Solid Air

Out of the latest batch of old records I brought back from Chepstow (a few weeks ago), I was especially pleased to have found a copy of John Martyn’s 1973 album Solid Air, a well-regarded record that has made its way on to a few all-time best-of lists. I’d quite often heard the songs ‘May You Never’ & ‘Over the Hill’ and was also acquainted with the title-track, whereas the other six numbers were unfamiliar territory. The copy I picked up, moreover, was from an early pressing with the ‘pink rim’ Island Records label. It would have been worth a lot more than I paid for it, had it not been in such poor condition.

While the sleeve was still in decent shape, the disc, unprotected by an inner sleeve, had picked up a dense tracery of scratches. On giving it a spin there was hardly a moment without a pop or a crackle, yet somehow none of the damage was deep enough to make the stylus skip. I greatly enjoyed the music but knew that all the surface noise would be an impediment to my future listening pleasure. I resolved to buy another copy, opting for the 2013 repress – which had the benefit of reproducing the original label design. When the new record arrived I put the unblemished disc into the old sleeve and discarded the scratched one, an arrangement which suits me even if it confuses or annoys whoever ultimately inherits my records.

Synchro System

On the cover of Synchro System (1983) by King Sunny Adé and his African Beats we see portraits of what, presumably, is the whole band, all eighteen of them. Adé himself is top-left in the white suit. He played lead guitar and sang. Five of the men pictured provided additional vocals. There were two further supporting guitarists, one rhythm guitarist, one steel guitarist and one bassist. The remaining seven band-members were all percussionists, among them two exponents of the talking drum, apparently “the lead and predominant instrument” of jùjú music, of which this is an example.

This was the second of three albums that Adé et al. recorded for Island Records, their signing reportedly a result of the label’s attempts to fill the gap in its roster left by the untimely death of Bob Marley. It’s too bad that the cover on my copy, obtained recently, is slightly marred by the remnants of two large stickers. The record itself sounds excellent: the recording, mastering and pressing collectively serve the music very well. I’ve only played the LP a couple of times and haven’t yet got to know it especially well, but my first encounters with its infectious, insistent grooves have been very enjoyable ones. I’ll have to put it on again over the weekend. The whole thing (Side A/Side B) is on YouTube, for anyone curious to hear it.

Associates

An exception to my usual rule of only posting my own pictures, here’s something that just happened to catch my eye somewhere on-line a few years ago. It’s a scan of a page from some 1982 teen magazine, part of a fashion spread with a photo of the late Billy MacKenzie with one of his Associates, Martha Ladly. I’m not sure which magazine exactly. Sheila Rock is credited as the photographer.

Once in a while I’ll spend some time listening to MacKenzie’s singing and feel sad all over again he died so young. Prior to teaming up with him, Ladly had been a member of Martha and the Muffins – not the Martha who sang, but the Muffins' keyboardist who also happened to go by that name. MacKenzie is widely believed to be the subject of The Smiths' song ‘William, it was Really Nothing’. Ladly had a tenuous connection to another classic Manchester 7": on the label of the A-side of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a dedication “For ML” from designer Peter Saville, her boyfriend at the time.

Download Codes

Will download code cards ever be prized by the ephemera collectors of tomorrow, I wonder? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cards or slips from the earlier phase of the vinyl revival might be more highly-prized than later ones, as – in my limited experience at least - a little more care and attention seems to have been devoted to them then than now. Nowadays, if there’s a download code at all in a new record, it might be printed generically on a tiny slip of paper.

Above are scans – front and back – of an appealing example with a colourful design on one side, and all the necessary information on the other, to which has been added some mild flattery. “Why, yes, thank you, my taste is pretty good, isn’t it?” A plainer example from another self-titled album is shown below. In both cases I’ve edited out the actual codes.

Brasil Universo

At ‘The Vinyl Spinner’ in Monmouth last month I took a chance on a late-’80s record by the Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal: Brasil Universo. It cost me £12, so I was relieved to find I greatly enjoyed it. The opening number ‘Mentalizando A Cruz’ begins with a few minutes of arresting solo piano before the rest of Pascoal’s band join in as he meanwhile hums and whistles, the whole thing eventually culminating in a wonky groove akin to off-kilter children’s music. On ‘Peixinho’ guest singer Jane Duboc contributes some vocalese as band-members ‘sing’ along with her on flute and saxophone.

Pascoal seems to be the sort of open-minded soul who can find music in almost any sound, and who, given the opportunity, will bring almost any sound into his music. The first track on side B, ‘O Tocador Quer Beber’, shimmies along irresistably for the most part like a popular accordion-powered tune from earlier in the 20th Century – aside from some brief freak-outs where voices and chicken noises come in to the mix. That’s followed by the somewhat discordant ‘Arapuá’, that would seem harder on the ears if it weren’t kept moving so briskly by its propulsive rhythms. The concluding tune, meanwhile, ‘Calma de Repente’ has some heartfelt vocals over acoustic guitars. It’s a varied album full of ideas & with many twists and turns.

The same day, from the same place, I picked up something else with a Brazilian flavour in the shape of The Wonderful World Of Antonio Carlos Jobim (1964), where the great songwriter plays and sings his own tunes accompanied by master arranger Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Reputedly Riddle’s favourite among the many records he worked on, it’s a thing of mellow beauty.

Tyondai

Above are four CDs of music by (or featuring) the American composer and musician Tyondai Braxton. My introduction to his work came via the 2007 album Mirrored by Battles (top left), whose front-man he was at the time. Its lead single ‘Atlas’ fascinated me, even if I only seldom returned to listen through the album as a whole. Two years later, Braxton’s solo album Central Market (top right) appeared, a highly original confection of electronic and ‘classical’ instrumentation. The unfamiliar blend of sounds and the peculiarly jaunty rhythms combine to disconcerting effect. I’m still not even sure I like this music, but now and again I’ll get drawn back to listen to it again.

HIVE1 (bottom left, 2015) is a predominantly electronic affair, with the sounds of synths and samplers augmented by percussion. I don’t know whether the percussion is likewise synthetic, or ‘organic’. ‘Gracka’ might be my favourite track on it. Unlike its predecessors, it’s a record I straightforwardly enjoy hearing all the way through. Bottom right is the most recent arrival of the four, ordered a couple of months ago, namely Telekinesis (2022). This is a single composition for large orchestra and chorus (with additional electric guitar and live electronics) that falls into four sections and has a total playing time of about 35 minutes. It’s music inspired by the anime Akira, without being any kind of retrospective soundtrack to it. I prefer the opening two ‘movements’ to the closing ones, but then I’m still getting to know the piece so my feelings could well change.

String Quartets

Above is the sleeve of a 1968 LP, acquired last month, on which the second and third of Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s four string quartets are performed by the Copenhagen Quartet. I’m still getting to know these pieces, but my provisional preference out of the two is for the more straightforwardly ebullient second over the third. I very much like the record’s cover image too (very much of its time). The style of the drawing or painting seems maddeningly familiar, though the sleeve only credits the ‘Decca Publicity Art Department’ with the sleeve design: I don’t know if they commissioned the image or made it themselves. I have my doubts that it’s an actual depiction of the Copenhagen Quartet.

The record brings the current count of string quartets I have on vinyl up to thirty-one. As well as the Nielsen ones there’s Berg’s Quartet Op. 3; three late Beethoven quartets (nos. 14-16); Borodin’s renowned 2nd (two renditions of that one); three of Dvořák’s (nos. 8, 10 & 12); no fewer than a dozen by Haydn (plus another one misattributed to him); Elgar’s op. 83 Quartet; both of Janáček’s; Ravel’s sole Quartet; Prokofiev’s 2nd; both of Smetana’s; & Tchaikovsky’s 1st. There’s some overlap between that list and the rather longer one of CD string quartet recordings on my shelves. At one time or another I’ve also owned (on vinyl) some Mozart quartets; a couple by Schubert; at least three more of Beethoven’s; four of Bartók’s and yet more of Haydn’s. I’d love to find some of Shostakovich’s quartets too on black plastic one of these days, despite already having most of them in digital form.

Turbulence and Pulse, etc.

Latterly added to my shelves, and shown above, is the album Turbulence and Pulse by the South African drummer, composer and bandleader Asher Gamedze. It was released last year, another fine offering from the people at International Anthem. For a taste of the music see Gamedze’s quartet play a live version of ‘Melancholia’, one of the tracks on the album.

It’s acoustic jazz with an old-school sound agreeably reminscent at times of Charles Mingus, with its unison horn passages and powerhouse rhythm section, in which Gamedze is very ably aided & abetted by bassist Thembinkosi Mavimbela. Shaped by American traditions it may be, but it also has an accent and an attitude very much its own. I’m less convinced by the vocal contributions of Julian ‘Deacon’ Otis on a couple of its numbers, but they may yet grow on me. If this and my one other slice of South African jazz (Shabaka And The Ancestors' We Are Sent Here By History) are anything to go by, then further exploration of that country’s music will be well worth my time.

Here are a couple more jazz or jazz-related albums that have made an impression on me lately. Also from last year, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning by Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, hitherto known as a trumpeter (and formerly named Christian Scott), who has turned to using his voice, in conjunction with harp-like instruments inspired by the West African ngoni and kora, and has produced a striking record heavy on the percussion and replete with call-&-response vocals. Hear for example ‘Shallow Water’.

And the first 2024 release to reach me: Mary Halvorson’s Cloudward, a sequel of sorts to her wonderful ‘22 album Amaryllis, one that features the same sextet line-up as that earlier record. Apart from Halvorson’s highly-distinctive guitar work, Patricia Brennan’s contributions on the vibraphone are, for me, particular highlights. An example track is ‘The Gate’.

It's Better to Travel

The music I heard as a very young child came in the form of the pop hits of the day issuing tinnily from transistor radios. On my first exposure to heavier & harder rock I didn’t care for it - I called it ‘rough music’, so must have valued a certain softness & smoothness in the tunes I heard. In time though, I lost that aural equivalent of a sweet tooth and grew to appreciate the merits of roughness; eventually coming to disdain music I considered to have too smooth or glossy a surface. These latter sentiments prevailed – albeit with gradually proliferating exceptions – well into my forties. Even now I’m deeper into middle age, I often still find myself oddly resistant to certain lower-friction sounds.

A few of last year’s vinyl acquisitions brought me back to music I’d formerly overlooked for those reasons, among them Secret Combination by Randy Crawford; Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway; Sade’s Diamond Life; and (pictured above), It’s Better to Travel, by Swing Out Sister. From the last-named, I was unavoidably familiar with some of the singles, espcially ‘Breakout’, their most successful song. I liked the tunes well enough, and Corinne Drewery’s smoky vocals, but had been less fond of the sheen of their polished production. Now, thirty-odd years on, I can at last better appreciate it for the fine album that it’s always been.

SL-1210Mk5

Pictured above is my Technics SL-1210Mk5 turntable. The blue LP spinning on it is a 2020 re-issue of Ahmad Jamal At The Pershing. I bought the turntable some eighteen or nineteen years ago, since when it has provided me with nothing but trouble-free listening pleasure. It was expensive, but in value-for-money terms it has proven to be a bargain.

Coming of age in the heyday of the Walkman, I began buying music on cassette – out of practicality (and for reasons of economy) rather than due to any attraction inherent in the medium. A decade later I made the leap from cassettes to CDs. I didn’t obtain my first record-player until 2001. That was a second-hand late-70s/early-’80s Ferguson unit picked up at a junkshop. While it wasn’t exactly a high-quality item, at that point the attraction was all about the novelty of getting any old crackly sound out of the dirt-cheap vinyl I was buying.

When the Ferguson gave up the ghost, I sought out something that would be easier to connect up to my PC’s sound-card, my focus having shifted to the desire to digitise some of my newly-accumulated analogue music. I settled on an inexpensive Kenwood-brand player which, alas, proved to be a poor choice. The build quality left much to be desired, and nor was the sound quality anything to shout about. My frustration with it led me to consider shelling out rather more for a model with a reputation for solid reliability: the SL-1210.

It took a while to get a Mk. 5 on order as this was a time (2005 or ‘06) when demand was at something of a low ebb. Come the end of the decade the SL-1210 would fall out of production altogether – until the vinyl revival belatedly summoned it back from the dead. Having used it first in digitising music, or for listening through headphones, I eventually did the decent thing and hooked it up to an amp and some speakers, in which configuration it’s done a round decade’s sterling service. The worst thing I can think to say about the thing is that the dust-cover seems to have been something of an afterthought: I ended up badly damaging my original one and had to get an aftermarket replacement.

All Thoughts Fly

In childhood I came to connect the sound of church organs with feelings of chilly discomfort, boredom and alienation. I should know better than to harbour continued prejudice against this kind of instrument, but those early associations have proven hard to shake off. The doleful onset of a traditional hymn-tune is still liable to provoke feelings of disquiet, but when a pipe-organ is used to play less conventional material, I have found I can enjoy it rather better.

A case in point is the album All Thoughts Fly by the Swedish composer and musician Anna von Hausswolff, released in 2020 but only very recently added to my shelves. It comprises seven solo instrumental pieces played by von Hausswolff on a church organ in her native Gothenburg, with some additional electronic manipulation apparently applied thereafter. The resultant music combines elements of the austerely minimalistic and of doomy drone, with plaintive lyricism.

The album cover photo was taken in ‘Sacro Bosco’, a sculpture-garden in Italy commissioned by a grieving nobleman after his wife’s death. Its title is a translation of an inscription (ogni pensiero vola) carved into the statue there of the underworld god Orcus, a “punisher of broken oaths”. Pensiero (I’ve been told) can translate, in certain contexts, not just as ‘thought’ but more specifically as ‘preoccupation’ or ‘anxiety’ – I’ve wondered whether the inscription could be interpreted in that light.

Another church organ performance I’ve grown to love is Irene De Ruvo’s rendition of Sweelinck’s Fantasia Chromatica on a 17th-Century Italian instrument.

Mingus x 5

Looking around the Music One record shop in Abergavenny late last year I’d seen a few things that had caught my eye but only one – an LP including a couple of string quartets by the ‘Spanish Mozart’, Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga – where the asking price accorded with my unreasonable expectations. Then, among the jazz re-issues, I saw a copy of Charles Mingus' Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus. I set my unreasonable expectations to one side for the moment, and picked up that one too.

This was an album I’d never owned, except as a download of questionable provenance. I’d listened to it, and knew I liked it, but, as is often the case for me with downloaded music, it had fallen out of sight and hence out of mind. On vinyl it sounded magnificent, and every time I’ve played the record it has been a real joy. It’s a kind of retrospective collection featuring re-arrangements for eleven-piece ensemble of several of Mingus' best compositions, plus a memorable rendition of Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’.

Why Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, and not Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus or Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus? I’ve yet to find an explanation for that. Not unreasonably the album’s title is often abbreviated as Mingus x 5. As it happens, it’s one of five of the composer’s records I currently own on physical media. I’ve had Mingus Ah Um and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady on CD for many years. I wrote a post about the former on my previous blog. The latter has a sunned and faded spine to show for its decades on the shelf. More recently I also acquired a CD copy of Blues and Roots.

The once I found an affordable used vinyl copy of a Mingus album in the wild it was Duke’s Choice (credited to the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop). This isn’t some little-known obscurity, but rather a re-titled ‘69 issue of the ‘59 LP A Modern Jazz Symposium Of Music and Poetry. The original title is arguably misleading, with the only poetry on the record being a striking narration on ‘Scenes in the City’ (the opening number) by actor Melvin Stewart. It’s a very good record, if not one of Mingus’ finest. The track ‘Duke’s Choice’, by the way, re-appears on Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus as ‘I X Love’.

John Luther Adams

I’d known of the composer John Luther Adams' name long before hearing any of his music. Having read several positive reviews of his work, and having caught a few snippets of his piece Become Ocean on the radio, I thought I should give his music a proper hearing. About this time last year I ordered the 3-CD box set of his Become trilogy. The three works Become Ocean, Become Desert and Become River all get a CD apiece, which wasn’t altogether necessary with the former two works clocking in at around forty minutes' duration, and the third just shy of a quarter of an hour. Become River attempts to represent its subject by gradually moving from high & bright tones to deeper & broader ones. The other two pieces are broadly palindromic, although Become Ocean conveys something of a cyclical sense of oceanic grandeur, while Become Desert feels more akin to a diurnal transition from night to day and back again.

I was enamoured enough with these pieces to aquire another album of JLA’s soon afterwards – Sila: The Breath of the World. This contains a single piece which is intended to give both performers and audience considerable latitude in how the music is created and experienced: “Sila is scored for five ensembles of 16 musicians – woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, and voices – who may perform the music in any combination, successively or simultaneously, outdoors, or in a large indoor space. The musicians are dispersed widely, surrounding the listeners, who are free to move around and discover their own individual listening points.” Hence any recording of the work can only be a snapshot of a single interpretation of it. Nevertheless, it does make for compelling listening. As it’s presented here, it makes an opposite kind of movement to Become River inasmuch as it starts with low notes and ends with high ones, as though embodying an irresistable ascent over the course of about an hour’s duration.

And, the other day, the post brought me the CD Darkness and Scattered Light where the sole instrument is Robert Black’s double bass, either heard solo or, on the title track, in five overdubbed parts. As I’ve only played it once this far I won’t attempt any kind of review. The cover image is in a similar nebulous vein to the one used for Sila.

I Killed Your Dog

The inevitable ‘best of 2023’ listicles that proliferated on-line a couple of weeks ago served as a reminder of just how little new music I’d listened to this year. Feeling older is inescapable, but one can very easily forget just how out-of-touch one is. Of the dozen or so new albums I have heard in full during the year so far, my current favourite is one that made an appearance on several of those lists: I Killed Your Dog by L’Rain.

Much was made, in the press accompanying the album’s release, of how different it is in terms of mood and subject-matter from the same artist’s previous record (Fatigue: 2021; as mentioned on my old blog here). Indeed it is a brighter and cleaner affair, including some tracks – like ‘5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)’ and ‘Clumsy’ – which would have sounded quite out of place on the last album. My first impression, however, was of the similarities between the two releases, of their shared sound-world and the consistent compositional ‘voice’ in which they both speak.

I love I Killed Your Dog every bit as much as I loved Fatigue, which is just as well, as certain aspects of its release irked me. Again, it was not made available on CD, and I somewhat resented paying £27 for a piece of plastic in a paper sleeve in a cardboard one. The paper sleeve, moreover, wasn’t even usefully anti-static. My copy was on coloured vinyl, in a shade optimistically called ‘oxblood’. While it can look vaguely reddish on the turntable, held up to the light it seems to me a translucent shade resembling magenta, quite unlike anything an ox might bleed.

I should perhaps add, by way of disclaimer, that your dog is almost certainly fine, and, if not, it was nothing to do with me.

IARC

The late, lamented jaimie branch’s album FLY or DIE II was the first one of several issued by the Chicago-based International Anthem Recording Company (IARC for short) that I’ve acquired over the last few years. Four of them are shown above.

• Suite for Max Brown by Jeff Parker & the New Breed (IARC0029, 2020). This album by the fromer Tortoise guitarist & friends is a recent addition to my shelves but is the oldest of the four. I heard some of it soon after its release, only to make the mistake of putting off getting a copy. Having belatedly rectified the matter, I can recommend Gnarciss as an example track.
• Open the Gates by Irreversible Entanglements (IARC0048, 2021) was the third album by this remarkable band, the second one to come my way. Its eponymous opening track sets up the mood perfectly. Their most recent album Protect Your Light (issued under the Impulse! imprint) is also right up my street.
• In These Times by Makaya McCraven (IARC0059, 2022) was my favourite album of last year. It’s another one where the title-track is a beauty. Like other several other IARC issues it’s a joint venture with other record companies, in this case Nonesuch and XL Recordings.
• There is Only Love and Fear (IARC0064, 2023) by Bex Burch is the latest of the company’s offerings to reach me. The opening number Dawn Blessings gives an idea of its mellow, earth-toned delights.

Havana 3 a.m.

Above is the elegant cover design of a UK pressing of the Cuban bandleader Perez Prado’s 1956 album Havana 3 a.m.: a recent vinyl acquisition. The original cover featured a scantily-clad dancer and a percussionist, which may have been a bit much for the buttoned-up Brits of the day. Even so, it is (I think) a better representation of the frequently raucous & unsubtle music on the disc than the image shown here.

While it’s not without its elegant moments, the main musical ingredients are blaring horns and insistent percussion–combined in forceful, spacious arrangements, accompanied here and there by piano, and punctuated by the grunts and whoops of Prado himself. It’s music made for the intoxicated & sweaty half-dressed reveller, and to my mind has more in common with, say, James Brown than it does with Frank Sinatra.

Uncatalogued

After a tedious yet oddly satisfying exercise of ‘stock-taking’ my music collection and updating its on-line representation at discogs.com, I was left with some seventeen CDs and LPs which I was unable to find in that database, voluminously extensive though it is. Discogs' coverage is less complete with respect to classical than the other styles of music on my shelves; and, I suspect, the site’s usage must be less widespread outside the Anglophone world than within it: in any event, most of the uncatalogued seventeen are classical releases from non-English speaking countries.

Six of the CDs in question are shown in the poor-quality photo above. Left to right, from the top:

• An album of piano trios by Russian composers issued on the Cologne-based C-AVI label in 2014.
• On a label affiliated with the Museum & Estates of the Palace of Versailles, a recital disc of 18th-century French harpsichord music. This one’s a 2023 release so maybe it’ll appear at the site in due course.
• Also French, on the now-defunct Timpani label, a delightful album of chamber works by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. Dating back to 2007, this disc’s chances of turning up at Discogs seem slimmer.
• An album bringing together two of the chamber works composed by the Bohemian-born Antonín Rejcha, performed by Czech musicians on the Praga Digitals label. Despite all those mitteleuropean associations, the label is another French one. Rejcha himself ultimately settled in Paris, where he became known as Antoine Reicha.
• From Warsaw, on the CD Accord label, the seventh and last in a series of releases devoted to the string quartets of Mieczysław Weinberg (Wajnberg in Polish orthography). A few of the others in the series can be found at Discogs, so perhaps this one will follow suit in time.
• A 2-CD set of compositions by Alfred Schnittke, in classic recordings issued by the Russian Melodiya label. This one only seems to have been available for rather a short time, so perhaps there are relatively few in circulation.

I would add them to Discogs myself, but I already have a full-time job. Plus I’m somewhat fearful of inadvertently transgressing the site’s norms in some unforgivable way and incurring the wrath of one or more of the gatekeepers there.

Red

At the Oxfam shop in Thornbury recently, I spotted a copy of the LP Red by Black Uhuru. It was priced at £3.99, which didn’t seem too much to pay. I already owned a copy of the group’s 1980 album Sinsemilla, so getting the follow-up struck me as a fine idea. Noting the damage to the cover (shown above) I thought I’d better first check the state of the vinyl within. A pleasant surprise was in store - a plain red inner sleeve contained a bright red record, which, moreover, appeared to be in good order.

For just short of £10, I picked up Red, along with two classical piano LPs. On getting them home, the latter both proved to be disappointments: even Sviatoslav Richter couldn’t sell me on the merits of a couple of early Beethoven sonatas; and the sound quality of the early ’60s Chopin recital by Adam Harasiewicz left much to be desired. Black Uhuru, on the other hand, sounded great!

Hadal Zone

Newly-arrived this week, Hadal Zone, a recently-released album from Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. While it’s music largely free of melodic or rhythmic hooks, it is nevertheless a compelling sonic experience, one based on the simple concept of a descent to the uttermost depths of the ocean.

After a brief but unsettling introduction, the following eleven tracks lead the listener from the daylit open ocean ever downward, with ever-deeper pitches to the fore as the water, as it were, grows darker, colder & more compressed. The instrumental line up of bass clarinet, cello, piano, double bass and tuba is augmented by electronically-mediated vocal sounds. While at times the music expresses agitation & motion, an uneasy sense of calm is more prevalent. The final tracks–where things are at their deepest & darkest–I find the most fascinating. I’d love to hear them issuing from a large & powerful sound-system; there’s only so low my small bookshelf speakers can go.

The piece comes across as a near-counterpart to John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World which moves in the opposite direction, from low sounds to high ones over a similar ca. one-hour duration (although Sila, is arguably more abstract than this work). I first heard of Martinaitytė last year, having been intrigued by a review of her album Saudade, though I ultimately struggled to appreciate the works on that disc after buying a copy. Around the same time I’d encountered the then-unfamiliar term ‘Hadal Zone’ from its use as a title to the closing section of Julia Armfield’s unusual and interesting novel Our Wives Under the Sea, which also revolves around a voyage to the lowest oceanic depths.

Experimental Doom

On asking for recommendations for music outside the styles I habitually favour, a correspondent suggested the track ‘Run Priest Run’ by Chicago-based outfit Wrekmeister Harmonies. I loved it, and went hastily to ebay to obtain a copy of the 2015 album that features it: Night of Your Ascension. I bought a lightly-used CD copy for £4 plus postage.

There are only two tracks on the album. First up is ‘Night of Your Ascension’ itself, which runs to over half an hour, and is apparently inspired by the composer and murderer Carlo Gesualdo. It’s a complex work with numerous moving parts, but still a gripping and absorbing one. At about seventeen minutes' duration, ‘Run Priest Run’ is no brief coda, providing a more unified exercise in bludgeoning menace.

Attempts to categorise Wrekmeister’s music tend to involve the words ‘experimental’, ‘drone’ and ‘doom’. Their name, I gather, is derived from that of Béla Tarr’s long & slow movie Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), which I have not seen, although I have read the novel on which it’s based: László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance. Krasnahorkai has been quoted as saying “You will never go wrong anticipating doom in my books, any more than you’ll go wrong in anticipating doom in ordinary life”–so that’s a chain of inspiration that seems entirely apt.

Ellis in Wonderland

A few of my recent record buys have featured the virtuoso pianist Oscar Peterson as a more-or-less unobtrusive accompanist. On Soulville (1958, mentioned recently), Ben Webster was backed by Peterson’s trio, augmented by west coast drummer Stan Levey. On Anita Sings Jazz (1957, a re-titled UK pressing of Anita Sings the Most) Anita O’Day was accompanied by Peterson, again with his bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis, but this time joined by Milt Holland on the drums. It’s a record where the pianist played a more prominent role, with some wonderful interplay between him and O’Day.

It was Herb Ellis’s turn in the spotlight on Ellis in Wonderland (1956, pictured above), which was the guitarist’s first LP as leader. With their roles reversed, Peterson stayed very much in the background. To be fair, there was plenty going on in the foreground with solos variously by Ellis, and by the three horn-players involved: Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, Charlie Mariano and Jimmy Giuffre (the last a college-friend of the guitarist). Alvin Stoller played the drums. Peterson, Brown & Ellis were also part of the ensemble in five of the seven tracks on New Jazz Sounds (1955, below), where alto saxophonist Benny Carter was credited as leader. It’s a somewhat uneven record that’s at its best in an opening pair of tracks which benefit from an ebullient guest appearance by trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie.

Fly or Die

A newly-released arrival in the post this week - the third and final Fly or Die album by jaimie branch and her quartet: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)). It’s pictured above with FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise (2019) - both on CD. I have yet to aquire Fly or Die (2017), the initial album in the series.

I wrote a little on my former blog about how I came to hear branch’s music. As a new fan, eager to encounter more of her work, it was a body blow to learn of her untimely death later last year. More recently there was the news that a posthumous album, all-but-complete when she died, would be forthcoming.

I’d already heard ‘The Mountain’ which had become firmly embedded in my mind over the past month. At first acquaintance with the record as a whole I wasn’t sure I liked it as much as FLY or DIE II, but I’m still getting to know it and my feelings may change. As well as ‘The Mountain’, I am, at the time of writing, particularly fond of the tracks ‘Baba Louie’ and ‘Bolinko Bass’.

Soulville, etc.

One of the best of my recent vinyl purchases was Soulville by saxophonist Ben Webster, who seems to have been caught in rather pensive mood when the cover photo was taken. Originally released in ‘58 on the Verve label, the copy I found was a 1980 French re-press in excellent condition. It’s a warmly mellow album, heavy on the ballads. I’ve had mixed success with his records previously, finding it hard to love See You at the Fair (1964) and ending up with a damaged copy of Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster (1960), but this one’s definitely a keeper.

On the same day I acquired more jazz in the shape of an interesting compilation (How High The Mooon) of late ’60s recordings featuring another saxophonist: Illinois Jacquet. Among the tracks an interesting take on Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” where Jacquet switched to bassoon, an instrument very seldom heard in a jazz setting. As well as the jazz I picked up no fewer than four David Bowie 45s: ‘Sorrow’, ‘Rebel Rebel’, ‘Rock’n’Roll Suicide’ and ‘Sound and Vision’, plus Hawkwind’s ‘Silver Machine’, also on 7".

From another subsequent batch of acquisitions my head was turned by Jeri Southern At The Crescendo (1960), apparently the singer’s final album before withdrawing from the music business, but the first I’d heard of her. I’m hoping to put a few more of her albums alongside it on my shelves. At first listen I was less taken with Herbie Mann’s 1958 outing Sultry Serenade, which I’d bought on account of its wonderful cover photo. Also known as Moody Mann it’s another mellow collection, albeit to my ears a less effective one than Soulville. It features the flautist using an alto flute on a few tracks, and, on one number, switching to bass clarinet.

Interval Signals

There was a tune that haunted me for about thirty years before I finally found out what it was. I first heard it issuing from a television set, but it wasn’t ‘on TV’ exactly.

When I was given my first home computer as a birthday present in late ‘82 (a Sinclair ZX Spectrum), it came with a TV to serve as its display. My parents had pushed the boat out for the computer, and couldn’t afford to buy me a new TV too. Having asked around, my mother learned that her cousin Betty had an old one she didn’t use any more. Betty was a flight attendant for TWA, and had picked it up at some point on her travels.

It was a nominally-portable Hitachi unit, a ’70s model with an 11" screen and a tuning dial rather than buttons to switch between channels. It could theoretically pick up both VHF and UHF transmissions, but, lacking an aerial, didn’t do so at all well. Not that it mattered that I could only conjure up a snowily indistinct ghost of the BBC, as it worked fine with the computer.

In the days before the world wide web, one was often bored. One of the things I sometimes did when boredom weighed heavily was to idly scan through the TV’s frequencies in the faint hope of finding something, anything unusual. To my great surprise I did on odd occasions detect unexpected audio issuing from it, having (I presume) strayed into shortwave radio territory. Most strikingly I could sometimes discern a chiming fourteen-note melody, in two similar sets of seven tones, floating eerily over a bed of inteference. I never heard any accompanying announcement, just the same music repeated several times. I lacked the presence of mind to record it.

When, twenty years later, I heard about shortwave numbers stations, I thought maybe my mystery tune might be connected in some way with those, but I found nothing to match it on ‘The Conet Project’ CDs, or elsewhere. More time passed and, although I never forgot the tune altogether, I sometimes doubted whether my recollection of it was correct.

Then, in November 2014, I heard it on the radio - on scheduled terrestrial digital radio this time, not in any random traversal of the airwaves. During one of Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone shows on BBC 6 Music, he played some tracks from OMD’s 1983 Dazzle Ships album. One of these, ‘Swiss Radio International’, an addition to later CD re-issues of the album, was the melody I remembered, a recording of the eponymous station’s ‘interval signal’: mystery solved! I further learned that the tune had been drawn from a 19th-Century song called Lueget, vo Bärgen und Tal.

Singles

Of the hundred and fifty or so 7" singles I’ve accumulated over the past decade, a disproportionate number of them date back to the tail end of the ’70s and the early part of the ’80s. In other circumstances, these could have been my peak single-buying years - I was between the ages of nine and fifteen - but I had other priorities at the time, and, in any case, not very much money. It’s been a pleasure to acquire now some of the records I might have bought then had things been different.

Shown above are a select half-dozen such 45s which happen to have picture sleeves:

• ‘(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence Dear’ by Blondie (1978)
• ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ by XTC (1979)
• ‘Echo Beach’ by Martha and the Muffins (1980)
• ‘Reward’ by The Teardrop Explodes (1981)
• ‘Beat Surrender’ by The Jam (1982)
• ‘Nobody’s Diary’ by Yazoo (1983)

Dark With Excessive Bright

My latest (modern) classical CD purchases were an excellent new recording, warmly praised by the composer himself, of a piece that means a great deal to me: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians; and Dark With Excessive Bright, a disc featuring two arrangements of the title piece along with four other works by Missy Mazzoli, which also proved to be very much to my taste.

‘Dark With Excessive Bright’ began life as a concerto for double bass and string orchestra. Having a particular fondess of the dark sonorities of the contrabass, I would have loved to hear that on CD, but instead the album is bookended with versions re-arranged so that Peter Herresthal’s violin is the solo instrument. He’s backed by a string orchestra on the first track, then has the sparser support of a string quartet on the final one. The scaffolding of the piece proves flexible enough that both versions work admirably well. The intervening works are a varied bunch all likewise well worth hearing.

I’d been more ambivalent about my previous pair of classical buys: two sets of string quartet recordings featuring music by Philip Glass & György Ligeti.

Issued last year were Quatuor Tana’s première recordings of Glass’s 8th & 9th quartets, the latter adapted from music composed to accompany a stage performance of King Lear. This theatrical 9th is sombre, as befits the play it soundtracked, and features no few sonically striking passages, particularly the section near the close of the restless first movement where the cello takes centre stage; but for all that it seemed to me slightly short on cohesion, and with a finalé that didn’t quite convince; whereas the subtler 8th holds together more persuasively, its melancholy slow movement the highlight.

Ligeti’s two numbered quartets are formidably challenging and played with commanding aplomb by Quatuor Diotima on their recent album Metamorphosis. For all their wit & wealth of invention, though, these are still works I find it difficult to love. When it comes ’50s & ’60s modernist quartets my preference would be for Penderecki’s over these. Also on the same disc is a fascinating two-movement ‘Andante and Allegretto’ by the Hungarian, a relic of the first phase of his compositional career in Budapest when he was obliged to try (at least some of the time) to please the Communist musical establishment.

In-Car Entertainment

The car I had before the car I had before the car I have now must have been one of the very last to be made with a built-in cassette-player. This was less than ideal as I had given away or sold all my cassettes in 1998. Its successor had a CD player, which suited me very well indeed. My current car, however, latterly-acquired, is of recent enough manufacture to have no on-board device for playing physical media. It has a bluetooth option if one wants to play music from one’s telephone (I do not). And it has a passive USB connection and a good old-fashioned line-in socket. Plus there’s a radio offering DAB and FM/AM reception.

For me, this new-fangled state of affairs feels like a backward step. Given my reluctance to use a phone for music, an iPod-esque device seems like it might be the best option. I don’t currently own one, but as I ponder what might work best for my needs, I’ve been using as a stopgap a contraption intended for a slightly different purpose: a Tascam DR-05X Linear PCM Recorder. As well as recording, it can play back mp3 and wav files perfectly well (though without any fancy playlist or shuffle options), and it’s equipped with a headphone/line-out socket. I bought it last year intending to use it for recording music from vinyl (which I still have yet to do).

Between ten and twenty years ago I maintained a music library comprising mostly mp3s and flacs, some of which were ripped from my own CDs, and some obtained via other means. More recently I have left that collection gather digital dust, so the tracks available for loading on to the Tascam reflect an outdated picture of my musical tastes. While it has been a pleasure to re-acquaint myself with songs I’ve not heard for years (for example) I’ll need to fire up EAC and get ripping the CDs I’ve acquired over the past decade to get my motoring playlist up to date.

Astrud

When I bought the instalment in the Compact Jazz series of compilations devoted to Astrud Gilberto, it stuck out of the rest of my music collection at an awkward angle. This was in 1989, when most of my cassettes featured rock, pop & indie music: tantamount in those days to a declaration of allegiance to a particular musical tribe. Gilberto’s easy & mellow jazz-tinged confections were clearly the property of some rival clan, but I knew I loved ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ & wanted to hear more like it.

Thankfully such ridiculous demarcations are much less in evidence nowadays, and one can listen to a little of everything without feeling the need to take sides in some broader conflict. It’s turned out that, unlike the larger part of what I was listening to in ‘89, I still love Astrud’s singing now. I was delighted then to find a copy of her debut solo album in Monmouth the other weekend at ‘The Vinyl Spinner’ market stall. It’s from a budget re-issue series seemingly made for the Dutch market, but there’s nothing wrong with the record within, which carries the familar Verve label, and which sounds wonderful.

It’s very nearly a case of “Astrud Gilberto Sings the Antônio Carlos Jobim Song Book”, with all but one of the tracks (and that the weakest of them) compositions of his. It’s all the better a record for it: ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and ‘Corcovado’ (the tracks on Getz/Gilberto that first introduced Astrud’s voice to the world) had been Jobim’s handiwork too. Moreover, the composer was also present in person, playing guitar throughout and adding vocals to ‘Agua de Beber’. None of which takes away from Gilberto’s own contribution: her voice brings with it just the right blend of naïve sentimentality and cool melancholy, complementing the songwriting and the arrangements perfectly.

Roberta

Last August or so I saw or heard someone singing the praises of Roberta Flack’s debut album First Take (1969). As luck would have it I found a cheap vinyl copy in September; but as luck wouldn’t have it, the disc was in barely playable condition. Still, I heard enough to know I too would be singing its praises in due course.

When I hastened to obtain another copy from a Discogs seller, even at four times the price I’d paid for the first one there was no qualm of buyer’s remorse. I particularly love the opening two tracks, the uptempo opener ‘Compared to What’ and the impassioned ‘Angelitos Negros’. Elsewhere, Flack’s famous version of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ is all the more lovely in the context of the album, and follows a stately cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, then still a relatively new song.

My luck came good again a few weeks later when I turned up her fourth solo album Killing Me Softly (1973), again on vinyl and again for only a few pounds (albeit this time in better shape). I was well-acquainted with the powerful title track but didn’t know the album included another Leonard Cohen number in the shape of Flack’s version of ‘Suzanne’. Overall I thought the LP almost as good as her first. I had to wait several more months before chancing on album no. 2, Chapter Two (1970), which cost me roughly twice as much as Killing Me Softly, half as much as my second First Take. It gets off to another strong start with Reverend Lee but has a couple of weaker tracks too, such as her less than fully convincing attempt on Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’.

Most recently of all - the weekend before last, returning to my usual haunts paid dividends yet again when I found a copy of her 1972 duet album Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway. This one I’m still getting to know - at first acquaintance I feel it may be straddling the line between the agreeably and the overly smooth: repeated listening will be the test of that. Now I suppose I’m on the lookout for solo LP no. 3, Quiet Fire (1971).

Rendezvous

Buying records based purely on their cover designs is something I’ve frequently regretted and yet continue to do. Then again, where the outlay is small, the regret need only be relatively inconsequential. An example is Rendezvous, a 1957 LP by Bobby Hackett I picked up for a few pounds a few months ago with a particularly appealing cover (above) so very thoroughly redolent of its time. The back of the sleeve is no less well-designed.

Hackett was a trumpeter who had played in Glenn Miller’s and Benny Goodman’s big bands, among others. By the mid-’50s he was prolifically churning out albums of retro mood music. The tunes on Rendezvous maintain a ’40s feeling, but rather than the upbeat exuberance one typically associates with that earlier era, the feeling here falls somewhere between the seductive and the sedative. The track titles suggest the progression of a romantic night out: ‘You Are Too Beautiful’, ‘Thank You For A Lovely Evening’, …, ‘We Kiss In A Shadow’, ‘Two Cigarettes In The Dark’, …, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, ‘Love Me’, ‘One Kiss’.

“But when music is part of a rendezvous” say the sleevenotes, “it has to be something special, deftly fashioned to create a quiet, after-dark mood. Such is the smooth and relaxing music on this album. The songs are comfortably familiar, with a warmth and freshness wonderfully suited to the persuasively romantic trumpet of Bobby Hackett…” - which isn’t altogether inaccurate, though any freshness that there may once have been hasn’t withstood the test of time. While undoubtedly a well-exectuted record, it’s just too blandly mellow for my taste.

Shelf Portrait (iii)

The Compact Disc has been largely unloved for at least the past fifteen years. There are scattered signs of a slight revival of interest in some quarters, but it still seems to fall some way short of the groundswell of affection that brought about vinyl’s second coming. I came to CDs quite late (not until 1997) and retained a stubborn affection for the medium while it it was pushed aside in the rush toward digital downloads and streaming. I’ve done a good deal of downloading myself, but still prefer the pleasures of physical media.

At one time I had at least half a dozen Gnedby-esque units to house DVDs and CDs. Nowadays I’m down to three, with those fully-devoted to CDs. I currently own somewhere in the region of four hundred and fifty shiny discs. A section of my central shelving unit is shown above, covering some of H, all of I & J and most of K in my more-or-less alphabetical arrangement. There’s at least one album here I’ve owned for twenty-two years, and at least one other I’ve had for less than a month.

This subset of my collection goes from 17th-century harpsichord music by way of big-band jazz to near-contemporary pop/soul tunes. it contains singing in Welsh, Swedish, Spanish and German (not to mention English). I sometimes congratulate myself on having diverse tastes, yet was already doing that back when they were rather narrower, so perhaps I ought to try instead to be more conscious of what’s not represented here. In any case, if experience is anything to go by, the contents of my shelves will continue to change over time.

Sweet Child

My last record-buying outing netted me five LPs and a 7" single for a total outlay of £23. The cheapest album was the only I didn’t much care for when I played it: a recital of piano pieces by Erik Satie on the Classics for Pleasure label. Beyond a handful of his greatest hits I’ve struggled to enjoy Satie’s eccentric compositions, and this was another unsuccessful attempt. Pieces like his ‘Sonatine Bureaucratique’ and ‘La Piège de Méduse’ left me cold. Then again, the record was only a pound and at that price it had seemed worth a try. The same charity shop had a similarly cheap copy of The Astrud Gilberto Album, which I’d have eagerly grabbed had it not been in such poor condition.

As a general rule, I’ve tended to be drawn toward lower-pitched singing voices and conversely have often shied away from high soprano & falsetto ones (I was slower than most to recognise the merits of songs such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ & ‘Smalltown Boy’). Combined with an incuriosity about the British folk-rock of the late ’60s and early ’70s, this prejudice sufficed to keep me well away from Pentangle’s music for many years. The dull months of Covid lockdown brought about quite a bit of musical reappraisal on my part, with one of the upshots being a very belated recognition of just how unusual and excellent a band they were. The frequently high pitch of Jacqui McShee’s exquisite vocals was no longer a deterrent.

I’ve much enjoyed a ‘Best Of’ 2-CD album of theirs I acquired at that time, and hadn’t considered buying any of their original LPs until finding a gatefold copy of Sweet Child in the bins. At £12 it was easily the costliest of the day’s buys but it’s a late ’60s pressing in very good condition and (most of) the music on it is a delight. ‘Sweet Child’ itself, and the live rendition of ‘No More My Lord’ are my favourite tracks. I very much like the pictures of the band in the gatefold too.

Shelf Portrait No. 1

The block of records above represents nearly a quarter of my collection of 12" vinyl. it’s a motley mix with a growing minority of albums I’ve bought new (or that were gifts) amidst a majority of scruffy charity shop and junk-shop aquisitions. Leftmost is In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs; rightmost are a few Supraphon LPs featuring some of Dvořák’s chamber music. Among the other classical composers represented are Beethoven, Berg, Berwald, Boccherini, Borodin, Bottesini, Chabrier, Chopin, Couperin (Louis & François) and Dukas.

Composers, musicians and bands who appear more than once include Black Uhuru, The Brothers Johnson, J.J. Cale, Circulatory System, The Colorblind James Experience, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis and Drums Off Chaos (all x2); Blondie, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Nick Drake and Dvořák (x3); David Bowie and Nat ‘King’ Cole (x4); Chopin (x5); with Leonard Cohen (x6) second only to Ludwig van Beethoven (x8) in terms of representation in this particular Kallax cube.

I’ve owned the two albums of Beethoven’s violin sonatas (played by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin) for over twenty years - they were among my earliest vinyl buys. The most recent newcomers here are the Brothers Johnson records, picked up within the last couple of months: I’m still pondering whether or not they’ll be staying on the shelf over the longer term.

Rockferry, etc.

At the local charity shop on Saturday I felt discouraged at just how many of their stock of LPs were ones I’d formerly owned and donated to them over the years that hadn’t yet found a buyer: some have been there for quite some time. Nothing on vinyl caught my eye, but I did pick up three CDs: D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar; Tasty by Kelis; and Duffy’s Rockferry. The total asking price was £2. Brown Sugar joins the copy of Voodoo I bought last year. Tasty meanwhile is aptly described by its title. I’d enjoyed ‘Milkshake’ and ‘Trick Me’ (more especially the latter) when they were new, but such was my blinkered outlook at the time that I never thought of buying the album back then.

It was a case of third time lucky with Rockferry: the other twice I’d ended up with copies that had been pre-enjoyed so much they were in unplayable condition. I’d not heard the album as a whole before and was favourably impressed at first acquaintance. The singles are clear stand-outs among some slightly weaker tracks, but the closing number ‘Distant Dreamer’ was an unfamiliar beauty. If you’d asked me fifteen years ago I’d have predicted Duffy would become a worldwide star and Adele an also-ran. Alas, things have gone very badly for the Welsh singer; as meanwhile the Londoner has gone on to one triumph after another.

In a different vein altogether a recent on-line order brought me new CD copies of John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World and Nuit Blanche by everyone’s favourite piano + cello + soprano sax + accordion art-music combo the Tarkovsky Quartet.