordings that I'm interested in checking out. Despite having recorded one of the most instantly recognizable songs of the '60s, Bobby Fuller remains an underrated, too often overlooked figure in the history of rock'n'roll, with a surprisingly deep catalogue worthy of exploration.

Bonus Link

Fuller puts down the Strat and picks up a Vox (?) to back a midriff-baring Nancy Sinatra in this YouTube clip

Underrated, Underappreciated (#4 in a Series) - Pick-A-Bar

What is the most underrated candy bar? I've got it down to two contenders:

Zero, the cult classic, white fudge coated, freezable bar with Midwestern roots and some of the best-looking packaging in all candydom.

Take 5, the salt-sweet exploiting newcomer with the jazzy name.

Is Zero just getting by on its striking looks while the more homely, generic Take 5 scores with its skillfully balanced flavors and textures? Can the Take 5 be as ubiquitous as it now seems to be and still be underrated?

Clearly, more thought and research is required before I can come to a decision. Please comment if you have an opinion on this critical issue.

Leitch At The Movies

Ex-Black Table, ex-Deadspin, now New York Magazine scribe Will Leitch occasionally posts movie reviews on his blog. Even in his casual, spare-time way, he's a better, more perceptive film critic than the vast majority of the full-time professionals currently writing for major publications (unfortunately, that pool is shrinking rapidly). Try comparing his most recent batch of reviews with those for the same movies in your publication of choice* and see if you agree (and don't miss the priceless Soderbergh anecdote). His recent, perhaps overgenerous, Tarantino apology, which helped me overcome my reluctance to see Inglourious Basterds**, is also well worth a look.

As I'm fond of telling people when his name comes up, I've been reading Leitch since about 1993 or 4. We attended the same school, and I consumed lots of his sports reporting and movie reviews in the (surprisingly professional - you actually had to pay a subscription) daily college newspaper. Although he was clearly passionate about sports, I always assumed that he'd end up as a film critic, following in the footsteps of the man he often cited as his inspiration, Roger Ebert***. Given the current state of that profession, he was probably right to take a different path, at least financially, but I can't help thinking that the little world of people who read and write about movies would be better off if Will Leitch's voice had a more prominent place in it.


*I really need to see A Serious Man, if for no other reason than to see how it can inspire such night-and-day different takes as Leitch's - he thinks it may be their best work - and Ella Taylor's frontal assault on the Coens in the Village Voice, in which she comes very close to accusing them and the film of contributing to anti-Semitism.

**I was glad I changed my mind. Though I thought QT made some questionable calls along the way, Basterds managed to justify, and seem quite a bit shorter than, it's 152-minute running time, no mean feat.

***I want to take this opportunity to mention that Ebert, probably because he became so TV famous, is generally, and shamefully, underrated as a critic. I'm sure a lot of intelligent people who think of him as some kind of middlebrow joke would reconsider if they read some of his writing (good examples of which are accumulating rapidly on his very active blog).

Recent Reading - The Debt to Pleasure

I only recently discovered this 2007 piece from New York Magazine which asked critics and writers to name a favorite underrated book from the previous ten years. I dumped several of them into my Amazon Wish List and found that, as might be expected of recent-but-not-too-recent books that fall into the "underrated" category, many of them could be had for not much more than the cost of shipping.

I finished John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure a few days ago ($0.01 + shipping for a "like new" hard cover copy) and was glad to concur with Ron Rosenbaum's endorsement in the NYMag piece:

"Pure wicked literary pleasure. Well received when published, but not nearly as well read as deserved. Ghostly progenitor: Nabokov’s Pale Fire."

While Pale Fire is certainly an apt reference point, there are echoes in the novel of lots of other writers and works, whether intentional on Lanchester's part or not. So many, in fact, that instead of writing a review, I'm going to try to convey a sense of what the book is like by listing all the possible models, influences, and related works that I could think of.

Although it might be appropriate to the subject matter, presenting this list in the form of a "recipe for The Debt to Pleasure" would have been taking my already shaky premise deep into the realm of the contrived. So, the list:

Pale Fire (hidden plot peeking out through the holes in the unreliable narrator's elaborately constructed facade)
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (investigating the life of a dead, more successful brother)
Despair (another delusional, unreliable narrator up to no good)
The Physiology of Taste (wide-ranging, philosophical musings on gastronomy - with recipes!)
The "Ripliad" (refined expat living well in France and occasionally doing very bad things)
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (the title says it all)
The Rape of Lucrece (referenced toward the end; coveting thy neighbor's wife)
Peter Mayle's Provence books (British expat in Provence)
John Wilmot's "The Imperfect Enjoyment" (check out line 24)

I feel like I'm missing something, maybe something on art theory or the art world, but I hope this list might at least prove intriguing enough to get you to read the book.

Payday Someday

Listened to some Jim Dickinson last night, in the form of Mud Boy & The Neutrons' They Walk Among Us.

If you do nothing else with your life today, I strongly recommend downloading this track. In a career full of fine moments, this has to be one of Dickinson's finest. Hard to imagine a better way to spend $0.99.

Looks like most of the Mud Boy albums are hard to find these days (I don't think they were ever easy to find), but maybe there are some other tracks out there on iTunes or something. Dickinson apparently was saddled with some serious medical bills at the end of his life, so making an effort to, you know, actually pay for his music through legit channels would probably be appreciated by his family. If his death does nothing else, maybe it will motivate someone to reissue the Mud Boy catalog.

Actually, the whole It Came From Memphis compilation is excellent, as is the book it was created to accompany. I picked up the album some time after reading the book years ago, but they both shaped my musical outlook and turned me on to some good stuff.

Underrated, Underappreciated (#3 in a Series) - Neil Young's Hawks & Doves

Hawks & Doves is an album that seems to mostly inspire indifference, annoyance, or tepid admiration (in numerical terms: a 3.5 star average on Amazon, a 5.7 from Pitchfork). In this way, it's similar to the album that followed it, Re-ac-tor. Neither album has the high profile of Rust Never Sleeps, which preceded Hawks & Doves and is almost universally regarded as one of Neil Young's best, or Trans, which followed Re-ac-tor and competes with Everybody's Rockin' as Young's most mocked and derided album, a rock geek punchline and the symbol of Young's supposed '80s creative nadir. Hawks & Doves also lacks the "lost classic" mystique of fellow late reissue On The Beach or the still unreissued Time Fades Away. I won't attempt to argue that H&D is better than either of those, but I do think it's a very good album and, at the very least, one of Neil Young's most interesting albums.

The points most commonly made about H&D are that it's a lightweight/half-hearted/throwaway effort, not even reaching the 30-minute mark, and that's it's Neil's "conservative" album, from the period when he'd briefly fallen under the spell of Reagan. The validity of the first point really depends on the strength of the songs rather than the length of the album, as a listing of classic sub-or-barely-30-minute albums could easily demonstrate (from the Ramones debut to A Hard Day's Night), and on this ground I believe H&D deserves to be defended.

"Little Wing" is Neil at his whispery acoustic best, a song so quiet, especially as an album opener, that it's beauty can almost pass by unnoticed. "Stayin' Power" is a modest but effectively straightforward love song about long-term commitment with a sort of country-meets-classic r&b feeling, appropriate enough as good songs about mature, enduring relationships are rarely found outside those two genres. With different instrumentation, "Stayin' Power" could've fit in and been a clear highlight on 2002's almost instantly forgotten Are You Passionate? (if AIP? is remembered at all, it's for the sub-anthemic 9/11 anthem "Let's Roll", shoehorned incongruously into the middle).

"The Old Homestead" is one of NY's rambling, "shaggy dog" stories, a cousin of "Last Trip to Tulsa" and "Ambulance Blues" with a guest appearance by Levon Helm on drums. "Lost in Space" is one of the most wonderfully weird entries in the Neil Young catalog, which is really saying something. It has a beautiful melody that veers into singsong as the lyric veers into stream-of-consciousness nursery rhymes. A lovely line about buildings on the ocean floor leads into a Lollipop Guild-influenced section with pitch-shifted backing vocals credited to the "Marine Munchkin". NY seems to be giving free play to his imagination in this song, letting one line suggest the next with very little editing. I have a real soft spot for this song - it's surprising and surprisingly good.

The political content of the album is for me one of its most interesting aspects. Despite its reputation, the politics of H&D-era Neil Young can't be reduced to a simple label or even easily summarized. The closing, title track may seem at first listen like a patriotic, borderline jingoistic anthem (perhaps directed at the Iranian hostage takers or the Soviets?), but is in fact deeply ambiguous, reflecting the songwriter's position as a by-then wealthy Canadian living (and, as he reminds us in the chorus, paying taxes) in the US. Young's take on America has always blended the romantic view of the admiring outsider with the sharp, skeptical edge of a longtime resident who loves his adopted country too much to see it take the wrong road without speaking up.

"Hawks & Doves" is all about mixed feelings, contradictions. The "U.S.A., U.S.A." backing vocals are a Rorschach, both a joke and not a joke, but the last lines of the last verse are where Neil really takes his stand - "Got rock'n'roll/got country music playin'/if you hate us/you just don't know what you're sayin'". Over the years, he's certainly been willing to point out America's shortcomings, but in the end he's going to stand with the nation that gave birth to his musical heroes, the simultaneously real and mythical land of Elvis and Hank.

The political ambiguity of Hawks & Doves is also well illustrated by "Union Man". The chorus begins with the line "I'm proud to be a union man" only to immediate undercut that sentiment with the sarcastically delivered "I make those meetings when I can...yeah". The ridiculous "union meeting" that ensues in the studio (including the famous-among-NY-fans request for "Live Music Are Better" bumper stickers to be issued) further undermines the surface sentiment, as does the couplet "I pay my dues right on time/when the benefits come I'm last in line". The question remains, though, was the song meant to parody merely the musician's union or was it a larger comment on the way workers are treated by the unions that are supposed to protect their interests?

Such concerns and contradictions would recur in Neil Young's music, but they appear with a particularly sharp edge here. The commentary embedded in the music avoids the traps that so much "political music", even some of Young's own, falls into. The listener isn't bashed over the head with any simplistic messages, and there's no choir being preached to.

Neil has something to say here, but instead of strident slogans or pat prescriptions, he gives us his uncertainty, worry, and anger as a mirror to our own. It may have had something to do with the times - America at the end of the Carter years was a country looking for a direction, for answers, or, if nothing else, someone or something to blame for it's problems. "Comin' Apart at Every Nail" is a portrait of that America - "oh this country sure looks good to me/but these fences are comin' apart/at every nail".

To my mind, The Bottle Rockets (from St. Louis) are the torch carriers for the kind of songwriting represented by the best tracks on H&D. One significant difference that may not be immediately obvious is that The Bottle Rockets tend to tell stories from eye level, focusing on small, telling details, while songs like "Comin' Apart at Every Nail" seem to be surveying a larger scene from an elevated perspective. Both are valid approaches (I'm not saying that Neil's perched up on Rockstar Mountain looking down on all the little people), but the Bottle Rockets have the rare quality of being able to make a song about the working man seem as if it's also by the working man.

Of course, they're heavily and admittedly influenced by Neil Young, but whereas many Neil-loving bands emulate only his sonics - the vocals, the distortion, the loping Crazy Horse rhythms - The Bottle Rockets are more serious students, picking up as much of the wild, humorous, contradictory spirit as the sound. You could safely place The Bottle Rockets' entire career under the heading of "Underrated, Underappreciated".

[Update 7/27/09: Just saw an interview quote from the Bottle Rockets' Brian Henneman that's relevant to what I wrote above. This is Henneman talking about the sound of their upcoming album, Lean Forward -

"The one, single thing we deliberately did different this time was avoid the Neil Young. We obviously love Neil Young, but that was the one deliberate angle we tried to avoid this time around: no Neil Young."

It's a pretty clear measure of how big an influence is when you can change your sound by deliberately avoiding it. I'm guessing this is an attempt to mix things up from their previous album, Zoysia, on which they took the opposite approach, fully embracing the Neil to good effect.]

Bonus Links

I intentionally avoided reading Robert Christgau's piece on Hawks & Doves until writing my own, so as not to be unduly influenced. Reading it now, though, it's interesting to see that while we hit some of the same points he seems to see less ambiguity in the political lyrics than I do. Am I giving Neil too much credit, or did Christgau give him too little?

Two versions of "Lost in Space" - Neil Young's first ever live performance of it (from earlier this year!) and another that I won't attempt to describe

Underrated, Underappreciated (#2 in a Series)

Willie Nelson's Me & The Drummer (AKA Tales Out of Luck) and Me & Paul

The Willie Nelson albums that get noticed are the ones with big-name collaborators or attention-grabbing concepts. As a result, some of Willie's finest work flies under the radar or gets lost in his constant stream of releases. As much as I liked Daniel Lanois' work on Teatro, Willie is his own best producer, and these two albums prove it.

Me & Paul (1985) is just Willie and his usual band going about their business. That business: kicking ass, Willie-style. "Pretend I Never Happened" has one of my all-time favorite Willie solos, and putting a Billy Joe Shaver song at the beginning, middle, and end of an album is never a bad idea.

Me & The Drummer (2000) reunites Willie with some members of his pre-outlaw '60s band, billed here as The Offenders. I don't think there's anything here that he hasn't recorded before (he's probably getting close to triple digits for "Rainy Day Blues"), but the fiddle-and-steel-driven, classic country sound is a perfect match for this batch of songs. Hearing "What a Way to Live" on KDHX in St. Louis is what made me seek this album out, and I'm still amazed at how great it is - a model of how the best country always seems so simple.

The all-instrumental Night & Day (1999) is worth mentioning here, too. I picked it up for next to nothing, having no idea what it was, and of course it was great.

Jamaican Patties with Coco Bread

They did get a feature in the NY Times and are no secret in Caribbean neighborhoods, but I still think this spicy-and-sweet, extremely filling "snack that eats like a meal" is underappreciated. And getting the patty without the coco bread is like getting a hot dog without a bun. Why would you do it (unless you were on the Atkins diet, in which case you wouldn't be going near a Jamaican patty in the first place)? This place has some of the best.

Matthew Sweet's Altered Beast

The dark sequel to Girlfriend. Judging by the ubiquity of this CD in used bins for several years after it's release, a lot of fans of Sweet's breakthrough album must've been very disappointed in the follow-up. What soured Matt's worldview? A breakup? His first taste of fame? As Alex Chilton descended into darkness, the sounds on his albums got weirder, sloppier. Altered Beast is relatively slick and full of great guitar sounds - speaking of underrated, Sweet's pairing of Richard Lloyd and Robert Quine was one of the great studio one-two punches - which somehow has the effect of throwing the bitterness at the heart of many of these songs into sharper relief and making it harder to look away. Matthew Sweet will never make an album with the heft of a Big Star's Third or even an XO, but he has a gift for a particular strain of power pop, and it was fascinating to see what happened when he used that gift to show us his dark places. Good music is never really depressing. Trouser Press calls it "disappointing", "puzzling", and "a mess". I call it one of the best albums of the '90s.

Underrated, Underappreciated (#1 in a Series)

Bob Dylan's Planet Waves

Recorded in L.A. with The Band, this might be more overlooked than underrated, though I think it's both. Dark, troubled albums usually have a better shot at attaining "classic" or at least critical favorite status than upbeat ones with songs about the positive side of love. Dylan doles out some of both here, which makes Planet Waves tough to pigeonhole or fit into a single concept. Jam-packed with some of the greatest Dylan songs that nobody ever seems to talk about: "Going, Going, Gone" (memorably covered by Jay Farrar), "Tough Mama", "Dirge". I was surprised to find out this made it to #1 on the album charts, though apparently sales dropped off fast after an initial burst of publicity. Today, it seems to be lost in the still-growing Dylan discography between the low of Self-Portrait (probably also underrated given its horrible reputation) and the high of Blood on the Tracks. Christgau called it "stray cat music--scrawny, cocky, and yowling up the stairs". No way I can do better than that. The phrase on the cover, "Cast-iron songs & torch ballads", is not a bad description either.

Old-fashioned donuts

I was a fan of this style long before discovering Peter Pan Donuts in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, but their perfect renditions are the pinnacle of classic donut making. The old-fashions at Edwardsville, IL's Donut Palace were sweetly glazed, dense, irregular and hard-fried. They were good (and hopefully still are). Peter Pan's are a bit lighter, and the glazed versions are less thickly glazed (and therefore not quite as sweet). PP also has sour cream versions, which are a nice variation, though the flavor difference is subtle to me. I've also been meaning to try Donut Pub on 14th St in Manhattan, which has a good reputation but as far as I know does not live up to its name by serving beer with donuts.

There are fancier donuts (the Lower East Side's "correctly"-spelled Doughnut Plant does great things) and more popular donuts (the airy, sticky, tasty but overrated Krispy Kreme glazed), but the humble, homely old-fashioned is the king.

Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece

Might be Van's second best album (if you don't think this is his best, you are truly a contrarian and need to defend yourself with a well-reasoned argument). Two other underrated/underappreciated VM songs, though not from this album: the early "Joe Harper Saturday Morning" and the more recent "High Summer".

Murphy's Irish Stout in the nitro can

Better than nitro can Guinness, and often cheaper.

Elvis Costello's Brutal Youth

Has some middling (for EC) tracks in the middle, but benefits hugely from one of the best openers ("Pony St.") and closers ("Favourite Hour") of any Costello album. I played this a lot in the car, when I had a car. Good replay value.