Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Gershwin Songbook Verve, 1959
Clocking in a 3 hours and 15 minutes, Ella Fitzgerald's exhaustive take on the Gershwin Songbook is intense. It took me a week to work through, and when you're dealing with the First Lady of Song, it's not like you can just breeze through it. This is just luscious. Just pure romance. Burning through all these great ladies of jazz, it's like what do you even do with that? How do you even objectively tackle folks who are unimpeachable? I could listen to them sing all day long, and in the case of this one, I pretty much have!
Another live record, and I dig this one quite a bit more than Duke Ellington's Ellington at Newport. For one it has a more off the cuff feel while still capturing Sarah Vaughan's incredible voice and charm. Toward the end of "Willow Weep For Me" she flubs a line and sings, "I really fouled up this song real well" to the laughter of the crowd. That's what I want out of a live record! To see the artist as a human being is part of the reason to go to a live show, and it's one of those things where the flaws are what make it special. But my god could this woman sing. I've been listening to a lot of these records in the kitchen lately and it's been a real treat. We're in the middle of a four album span where 3/4 of the records are from three of the great ladies of jazz. And you think about Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald and you wonder how white people have the nerve to think they are somehow superior. I think about what it must have been like to not only be black, but a black woman, singing for white folks for their entertainment, and yet being seen as something lesser. It is truly obscene. This record, on the other hand, is truly sublime.
Ramblin' Jack Elliott is the bridge between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan that I never knew existed. His story is a good one too. The son of a Jewish doctor, Elliott ran away from his New York home to join the rodeo as a teen and though he was eventually dragged back home, it wasn't too long before he hit the road under Guthrie's wing. While the throughline between Eliott's stripped down folk music and Bob Dylan is crystal clear, they honestly seem a little bit like the same person. Both were city slicking Jewish dudes obsessed with Woody Guthrie, yet where Elliott stayed a cowboy Bob Dylan became, well, he became Bob Dylan. This is the music of the dirt, and I've always had a soft spot for the music of the dirt.
Imagine hearing that voice for the first time. This was the last album released while she was still alive, and reading up on her death is one of the most heartbreaking things I've read in a while. Just so tragic how someone who was able to make such stunningly gorgeous music suffered so greatly. These recordings are world weary and weathered. Well, her voice is at least, compared to her dulcet tones in the 30s. The sweetness is gone, but the orchestrations are epic and sappy, and contrast wildly with the newfound rasp in her voice and make this an incredible listen.
I'm glad that the book mentions Tito Puente's turn on the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episodes of The Simpsons as one of the reasons anyone under the age of 40 knows his name. That me! I have listened to more Latin music in the last week than I have in my entire life up to this point. I think I'm getting to the point where I can ID an Afro-Cuban rhythm, which is exciting. This album is lively as hell, and does plenty to chip away at the cynicism of this aging rock chump.
Little Richard - Here's Little Richard Specialty, 1957
I think the question isn't "What was the first rock and roll song?" but "What was the first rock and roll song that made rock and roll rock and roll." You always see Bill Haley & The Comets "Rock Around the Clock" touted as the first true rock and roll song, which has a real "It's your cousin, MARVIN BERRY" vibe about it. Honestly with all the Jim Crow stuff it's a real stew of shit when it comes to deciphering the origins of rock and roll music. You have white artists appropriating black music and black artists who aren't allowed a platform to perform their music due to Jim Crow and racism country-wide. You have someone like Little Richard, who on top of being black was also queer, and it almost seems like a miracle that "Tutti Frutti" is such an enduring classic. There is just something so perfect about that opening "Whop bop b-luma b-lop bam bom" that transports you to a place of pure joy. If "Tutti Frutti" isn't the first rock and roll song, maybe it's the first rock and roll song that truly perfected the craft. That's a tune you can still listen to today and feel exactly what it must have felt like hearing that on the radio in 1957. The energy is unimpeachable. There are other great numbers on this record--"Ready Teddy," "Long Tall Sally (The Thing)"--and though a lot of them mine the same sort of sonic turf (many of the songs are effectively variations on the same theme). Regardless, this is what magic sounds like.
More Afro-Cuban jazz! Initially I thought this was gonna be some tribal African music or something like that, so hearing the fiery Latin jazz of the opener "Wild Jungle" caught me totally off guard. Kenya is quite a bit livelier than the Sabu record from a couple entries ago, but it just feels like a different piece of the same patchwork. There's plenty of conga, but the horns and grooves take center stage here. This one is another fine example of an album I thought would make this project difficult, but lo, it turns out being a music lover is quite easy. Literally, all you have to do is listen. The albums here are curated by 94 music critics so you know you're not really going to get any duds, and all that is required is an open mind and ears.
Jazz still has that foreign film without the subtitles feel for me, and I reckon it will for a while. I would probably need a semester long How to Listen to Jazz class to truly get it. That would honestly probably do the trick. I took a class on Film Music through the music department at KU during my undergrad and it absolutely blew my mind. Not only did I gain a greater appreciation for film scores and how they did a lot of heavy lifting in delivering a film's emotional impact, but I learned a ton about timbres and orchestrations and all that musicology stuff. The final in that class involved picking a movie from a list--I chose Bernard Herrmann's score for Citizen Kane--and identifying every music cue in the film. I watched Citizen Kane five or six times, IDed the cues, the instruments involved, how they worked in the greater cinematic landscape, and I feel like I learned more about film in that class than any of the classes from the film department proper (I did take a film music class through the film department from the legendary Chuck Berg, but like all of his classes it was a sumptuous softball of film (music) appreciation than it was a scholarly powerhouse). That's as close as I can get to jazz, and while that class was helpful for like, identifying oboes and bassoons, there's so much social and cultural history to jazz that it is tough to properly assess without a 700 page book on the subject.
But here we are, listening to one of the most famous jazz records of all time and it's still essentially pearls before swine. It's lovely to listen to, and I wish I had more context for how this fit into jazz as a whole. The book provides a little context, and there's a nice little trivia bit that reminded me he did the score for Louis Malle's excellent Elevator to the Gallows, which I now need to revisit, but there's just so much history. In my waning days at KC Public Library I visited Kansas City's American Jazz Museum as research for a breakout box (think a breakout room, but self contained in a lockbox for teenagers to figure out how to break into, which shouldn't it be called a break-in box? I digress) about Kansas City's music history. I left before the project reached completion, but it was fun to hang out in that space. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, another record I can see myself randomly throwing on while cooking dinner.
There is a fair bit of world music in this book, and I'm here for it. It's another one of my musical blind spots. Here Louis "Sabu" Martinez opens my eyes to the wild and wonderful world of the conga drum. It's pure percussion, and there's something about this recording that feels very primal. Like we are hearkening back to the dawn of time or something. Some tracks are straight up Sabu going wild slapping the skins, but the tracks where the conga serves as the base for the more traditional jazz-folk numbers were my favorites. "Rhapsodia Del Marvilloso" in particular.
I have listened to this album four times in the past five days and it sticks in a way none of the other jazz records I've listened to so far have. There's just so much personality and a true willingness to go out there. There's a freedom of this that you're never going to find in big band. Again, jazz is firmly outside of my comfort zone. I've listened to a couple of John Coltrane records but that's it. Of all the albums I have covered so far, this is the first one I can see myself going back to. It's the first jazz record on the list that has an actual composer's touch rather than a conductor's touch. Brilliant Corners sounds like alchemy, like pure magic.
My whole impetus for listening to the 1001 Albums was to always have something I could put on while choring. Doing the dishes, making dinner, woodworking, hanging drywall, etc. It's nice to just throw something on without thinking. "What's next on the list? Thelonious Monk? Cool!" There's something liberating about that.
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