Remember a Day

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  • John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

    John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

    Studio Album | Released January 1965 | Recorded December 9th 1964 at Van Gelder Studio | Impulse! Records | Producer Bob Thiele

    The John Coltrane sound: heavenly, spiritual, otherworldly. A Love Supreme is for many the peak Coltrane album. For others it is at least the most famous one, the record that hit the jazz world the hardest and left the deepest mark.

    Music as expression of soul and spirit. That is what John Coltrane eventually dedicated his life to. By the time he began working on A Love Supreme, prior to 1965, he was already deeply accomplished as a musician and a horn player, having appeared in probably the best jazz band ever put together alongside Miles Davis.

    1964

    The album was conceived and recorded in 1964. In many ways the cultural movements of the decade were still at the cuff. The wave had not yet formed. Music was definitely pushing toward societal reflection and change, with records like Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The civil rights movement is key context as well. By 1964 the movement had developed into a massive outpouring of protest. Lyndon Johnson had taken over as president after the assassination of John Kennedy. The war in Vietnam was not yet on most folks’ minds, but it was looming.

    In jazz, John Coltrane loomed over others as an emerging figure of the free jazz movement. He had broken out as a solo artist after his stints working under Miles Davis. 1964 was a year of hard work, but it also gave him room to rest, enjoy his newborn son, his first, and spend time with Alice in their new house on Long Island, New York. It was at this house that John secluded himself and began to develop the concept of A Love Supreme.

    Coltrane’s path to A Love Supreme ran through his years with Miles Davis, and a lot of the inspiration for free improvisation most likely took root while working on Kind of Blue. It was a time of listening, learning, and growing. And between the two recording sessions of Kind of Blue, Coltrane made Giant Steps. A seriously innovative record on its own, but what it also was for Coltrane was an exhibition in composition and music writing. It was proof that he was on the path to getting things going for himself and growing as a creative.

    Then there was the soprano saxophone, a new instrument picked up mid-career. An interesting move. There’s a lightness to the soprano, he would say. You can play lighter things on it. It’s a relief to shift to it. The soprano gave him “My Favorite Things” and a hit, and it widened the range of what his voice on a horn could be. That widening matters on A Love Supreme, even on a record where the soprano never appears.

    Something else Coltrane had to traverse to get to the point of making A Love Supreme was severe heroin addiction. In the 50s, using was not universal among jazz artists, but it was readily done and many artists had easy access to it. John was caught up in the attraction of drugs as a path to higher planes and higher abilities on his instrument. It did everything but that. Coltrane quit heroin cold turkey, and through sheer willpower and faith made it through a darkness few people have any idea of the difficulty of. That moment, the spiritual awakening of 1957, is the very experience he references in the liner notes of this album. A Love Supreme is, in a real sense, the thank you note for surviving it.

    December

    Coltrane’s record label had set aside about half of the second week of December. Tyner and Jones remember Coltrane calling them up and arranging a session for December 9th.

    Recording an album usually takes time. Days, weeks, sometimes months. Depends on the artist, I would say. But something is vastly different about A Love Supreme: it was recorded in one night, in one session.

    The Quartet

    The quartet on this record is a product of experimentation, but the end result is a band that allowed Coltrane full inventiveness and full confidence in working together. The record could not have been made without their collective skill, ability, and knowledge of music.

    Pianist: McCoy Tyner

    Tyner joined up with Coltrane around 1960, a confident young pianist who had what Coltrane wanted: a clean and astute harmonicist. Even though Tyner was 12 years younger than Coltrane, the two seemed to share the same musical focus and a spiritual leaning. They worked well together.

    Tyner relates the relationship to a brotherly one in Chasing Trane, the John Coltrane documentary. They were like brothers, and they were together for one reason: to create beautiful music. Full commitment. Full humility. No ego.

    Drums, Gong, and Timpani: Elvin Jones

    A master of the polyrhythmic style. Not the most in-demand drummer at the time, apparently. He would take liberties on the drum kit, drawing unwanted attention from bandleaders who wanted something tamer. But Jones was an amazing drummer, a master of his instrument, one who looked at the drums as intently as Coltrane looked at his horn. A naturally gifted player and a perfect addition to this quartet.

    Bassist: Jimmy Garrison

    Garrison had come up under another sax impresario and innovator, Ornette Coleman. Coltrane had been seeking a bassist who could match the strength required to work alongside a drummer as challenging and effective as Elvin Jones. Garrison joined the quartet in 1962 as the final piece of the band.

    The group gave Coltrane the feeling and the force he wanted. He wanted extremely capable musicians who could perform and sound like a unit without needing to force it. He wanted the feeling to be there rather than the hard edges of each musician playing on his own. Gathering this group was vital. From the point in 1962 when it solidified, the quartet became known for its work ethic, and its popularity shot up. It was Coltrane’s hot group, destined for something great.

    With this group, John Coltrane became the immense jazz figure that would seal his legacy. It tracked right into the making of A Love Supreme.

    The quartet formed, and the records came through. They recorded Crescent earlier in 1964, and man, what an album. Moodier, more contemplative, the band settling into longer forms and deeper waters. You can listen to it as a subtext, a prologue to A Love Supreme. Crescent is the record if you want to hear the quartet gathering itself for the leap.

    Producer: Bob Thiele

    On Bob, John said his duties were basically to keep the lights on and keep the tape running. A real backseat appearance for a producer. With all that expertise in the room, production gets pushed to the side. These were experts. Especially John.

    Significance

    The record landed in people’s homes like a gift from God. It was early 1965, right in the middle of the 60s. People were pursuing new religions and seeking truth through other means, music being one of them. People were seeking different lifestyles and accepting a universal consciousness. A Love Supreme was a perfect representation of that effort.

    A Love Supreme is dug deep into our cultural awareness, and that is something I’ve taken for granted myself. Even the phrase, the album title itself, inspired similar phrases down the line. A “blank” supreme. Anytime you hear that construction, it’s owed to Coltrane. It was one of the first records to be unapologetically devoted to a higher power.

    Many place the record, and sometimes Coltrane himself, into a religious context. For many listeners the music represents a voice from a supreme being, whether that voice is Coltrane himself or Coltrane channeling something through music. What you hear is someone playing an instrument beyond any extension of himself. It is himself. Full artistry, full mastery of craft, full immersion, and full transcendence.

    The Object

    My copy is not an original, not significant by any means. However, it is the music on vinyl, and for me that is significant enough. I’ll say that for a lot of records. It’s a 2023 US Impulse! reissue bought from my go-to record store right now, Recycled Records in Monterey, CA.

    A beautiful album cover. Instantly recognizable. Pure Coltrane. His gaze is not toward the camera but forward, toward a path to making better music. The photo was likely taken by producer Bob Thiele around the time of the recording. I really like the title font and how the title of the record comes first, then its maker. The tilt of the typeface seems to follow the same tilt as John’s eyes in the image. There’s not much simpler artwork than this, and it’s incredibly effective.

    The Music

    The album plays like improvisation mixed with composition. It blends genres together, and you can hear gospel, free jazz, bebop, and blues throughout. It eventually became known as spiritual jazz, a term that had never been used before. But many just see it as music, period.

    The John Coltrane sound: no vibrato, the shrieks, the rapid-fire runs. Vocal-like. It’s a tone. It’s purely him. It’s from deep within. It’s a howling soul and a wailing preacher together. On A Love Supreme he used the tenor saxophone for the entire recording, noting that it had the depth the music required. The tenor is close in tone to the human voice, and if these sessions were meant to come across as sermons, you can see why leaving the soprano behind made sense. The tenor is a voice here.

    Before even stepping into the studio, John had visualized the music as a connected suite: two pieces on side one and two pieces on side two. This is how the final product appears, and this is how the record was recorded.

    Acknowledgement

    The first gong hit and the opening lines from the sax are immediately transporting. You know you’re in for something different and special.

    Coltrane’s opening is transporting but familiar at the same time. To me it’s reveille, the wake-up call. It’s curtains opening. It’s a door opening. The signal to begin something. The signal for prayer to begin. The imam calling. Elvin Jones dances on the cymbals as that welcome ends. Then Garrison enters with that four-note motif. It is the album’s title in a four-note sequence.

    A love su-preme.

    Then Tyner takes a few chords as the rhythm develops. Coltrane’s horn returns. In full force. With a melody that just kills. Intensity is reached, and Tyner and Jones match it. Jones and Coltrane are really reaching heights here on “Acknowledgement,” interplaying so well. There’s a consistency from Jones that allows Coltrane’s flourishes and movements across the musical atmosphere. The cymbal is an interesting instrument to focus on here.

    Coltrane reaches peak intensity and then backs down, like a hiker on the downslope. Longer pauses open up between lines, and then the recurring theme enters the room. He plays the four-note motif 37 times in a row, in different keys.

    It’s an exercise in roaming key modulation. A masterful display. Some interpret it to mean that God exists everywhere, in every key. Some take it as a display of pure talent and ability.

    Then the tenor is put down and Coltrane takes the mic, one of the rarest moments on any of his records. He chants the mantra 15 times, drops to a lower key, and says it four more times. The song ends as the quartet slowly drops out, but Garrison remains. The bassist is the final musician you hear on this piece and the first you hear on the next.

    Resolution

    The seventh take. Garrison gives an introduction to the track on bass. A simple rhythm and theme, and it does little to warn you about the onslaught of Coltrane’s sax when it comes. It comes in blasting with the most out-there melody you’ve ever heard. Even today this melody makes me feel something I can’t pin down. It’s that dramatic and affecting. What ensues after the initial shock is a relatively traditional 4/4 jazz workout with Coltrane soloing.

    Then Tyner takes a solo. This solo is a highlight of the record. It’s insanely good and really hard to describe. Tyner’s left hand is fluid while his right hand stays fixed, playing mostly chords to follow and give structure to what the left hand is doing. I can’t begin to understand how difficult that is to do. But here, you can hear it done. It’s mind-boggling.

    Coltrane flows back in with his own solo, carrying a subtle respect for what Tyner just accomplished. His second foray as soloist on this track lasts through the remainder of the recording. He flourishes along, some of his lines blues-tinged. Then he strains on some wicked high notes, pushing the limits, and returns finally to the original melody. Garrison and Coltrane finish up while allowing the melody and the track to settle out and resolve, if you will.

    Pursuance

    This track begins with Jones taking a solo of about 90 seconds. His adaptable talent is on full display. Jones reported that Coltrane gave him no direction for this solo, so what you hear is supposedly unplanned. It is a showcase of his polyrhythmic ability. What it really sounds like is Jones using all of the drum kit at once. He playfully executes this extremely fun solo and slowly reaches a conclusion, still going at a brisk pace as Coltrane and the other two bandmates filter in.

    Coltrane’s intro rushes in with an initial blast of this new tune’s melody. Before that even gets a chance to sink in, Tyner takes another solo, his second on the album. Tyner really takes a walk around the room here, dancing around the melody of “Pursuance” at a sometimes breakneck speed. The left hand is just flying. Amazing stuff. Then Coltrane returns.

    Coltrane’s entrance into this track is the peak of the energy on the recording. It is a powerful exposition of melodic runs and strings of new ideas. It’s way out there. Underneath Coltrane is Jones, flying around the kit as well. The two together are reaching new heights simultaneously. A real partnership.

    Coltrane flourishes through the melody for a couple more measures, leaving Jones to find the track’s ending. In reality it’s a false ending. Jones gives some whaps to the snare and cymbals while Garrison begins an improvisation that runs for the next three minutes. His solo here is a truly unique point on the album. He does some great call-and-response work all by himself, moving from chord sequences to several-note combinations and answering them with chords. He travels up and down the strings with ease, and this closes out probably the most intense track on the record.

    Psalm

    The finale of the record. It is different from the three tunes before it, since it’s more of a mood piece. It’s pure emotion. It’s not regimented improv like before. It’s closer to a lyrical poem. The words of the passage appear in the album’s liner notes. It is essentially a conversation between Coltrane and God, giving thanks for his life and his gift. His praise for salvation, laid bare in his most effective form of expression.

    Accompanying Coltrane on the tune, mallets in hand on the timpani, is Jones. The timpani gives this piece the emotional weight it requires and makes the whole thing feel more orchestral and cinematic. Beneath that, Garrison and Tyner provide fills and layers where they can. But really this track belongs solely to Coltrane and his speech through the saxophone. You can listen along and read the words as Coltrane recites them through the horn, and it’s really not that difficult to follow. He does a fantastic job with that. As Coltrane works through the psalm he starts to sound strained, likely because this was the last tune recorded that night. It’s a voice at the end of its night.

    Coltrane finishes with a short reference back to “Acknowledgement,” there’s a roll on the timpani and cymbal, and A Love Supreme finishes.

    Closing

    Carlos Santana plays A Love Supreme every time he enters a hotel room. He does this to cleanse the room of harmful spirits. I do believe this record has that power. I feel something every time I play it. The feeling is a calm acceptance of the beauty and hugeness of my existence in this universe. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I do accept the existence of a higher power. A Love Supreme is a record some people will use to find their connection to, or their acceptance of, that higher power.

  • Dave Van Ronk – Folksinger

    Dave Van Ronk – Folksinger

    Studio Album | Released November 1962 | Recorded April 1962 at Van Gelder Studio | Prestige Records | Producer Shel Kagan

    This album is pure and simple. An urban performer taking his trade and applying it to reshape and reform the golden nuggets of folklore. The folk song unearthed, repurposed, re-bluesified and re-jazzified by a singer with a powerful, emotive voice and a knack for the guitar bent upon years and years of rambling, and practice practice practice.

    Dave Van Ronk didn’t agree with the title this release bestowed upon him. Van Ronk had traveled to Manhattan in the early 50s in an attempt to work and succeed and be famous as a jazz singer. His inspirations were jazz artists and big band leaders and musicians. Those jazz leanings were fused with blues leanings, and his inspirations remained as such throughout his life. The early members of his audience made note of his appearance and his voice. He was a very big guy. Above six feet and above 200 pounds. With a voice that could raise Lazarus from the grave.

    In The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Van Ronk relates hearing an early version of “Stackolee” on an Alan Lomax reissue series record, one of the earliest records he ever purchased. The version by Furry Lewis had a distinct fingerpicking guitar style, and it perplexed Van Ronk. He felt it was two different guitars playing, when it really was one person playing both melody and bass line simultaneously. He ran into someone later in Washington Square Park picking their guitar in a similar way. He sat down and listened, and asked the person for a quick on-the-spot lesson. After that day, Van Ronk took a head-first nose-dive into the fingerpicking style. He would go to Washington Square Park to play, and to learn from those who already knew. He gave everything he had to mastering that style of playing, and that was his change from jazz to folk. It was a career decision, as Van Ronk states in his memoir. It was a move from complex to simple. It came out of necessity, and it was also a change in mood and mind, arriving right at the time the Village scene was about to make history.

    It was the Washington Square Park scene that Van Ronk developed inside of. This scene was sporadic pockets of musicians occupying various parts of the park, striking up tunes together or by themselves. A fertile music-breeding ground if there ever was one. Also passed around in copious amounts were drugs and left-leaning ideology. This was libertarian, progressive, communistic support for music that these folk thought was going to affect change at upper levels of government. Lots of hate for other groups, as he would say. Van Ronk’s MO at the time was to sit down somewhere and sing. The hope was that folks would gather around, and maybe pitch in money. He had an advantage for these impromptu live sessions: his voice volume. If you’ve heard Van Ronk you immediately notice his voice. It would carry well in a park setting, and even the least curious passerby would notice it.

    Somewhere around this time a reissue record comes out. The Anthology of American Folk Music, a compendium of traditional American music. Some had never heard these recordings before. Most hadn’t, actually. This became Van Ronk and friends’ guidebook for how to sing and make their music. It was the tome of the elders. It had all-time greats on it. Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson. Triple OGs. On contemporary phonograph equipment at the time, this record set must have blown minds. What it actually was was a set of old 78s collected onto LPs.

    The music would come from places other than America as well. Van Ronk’s song on this record, “Chicken Is Nice,” was a Liberian original. One of the only recordings at the time of an American folk singer repurposing a song from Liberia as his own. That alone makes this record a must-own and a must-listen.

    MacDougal Street, the Folklore Center, and the Scene

    By the time Folksinger came out, Van Ronk was pretty well established in the scene. He had become somewhat of a mentor and ringleader of sorts. The hangouts were the Caricature Coffee House, the lofts down on the Bowery, and the Café Bizarre. It was at a gig at the Café Bizarre, with Odetta as the lead attraction, that Odetta saw Van Ronk’s performance and was so impressed she asked him to send her a tape so she could pass it along to Albert Grossman.

    Van Ronk’s vocal influences were jazz and blues artists he began to mimic through a jazz lens. Josh White was one of those touchstones. White was a Black blues and folk singer who had lived in the Village for years and represented exactly the kind of vocal authority, dramatic phrasing and stagecraft that Van Ronk admired and absorbed. You can hear White’s influence in the way Van Ronk shapes a phrase, how he leans into a line for emotion and then pulls back.

    Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street was the other anchor of this world. It was part shop, part hangout, part bulletin board, part informal concert hall. Van Ronk spent enormous time there in the late 50s and early 60s, and the cover photo of Folksinger shows him standing right under its sign. There were also the hootenannies at the Gaslight Café and up and down MacDougal Street, which Van Ronk was central to.

    The Object

    My record is a faithful reissue of only the best kind, by the great company Vinyl Me Please. Every one of their reissues that I own I cherish for the quality of sound and the great presentation of some of the all-time greatest records, or at least the ones that hold the most importance. The sound quality on this release is fantastic. The jacket and wax are sturdy and guaranteed to last my lifetime. The liner notes are recreated. The true highlight of this package comes in the listening notes by Elijah Wald, in a little Moleskine-style notebook tucked away in the record sleeve. Give me something like that with every single record and I’ll be happy. With this record, and with the ones that come with lore, it’s a cool thing to see, a writer putting heart and devotion into detailing the music you’ll hear and giving you the stories you need to understand the notes and heart and emotion in Van Ronk’s voice.

    The album cover has a great photo of Van Ronk on it, in full belt, standing under the sign of the Folklore Center, the place where he spent a lot of his time in the late 50s and early 60s, and like the church of his inspiration, where he became linked to so many of the songs you hear on the record.

    The Music

    He Was a Friend of Mine

    This is a traditional folk song, originally unearthed by Alan Lomax. It’s simplistic in nature and exhibition in most versions that you hear. A song of lament, about a person recounting the death of an old friend. There are numerous versions. One of the most incidental was the Byrds’ version, given more weight as a somewhat pointed tribute to the dead president John F. Kennedy. The two early folk versions of the 60s belong to both Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Dylan’s version precedes Van Ronk’s and is similar in execution, and it did not end up being placed on Bob’s first record.

    Van Ronk’s version really makes you think this song belonged to him. When I first heard it, I suspected the song was new. As the first song on the record, it opens up the listener to the Van Ronk universe. The song is sung with quiet beauty here. Sustained notes start getting scratchy toward their end, like a road going from pavement to loose asphalt to grit. The road is the setting. The man who died, we don’t know who he was. What we do know is that Van Ronk is intensely broken up over this person’s death. And since Van Ronk himself has passed on, leaving his legacy in tattered records and folk legends and lore, perhaps this is a song that can serve as an obituary to the man himself.

    Maybe this is the one song on the record most connected with Dylan and the strange way that people connected Van Ronk to Bob Dylan. Each of them sang their own version of the track, maybe in reference to each other. As far as friends, enemies, rivals, mentors, I don’t know where the two fell. It’s difficult to understand truly how each of them felt for the other. What we do know is that they were both somewhat influences on each other, maybe moreso Van Ronk on Bob. Still friends though.

    The man who most could have been this friend, though, was Phil Ochs.

    A great live version of the song, maybe the most meaningful, was put forth by Van Ronk at the Phil Ochs Memorial Concert in 1976. Van Ronk sounds tore up singing it, his voice cracking with the emotion at the lament of the death of a fellow folk giant.

    Motherless Children

    Originally recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. The song moves through the gospel and blues tradition and was a natural fit for Van Ronk’s range, sitting somewhere between spiritual and field holler. He gives it that wide, deep voice and lets the guitar do the mourning underneath.

    Stackerlee

    This song’s legend holds a mirror to itself. It’s one of those legends made into song, and with each iteration a new artist and performer etches their name in the logbook of history. Originally the song was performed in the 19th century, about a famous African American criminal. Lee Shelton lived in St. Louis, Missouri, was a member of underground clubs, and gambled, drank, and bedded women. He would go “stag,” and eventually Stag Lee became his name.

    As folk tradition has it, the passing down of songs with different variations was the tradition. The names get changed, the ideas of the song change. The legend grows larger. “Stackolee” is a great example of this passing-down through generations, but with things different each time, like a generational game of telephone.

    Van Ronk relates his first time hearing “Stackolee” and it not making sense to him, that it must have been two guitar players in unison. Furry Lewis is completely inspiring on his rendition of this legendary song. Van Ronk makes note that he never changed much about the original Furry version. Bottom line up front though: if Van Ronk never hears this song on the Listen to Our Story anthology, put together by Alan Lomax and released in 1947 on 78 and 1950 as a 10-inch LP, Van Ronk probably never takes up fingerpicking.

    If you listen to a version by Furry Lewis, you can really make out the great imitator that Van Ronk was, in both his vocal stylings and his guitar work.

    Mississippi John Hurt’s version of this track is one of the most famous and earliest put down. That came in 1928.

    Mr. Noah

    An exhibition of Van Ronk’s great sense of humor, and a touch of goofiness. This one was sourced from blackface minstrel shows by way of Greenwich Village banjo great Billy Faier.

    As simple as this song appears to be, it exposes something inherent about Van Ronk, which is that he was a skeptic of institutions, religion being one of those. According to Elijah Wald, the song was popular as a barroom number, sung by drunk men in circles. It was a mock at religion, with a chorus of “hallelu, hallelu, hallelu.”

    Van Ronk deftly replaces “hallelu” with “doodly-dee-doo.” I think Ned Flanders would not enjoy this song.

    Come Back Baby

    Dave had recorded a version of this song on his preceding record. That version sounds primitive, worked out as a blues recording. On Folksinger, the version has more personal qualities to it. It’s recorded better, for one. You hear the inside of the guitar sound so well. And the vocal has resonance, and you are personally affected. Dave is singing in a slightly tender register. But it’s gruff. It’s like a bear with a soft voice in one line, and then a growl in the next line. That artistic style, that variance in pitch and demeanor, was something Van Ronk was a master of.

    Poor Lazarus

    This song’s source was Alan Lomax’s anthology American Ballads and Folk Songs. A work song with chain-gang roots, sung with a heaviness that Van Ronk’s voice was built for.

    Samson and Delilah

    Original arrangement by Reverend Gary Davis. Of biblical nature, and a narrative song. Reverend Gary Davis was another legend, and probably loomed pretty large for Van Ronk. The banjo of Davis is replaced here by Van Ronk in his own way. Van Ronk is in full throat on some of these lines, giving his best effort to imitate the master.

    Cocaine Blues

    Another song Van Ronk sang as an inspiration from Reverend Gary Davis. Davis’s version is a borrowing of a vintage country song, popularized in modernity by Johnny Cash, but here taken in the folk-singer revival tradition. Van Ronk gives this track its due, and it seems like a personal lament to the drug and its adverse effects. It’s really got that one-man-in-a-song-in-a-small-room setting, maybe more so than any other track on the record. Toward the end it becomes a confessional of sorts. On that last line of the chorus, Van Ronk raises his voice to full effect.

    This track was one of the early folk songs that mentioned drugs, and that inspired dozens of artists to create their own versions. Dave’s version maintains that original status still, and the song about cocaine gained definite appeal long after the 60s and into the 70s, as that drug lived its own life and so did this song about it.

    Many people connect this song to Dave Van Ronk as the closest thing he ever made to a hit. It was always requested, loudly, from the crowds at his live concerts. Van Ronk probably got sick of it. He stopped singing the song in 1972.

    A large section of Dave’s memoir is given over to the inspiration and the authority that Reverend Gary Davis had in his life as an influence. He notes the song’s importance as it came from the Reverend, who was the biggest inspiration on Van Ronk’s life.

    You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon

    This may be the track where you can most make out Dave’s jazz big-band and ragtime influence. You can hear just how important Dave’s vocals are in the arrangement and how the guitar part is giving the vocal its power. On a larger scale, there would be a full band backing up a vocal like this, but here it’s done subtly with just guitar and voice.

    An original song by Bessie Smith in the vaudeville blues tradition. A song that in Dave’s rendition is meant to be funny, though later Van Ronk would express some regret, since the original version holds a more funereal aspect to it.

    Fixin’ to Die

    A Bukka White song, from the album The Country Blues, put together by Dave’s roommate at the time, Samuel Charters. Dylan had also recorded his version of this track a year earlier.

    Hang Me, Oh Hang Me

    Sourced from an album by Sam Hinton, who was a West Coast folksinger. If you watch Inside Llewyn Davis, you’ll get a good dose of this song, sung by Oscar Isaac. The Coen brothers borrowed a lot of inspiration from the life of Van Ronk to make that movie, and it’s fitting that they chose this song as one of the figurepieces. The main character, down on his luck, in a constant cycle of trying to break out of a lack of success through music and talent. It’s downtrodden. If “He Was a Friend of Mine” is a lament about a friend gone away, then this song is a lament about one’s own miserable lot in life. Destined for poverty and hard times.

    Long John

    This song came from a version by Woody Guthrie on a 1950 record called Chain Gang. Another work song, another voice in the long American line of singing under the lash and the sun.

    Chicken Is Nice

    A fantastic ending song, and a unique one. Originally put down by a Liberian pianist named Howard Hayes. Van Ronk found it on a set called Tribal, Folk and Café Music of West Africa. Dave’s early years were occupied with searching out the deepest and best material out there on records. Likely on 78s, and not usually on LP compilations.

    Closing

    I must admit, purchasing, owning and listening to this Van Ronk record are recent events in my life. As an offering of songs, Folksinger is a truly brilliant gift of an album, from a singer who should definitely not be forgotten but too often is. And it’s more than being forgotten. I think he’s a bit misunderstood. Many connect Van Ronk to the Greenwich scene, but to me his life was much bigger than that. That scene was fertile ground for dozens of songwriters, artists, poets and all sorts of creativity. Van Ronk stood solo based on his presence as a person, and on his influences. Folksinger, from 1962, is a good entryway into the efforts and works of art of how he took his song influences and made them his own. Don’t compare him to anyone else. Don’t associate his name with any particular setting other than late-50s and early-60s American music revivals. It’s essential that Van Ronk is remembered as such. Folksinger is in fact a statement of that, and a great record.

  • Bob Dylan — The Times They Are A-Changin’

    Bob Dylan — The Times They Are A-Changin’

    Studio Album | Released February 10th, 1964 | Recorded August 6 – October 31, 1963 | Columbia Records| Produced by Tom Wilson

    In my opinion this record is Bob’s second brush with greatness after his second record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The third record from the master bard and songwriter represents a stark contrast to that second one. On Freewheelin’ there’s some hidden optimism somewhere within it. It’s hopeful, it’s youth, and the world is open. There’s a hope that we can get things fixed if we all get on the right track. With The Times They Are A-Changin’, we along with Bob must accept the onslaught of an apocalypse. It’s a stark and haunting landscape. Windswept. Dusty. Dark. Black and white. The title represents a regard for a movement in a different direction. You listen to the record intently, you can feel that movement. In some songs you feel the damage already being done. In some ways things have already changed for the worst.

    Being noticed can be a burden.

    Bob’s fame was shooting to the top in the period between his second record and his third. Between spring 1963 and early 1964, Bob was being crowned the king of the protest song. This was a persona he was beginning to reject and come to terms with at the same time. You can feel that rejection, and some quiet acceptance, in this record. What also occurred during this period was the assassination of John Kennedy. That event really informed the album and had an indelible effect on the songwriter. Many people still associate that event with the title track, and rightfully so, it being such a turning point in his country’s and the world’s history.

    Bob’s relationship with Suze, which helped inspire several of the songs on his sophomore record, continued to struggle. What was coming into his life was a semi-rivalry, semi-courtship with female folk powerhouse Joan Baez. This partnership and career advancement opportunistic relationship took center stage on multiple occasions, most famously during the Newport Folk Festival held in July 1963. That festival was Bob’s joining of the folk zeitgeist, the world giving him the title of folk and protest song master. Bob was applauded in dirges. The want for his words and the want for him to represent the teeming masses was massive. They were on edge waiting for him to come and lead the way, even though he was just trying to make his way as a songwriter and as a young human man being.

    A guest tour with Joan Baez, and a performance at the March on Washington alongside Joan later, pretty much sealed the deal for Bob and Suze. Bob spent time with manager Albert Grossman, as well as spending time in Carmel, California, at the home of Baez. I currently live near this place, and have spent a lot of time in the area. I can sense the pastoral quality of this time period being injected into these lyrics. It may be why I’ve always felt a closeness to this record. It’s got that feel of sitting inside a cozy bedroom or living room, reading and writing, but with a black cloud of woe and worry passing overhead. The Carmel and Monterey fog living within the lines, maybe.

    Bob’s rejection of his personification as the spokesman of his generation informs much of the record as well. His popularity came with an expectation that he began to work against. He just wanted to do his own thing. What emerges are songs that evoke his inspirations and his life as a songwriter up to this point. What emerges in Bob and his persona is a spikiness, and an unwillingness to accept bullshit from the media, the critics, and the endless line of microphones and magazine article writers. It was this spiky Bob Dylan that went on to create his third record.

    The Object

    This record’s album cover has always been striking to me. The monochrome quality, the edges of age and maturity progressing across Bob’s face. It’s a very captivating image. Bob’s face shows a recognition of something harsh and intense going on. It’s post-apocalyptic in a way. You see age but also inexperience on his face. You sense a great emotion, and along with the big typeface of the lead track and the album’s title, a strong statement is made. It’s still very affecting, even by modern standards.

    This cover is also striking as a stark contrast to the preceding record. The brace against the cold on the New York street, along with the kind embrace with Suze and a general optimism, has been replaced with something like a mugshot or an image of poverty, isolation, and longing.

    The Music

    Recording began on the record in August 1963, and Columbia brought back the company producer Tom Wilson to oversee production. Tom Wilson had produced Bob’s preceding record, and went on to produce the next two. Wilson served the artistry here as more of a facilitator than an overseer. The approach with The Times They Are A-Changin’ is less is more, and you feel it throughout the record. If you focus intently on the songs and how they sound, you’ll notice more prominence to Bob’s vocal, and the refinements in the gentle rhythmic strumming guitars are assisting that voice, not playing alongside it.

    Three sessions were conducted in early August 1963 and produced the master takes for several songs: “North Country Blues,” “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “With God on Our Side,” “Only A Pawn in Their Game,” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Touring interrupted further recording, and the rest of the master tracks were completed in October 1963. In this interim period, Bob may have actually been writing the tracks for the album as well, or at least finalizing ideas for songs he wanted for the record.

    The Times They Are A-Changin’

    Finger-pointing songs.

    Bob said this track was influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads like “Come All Ye Bold Highwaymen” and “Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens.” Each verse addresses a different group, and each verse provides a command to that group or groups. It’s a song and an anthem, wanting something from society, civilization, the institution, and the individual. Bob admitted that he made this song with the intent to make some social change. Maybe it’s his most literal call to change from his time as a protest singer in the 60s. It became one of his most well known songs.

    The opening verse calls everyone to gather and admit that the waters around them have grown. Water can destroy all things over time, water erodes. What exact waters is Bob referring to? Just the concept that we’re going in a direction where, if the tide or the flood hits a certain point, we’ll all be affected in some way. And we must admit that. Sink or swim, folks. Adapt, learn, evolve, or die essentially. On this first verse you can sense Bob settling in to the song in the studio, his voice and demeanor and maybe his body getting comfortable with the feeling and progression.

    The second verse turns to writers and critics. Is Bob calling to mind his own quality, or is he asking his writer peers to join with him, don’t miss the opportunity to make a grand statement about what’s going on? I can read these words in a political light. The constant flux of leadership. Don’t criticize the leaders now or the losers, the inevitability that they will be replaced is a constant. The loser now will later win, as if it’s all a game, a constant change, the tables always turning, all up to chance, the spinning wheel.

    Next come the senators and congressmen. Bob’s urge here is to get with the friggin’ program. Don’t cause hindrance. Don’t be an obstacle to change, be a facilitator of it. The times need you to change as well, and call upon yourselves to be the ones that help out. If you stand still, you’ll feel the pain of the oncoming change. The battle outside, the conflict you fail to participate in, will affect your home.

    Then mothers and fathers. Every new generation feels this. Bob would like the old ways to go away. It takes old folks to learn and adapt to new ways of thinking. Always. The youth movement was on its way. The times were showing a protesting population full of college-aged youths. They had ideas and were discussing them. Bob joins the thrall, and requests that if the older generation can’t get along or get with the change, then to simply get out of the way.

    Turning points are no longer even acknowledged. It’s a boundary, and the change has been made. Many have drawn biblical parallels to the final lines of this song, however I find similarity in Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” The order is rapidly fading. The blood-dimmed tide is loose.

    Ballad Of Hollis Brown

    This is a grim, morose song, full of hard-edged dusty imagery, of the poor farmer variety. Very Grapes of Wrath. Very Woody Guthrie, and old American. The story is of a South Dakota farmer overcome by poverty, reaching such desperation that he kills his entire family and then himself.

    An earlier version of the track was recorded during the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions in November 1962. The early version had a guitar strum pattern, the final version has a more primitive, fingerpicking style.

    This song is amazing and it’s my favorite on the album. It’s a staggering work and could be one of Bob’s more underrated masterpieces. Definitely belongs in the list of great murder ballads.

    If the title track was meant to attract, this song with its dark imagery, themes of ending, murder, and poverty, is meant to repel. The quick one-two punch of the title track’s finger-pointing call to action, paired with this track’s brought-down gloomy mood, establishes both the black-and-white theme of the record and the bleakness of Bob’s optimism. He asks folks to look at what’s happening, but in reality things all turn out bad in the end, and we all die and towns die with us. Whoever this Hollis Brown character is, none of us should want to be him or experience his woes.

    Sonically, the song is definitely gloomy. Bob takes that lower, Woody Guthrie or more dark folk register, delivering each line with a strong punctuation. A matter-of-fact, line-by-line storytelling style. The fingerpicking guitar strum, albeit gloomy as well with its simple chord sequence, is deliciously infectious when paired with the gloom of the song. If you’re someone who likes dark moods in songs, which I am, you’ll get enjoyment from this dark folk tale.

    The scenery and imagery are stark here. Hollis Brown lives on the outside of town with his wife and five children in a broken-down cabin. Such harsh poverty reduced to a hard one-line image: a child not able to smile due to hunger. I enjoy the way Bob is addressing the subject as “you,” placing his audience inside the character’s scene. It makes the listener feel the emotion as if it’s happening to them. Pacing the floor, asking why, never to get a response.

    The horror continues, and the want for some assistance, whether in human form or spiritual, continues. These added questioning lines give the song an anti-religious bent. Money is lord here in this universe, and when there is no money there is no lord. The psychosis is starting to set in. This is a maddening portrayal of someone pushed to his limits.

    Bleakness reaches its breaking point. He’s finished, and the shells will execute the plan. The cold coyote call. Just amazing alliteration. Very deep western. This song is spooky.

    What’s driving this character to commit this harsh act? Does the brain-bleeding imagery imply some madness taking over? Does the man have the same bad blood that the horses have in an earlier verse? There’s a slight disruption in the fingerpicking here, slight new note intonations. Indicative of the madness occurring.

    The seven breezes, to me, indicate an effort to escape, perhaps a run out of the house and the disturbed wind because of it. Nonetheless, seven shots ring out, seven shells spent. The ending lands hard. Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm, and somewhere in the distance, seven new people are born. That’s an inevitability. There are folks being born every day, and folks dying every day. The seven tragic endings may be replaced by even more tragic endings. Who knows.

    Bob chose to sing this song as part of his performance during Live Aid on July 13th, 1985. He expressed he hoped some of the money raised for the event would go to pay mortgages on farms in Africa.

    With God on Our Side

    The anti-war and anti-religious songs continue with this great track to make up more of the powerful songs of side one on this record. The irony of the song is simple. The events mentioned all fit the same pattern. It’s war justified by righteousness, throughout history.

    Bob was accused of plagiarism for this song, and how similar it is to “The Patriot Game” by Dominic Behan. He declined any conflict with Behan.

    With this song, Bob takes a stab at patriotism, at history’s alignment with religion, and at political will bending to support both for the pursuit of land, real estate, and monetary gain through war and killing.

    The song sounds like a funeral march. It’s simple, along with all the other tracks on the record, relegated to just Bob, a guitar, and harmonica. At this point in his life and career he’s still up against the man, and probably up against his own indifference to religion and institutions overall. His later days get a little preachy, and lots of folks drew issue with that when you look back on the statements he was making in songs like this.

    Bob does place himself inside the irony and the argument, though, stating that the country he comes from is called the Midwest. He was taught and grew up there, and the land he lives in has God on its side. He belongs to the country, so there are no exemptions.

    The next verse begins the walk through history, mentioning that the cavalries that charged and killed the Native Americans had God on their side. After that, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War take place. Bob notes that all the names in the history books, that he had to memorize, were the winners, and thus had God on their side.

    The First World War comes next. Bob didn’t get what the conflict was for. But he accepted it, because the dead don’t matter when God’s on your side.

    After that, the Second World War, naturally. And the most biting verse of all. The Germans lost, we forgave them, even though they oversaw massive genocides, and now they are on our side, with God.

    Cold War fascinations come next, where Bob notes that he’s been taught to distrust the Russians. If a war with them comes, it will be fought bravely with God on our side.

    Nuclear weaponry makes up the next verse, the weapons of chemical dust. Bob argues the decision would not be questioned. Because God’s on our side.

    Even the Bible’s key event is brought into question. Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side when he betrayed Jesus?

    The last verse brings it all together, and is basically the punchline to the song, if the song is a joke. If God really was on our side, there won’t be any war, and that God, if caring, would stop it. That turned out to be not exactly the way things went for the subsequent decades. Perhaps Bob found God through all those years of hurt.

    One Too Many Mornings

    This track has a calm beauty to it. It’s emotional, and shows a side of Dylan that has been affected by a difficult time and a difficult relationship. Probably the fallout of his Suze relationship coming to an end is the driver of the emotion in the track. The two impressionable young adults seemed to be on different tracks altogether, and eventually broke up in March 1964, after estrangement due to distance and people in the background interfering.

    This song at the time was cast aside as not protesty enough. A re-look at it, and a placement against some of Bob’s later material like Blood on the Tracks, gives it an immense weight. It’s an amazing track and gave a glimmer of the direction Bob would be taking in a few albums and into the 70s.

    To my ears, it has the best vocal performance as well as the best harmonica insertions on any song on the record. Following up the previous grim track with this sweet ballad is like stepping inside after being caught in an acid rainstorm.

    There’s still some melancholy here, and much of the themes deal with sadness and endings, and a mind not equipped for letting go.

    North Country Blues

    We’re back to the protest songs, and we’re back to the circle, gathered around Bob while he tells us a tale. This tale will turn out to be a personal one, about the iron mining towns of Minnesota and how they break people, and the effect on working people of capitalism’s ever-creeping cycle.

    Most people attribute the setting of this song’s story to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Iron to Minnesota was like gold for Californians. It was a mad rush to mine the land in the 1890s, and Hibbing was a town built on those strips. The iron ranges, where Bob grew up near, gave birth to generations of miners. John D. Rockefeller broke the land, buying up huge pieces of land, amassing huge profits by selling iron to U.S. Steel in the early 20th century. By the 50s the area was mined up, and Bob saw the effects of the industry decline causing a depression in his town. Bob himself did not come from one of these poor mining families, but he was exposed to all of it enough to see it and empathize with their experiences on this great song. Perhaps young Bob’s exposure to downtrodden miners was his first brush with the disenfranchised.

    Bob is putting on a vocal performance on this track evocative of the bards of old, and really is emulating Woody Guthrie. His storytelling skills on this track are downright intense, and the vocal performance helps give the narrative the weight it deserves. He’s singing this story like a good country artist, but a folk country.

    The narrative of the track is told from the POV of a woman. The scene opens with an acknowledgement that this town doesn’t have the luster it used to. The red iron ore pits used to run a-plenty, but now folks have cardboard in their windows. Damage done. The woman narrator’s children are grown, but her own mother was sick and died, and she was raised by a brother. The ore trade flowed, but the woman’s brother died, just like her father. So this woman has children, a dead brother, and a dead mother and father.

    Winter comes, her schooling is cut, an indication that schools may have been closed or shut down. She notes she quit in the spring and marries John Thomas, who as luck would have it, is a miner. Three babies later, but work starts going away. The line about work being cut down to a half-day shift with no reason is a greatly written piece of poetry.

    More mines were closed. Prices for ore rise as supply goes down. Inevitably, and along with what would later resemble free-trade dynamics, the labor goes outside the country. The miners in the South American towns work almost for nothing.

    The next verse has an amazing line about the room smelling heavy from drinking. The work gone, no one to support the family, the inevitable demise. The man dies, the narrator is left alone, the stores all start to close. The children grow up and need to leave. There’s nothing left there to hold them.

    Only A Pawn In Their Game

    This track refers to the murder of Medgar Evers, one of the key leaders of the NAACP in Mississippi, in June of 1963. It was first performed by Bob at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. This was a peak song for Bob at the time, a very important event in the civil rights movement given its due treatment by a young folk singer on his way to making some of the greatest lyrics ever put down, in any genre.

    The song does a lot to recognize and analyze the origins of institutional racism in the South. It doesn’t just say this was a bad thing and we should all learn from it. Evers’s death was one in a string of heinous events towards black people in the South in the 60s. Heinous things purely just for asking for equal rights and freedoms.

    To my ears, there are similarities between the sound of this song and “With God on Our Side.” Of course, the verses end with the same line, each building on an examination of what the hell did this have to happen for. And Evers is just a small piece in the machine.

    In the second verse, the pawn in their game is the poor white man. The Southern politician tells the poor white man that he’s better than the black man, but as we all know, and Bob effortlessly explains to us, this is the game. They play us against each other for their own gain. It continues with the next verse, where the G-men are the ones getting paid, while the poor white man is their tool. He’s taught early that he’s privileged, the laws on his side. And that his skin will save him, so there’s no need to look outside himself, no need for empathy or creative thought.

    The next verse is where the worm turns in the mind of the poor white man. His enemy grows wider in his vision, while his poverty continues, wearing at his self-esteem and respect. The hate for the other leads him to gather with others who think the same, and to kill and lynch along with them.

    The final verse nails the concept true, with great skill. Medgar Evers’s death occurs, his funeral a moment of sadness, but the martyrdom is only surface level, because on the epitaph will read that he was only a pawn in their game.

    Boots of Spanish Leather

    Another beauty of a song inspired by the Bob and Suze relationship. This one feels achingly sad in its details, and Bob’s emotion in his voice. Bob describes it simply as a boy-leaves-girl story. It was written during Suze’s time in Italy, and when Bob had traveled there with folk singer Odetta. He had hoped to meet up with Suze on this trip, but that’s not what happened. This kind of wondering long-distance love vibe weaves through the track and Bob’s pain in his voice shows that.

    Each verse is like a letter to a loved one on a distant journey, so much delicate beauty packed into each neat package. There’s a subtle naivete about love and life here, Bob being young and in love. Generally there isn’t too much story, but each image brings to mind that lover seeing the end of their relationship in sight, and the journey through life becoming solitary, the distance between the two ever widening. The boots of Spanish leather, as the key metaphor, are the footwear for a long journey. The ever-rambling man must ever ramble on. If that’s the gift he wants given, the implication is he wants to be getting on down the road.

    When The Ship Comes In

    Written after an event shared between him and Joan Baez. They were supposedly checking into a hotel together, the clerk snubbed Bob but acknowledged Joan with much respect. The ensuing anger resulted in a quick flash of songwriting, and “When the Ship Comes In” was written that night. Bob’s biographer mentions the snub was due to Bob’s unkempt appearance at the time of check-in. Joan had to vouch for Bob.

    Maybe in this fit of anger, Bob’s selfishness set in. I read in the lyrics that the ship on the sail is Bob himself, or Bob’s ambition. The hour of this metaphorical ship’s coming is Bob’s rise to fame. It’s kinda like “I’ll show ’em.” That’s the feeling I get from the words, as well as the jaunty melody and uptempo strumming of the guitar chords, and the harmonica filled with a hope for better times.

    The track also features a lot of biblical imagery, with interpretations of conquering enemies and revolutionary time periods. Upheavals, new beginnings, the tide of change bringing in ships of hope for better.

    The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

    The penultimate track is another semi-lengthy story song, this one about a hotel barmaid who was killed after being struck by a wealthy white man. The incident happened in early February 1963, in a Baltimore hotel. The barmaid was serving the man a drink, too slow for this rich person named William Zantzinger. He was the first white man accused of killing a black woman in Baltimore, and ended up only receiving six months in prison.

    Bob’s response to this severely sad event was a song that again spoke about the broader issue, not the event itself. He pens a terrific series of verses of poetry about the environment of serious racism in the country. He does this through poetry strong and evolving, the creativity of Bob getting stronger and on firmer ground. There are some intensely good and memorable lines, including an accusatory address to those who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, telling them to take the rag away from their face, that now isn’t the time for their tears. Bob is taking an accusatory tone with the people who politicize events such as this. William Zantzinger’s six-month sentence is the final line of the track, really nailing down the injustice of the system here.

    Restless Farewell

    Opinions seem to divide on this final track on the album. For my ears and my experiences with Dylan, hearing this track at the end of this record, knowing the change in direction he will take after this record, it may be the most fitting final track on any of his records.

    As with a lot of the tracks on this record, the melody is borrowed from some old folk songs popularized long ago. This track seems to borrow the melody from the Irish folk song “The Parting Glass.” That song is usually a parting song, sung after a gathering of sorts.

    Why did Bob want to have the punctuation on his third record be a farewell song? Who was he singing farewell to? To me, Bob wrote a lot about himself, his own life, his own songs, his own mind. The restless farewell could allude to his new direction and a relinquishing of his folk traditions, since after this record he’s on the pathway to rejecting the scene that made him famous, rejecting the old style for the new style, and plugging in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. And the reason why his next record would be called Another Side of Bob Dylan.

    There are plenty of lines that refer to this attitude towards the scene and life in general. The final words really were an attack, a true goodbye and a promise to never care about anything anybody said about him. Pretty ballsy of Bob at the time, he was getting criticism from multiple sides at this point, not to mention a rocky personal life. The image of the straight arrow, the slick point, piercing through dust no matter how thick. Making his stand and remaining as he is, and bidding farewell without giving a damn.

    Closing

    The assassination of John Kennedy looms over this record. The event turned out as pivotal to the mind of Bob, the reaction his album got, and his own reaction to feeling helpless against the G-men, his institutions, and the media. That event changed how the title track meant to a lot of folks. It was a turning point, a cultural hinge point. A revolution, towards one direction or another.

    The overall feeling of the record, even if we just focus on that last final line, is black and white. The world as black and white, whether in skin tone, or us and them. The vibe of the record is also darkness and whiteness. There are happy glimpses of bright, very subtle, but overall the darkness is what gives images their contour and context. It may be his most politically charged album, but there’s a frustration about the situation that exists on the fringe of hopelessness and giving up. If you match “bid farewell and not give a damn” to the songs he’s written, arguing to everyone to get their head out of their ass, then we see such a frightening display, a serious pessimism. It’s the darkness to his previous album’s lightness. It’s no easy listen for a vinyl spin. It’s quite bleak. But that’s what makes it a worthy album.

  • James Brown — Live at the Apollo

    James Brown — Live at the Apollo

    Live at the Apollo Live Album | Released May 1963 | Recorded October 24, 1962 at the Apollo Theater, Harlem, NY | King Records | Produced by James Brown

    One of, if not the most significant live recordings ever made. James Brown’s energy as a musician in a live setting is still damn near unmatched. His energy and work ethic off stage, in the studio, as an advocate for his band and his own self-image as a musician and producer, are equally unmatched. There will never be another James Brown, as cliché as that sounds. There will never be an artist more worthy of the title “Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness.”

    James Brown’s road to recording this live album was a rough one. It’s up in the air where he was born exactly, either small-town Tennessee or Macon, Georgia. What is accurate is that he spent his childhood in Augusta, Georgia. Definitely a Horatio Alger story. Young James worked through poverty, family abandonment, prejudice, and delinquency. As a child he shined shoes and danced on the street corners of old Augusta, sometimes falling in with rough crowds and drawing the attention of local police.

    I spent some time in Augusta myself and saw the streets as they are today. Definitely not the town of James Brown’s childhood. What I did see was the display of affection and pride that Augusta holds for being the hometown of one of the most influential musicians who ever lived. The Augusta History Museum has a brilliant display of Brown’s memorabilia and clothes, and James Brown even has a small display of honor at the Augusta Regional Airport.

    Brown started singing with gospel groups in the late 1940s and began touring. Then in the ’50s he started getting noticed as an R&B singer, distinguished by a powerful voice and stage presence despite his stature. His two early hits, “Please, Please, Please” and “Try Me,” became million sellers, and Brown quickly started to rise to dominance in the R&B game and circuit. His work ethic grew with his career, and he became secure enough to play large clubs and demand nothing less than an agreed-upon sum of around $1,200 a night. The Apollo Theater became the quintessential venue for what would become a landmark live album, even though recording a live album of all-original material was essentially unheard of at the time. It just wasn’t done.

    Place this album in its context. Think 1962, the Kennedy administration. Fever pitch. Bottom of the ninth for some Americans. Some people genuinely thought the country and the world were on the brink of full nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis. This show was recorded right in the middle of that 13-day standoff, and folks must have been dancing and singing along to this show thinking it could have been their last night on earth.

    The Object

    My copy is a curious little reissue from 1980 on Solid Smoke Records. It carries the alternate title Live and Lowdown at the Apollo, which to me is pretty dope and really adds to the lore. The original cover is a slightly impressionistic piece depicting the front façade of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, names and lights and information filling the marquee. That cover is more about the impression and the vibe of the setting, which is important. The Solid Smoke reissue I own focuses more on James Brown himself, giving his name center stage alongside a stylized portrait of the artist in action, beautiful hair, mid-expression toward the audience, microphone in hand, delivering a vocal performance. The cover also makes the claim that 1962 saw the “greatest live show ever recorded.”

    I snagged this copy on Discogs at a pretty reasonable price. Originals on the King Records label probably go for much higher. The Solid Smoke release sounds really good. It has that energy captured in the recording and presents it well. The vocal is right where it needs to be, and most folks seem to agree the sound holds up against other releases. Douglas Wolk, in his book on the album, notes that this Solid Smoke release is something of an oddity, and also observes that the vocal appears on the left channel while the instrumentation sits on the right.

    The Music

    The Apollo Theater and the Chitlin’ Circuit

    What this record is, for some people, is a portal to another time. A key time in R&B and soul music, the early ’60s, and the cutthroat venues known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. For many, the Apollo Theater was the most demanding venue on that circuit. James Brown eventually established himself enough in the industry to become one of the original artists with a residency there. Think of the importance by recognizing a key predecessor: Little Richard and his band, the Upsetters. Brown and the Famous Flames eventually worked their way up to co-headline the Apollo right alongside Little Richard. Those must have been some great concerts. We can only imagine the energy in that room watching those two performers work their magic.

    At the Apollo, acts would typically play for a week or weeks straight, performing multiple shows a night. What this record contains in its grooves is only a short snippet of one of those nights. This is Star Time. The headline attraction after a full evening of music, with many other artists preceding. Also important to note: this likely wasn’t the first time the audience had seen James Brown on stage that same evening. An earlier portion of the program was given to the Famous Flames for an all-instrumental set, with Brown playing organ. The anticipation can be felt in Fats Gonder’s introduction and the crowd’s response. This audience was ready for a show.

    The Famous Flames, 1962 lineup:

    After multiple personnel upheavals, the lineup that performed at the Apollo had stabilized: Johnny Terry (original member, who would later leave to join the Drifters), Bobby Byrd (whose second return became permanent), Lloyd Bennett, and Bobby Stallworth.

    At the time this record came out, a live album featuring no new songs or previously unreleased material was an untouched concept in the industry. The recording was produced and overseen by Brown himself.

    Part of what strikes me about this recording is how absolutely in shape the band is. That is not an accident. James Brown was a known perfectionist who demanded a great deal from every musician who backed him. Minor imperfections in clothing, such as an unshined shoe, resulted in fines. A couple of notes off pace or out of tune during a performance resulted in a fine. Brown would signal these infractions by flashing his hands in rhythm with the beat. Four flashes meant twenty dollars docked from their pay. Behavior from a man who wanted the best out of his band, or who was simply unfair and unsympathetic to anything short of perfection in his eyes. Bobby Byrd described the system plainly: Brown didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing ahead of time, so he devised numbers and certain screams and spins as cues. The band as a live compositional tool, entirely subordinate to Brown’s will, requiring him to know every player’s strengths and weaknesses intimately. This endless pursuit of excellence was the product of an upbringing no one would be envious of.

    Introduction by Fats Gonder and Opening Fanfare

    It really doesn’t get better than this in terms of an intro. “Are you ready for Star Time?” immediately establishes what is about to follow. I’m sure that question and that term have long since entered the musical history zeitgeist. What makes this intro even better is the band’s full involvement, and the string of sobriquets Gonder unleashes.

    Fats Gonder really didn’t have to be this effective when he introduced James Brown, but one wonders how much pressure he must have felt. He was not only the emcee for the evening but also an organist in the band. Unclear why the role landed in his lap, but man, it’s a great introduction, and one that Danny Ray, the second hardest working man in showbusiness, aka the Cape Man, aka the number-two to James Brown’s number-one, would go on to emulate in all future shows.

    Gonder’s intro begins:

    “Nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in showbusiness…”

    That title was originally attributed to Little Richard. Sometimes Little Richard would ghost shows, and James Brown would fill in. The title gradually started to precede James Brown’s name instead.

    Then Fats goes into a greatest hits list, and with each track mentioned, the crowd response grows progressively louder, until the final bang with “Night Train.” Between each song title there is a note, and with each note the progression and tension rise. The pot is boiling over.

    I’ll Go Crazy. Try Me. You’ve Got the Power. Think. If You Want Me. I Don’t Mind. Bewildered. Love Someone. Night Train.

    Mr. Dynamite! Mr. Please Please! The Star of the Show! Mr. James Brown and the Famous Flames.

    Important to note here that Gonder does a great job as master of ceremonies by not leaving out the full title of the band. Not neglecting the Famous Flames. They are stalwart musicians backing James Brown, and they deserve the credit, even if they didn’t always get it from the man himself.

    By the time Gonder gets to that ending, the crowd is like a primed engine ready to blow their frigging top. And then the band flies straight into the first song, bass line and drums and guitar and horns just exploding with energy. One of the more memorable introductions to any live show I can recall.

    What I imagine happening with the opening fanfare, and it’s easy to imagine if you’ve seen any footage of Brown’s work on stage, is his stage entrance. Ever the showman, his intros were some of the finest pieces of expert showmanship in the game. Fast dancing his way to the mic, or strutting and then dancing, sliding up to the microphone like he was born to do it. Many argue he most assuredly was born to play shows, and this recording proves it.

    I’ll Go Crazy

    Written by James Brown, this track was one of his first singles, from 1960, originally recorded in November 1959.

    Brown’s entrance gets the crowd to fever pitch all over again. The background vocals from the Flames are great here, and the band is right in touch with Brown, which was sometimes easier said than done. As the band worked with Brown, they had to learn how to follow his movements and commands, punctuating his shouts and hollers with horn bursts and drum hits.

    Here you can feel how good the band is and what a counterpoint that creates to James Brown. James delivers this vocal with confidence and swagger, claiming he will definitely go crazy if this person leaves him. The Flames act as the mediator between James and the object of his affection, imploring him to calm down and her not to leave him.

    Try Me

    Once Brown announces the first words, the crowd screams in recognition and excitement, and Brown settles into this ballad. One of his earliest singles, preceded only by “Please, Please, Please,” it was a number one hit in 1958. You can feel that popularity in the crowd’s response when Brown kicks it off. Short and sweet here on the live record, but very effective due to Brown’s heartstrung vocal.

    Think

    This track was originally written and recorded in 1957 by a group called the 5 Royales, on James Brown’s same record label, King Records. The James Brown version, especially the one here on the live album, is incredibly sped up, to the point of near ridiculousness. Taking a song and accelerating it into something urgent became part of the MO for Brown and the band.

    The live version is an uptempo clapper, with a strumming guitar, an instrumental jump-and-jive energy that really moves at pace. Those claps, and the way James Brown is so frenetic in his delivery, you can almost picture him cutting some seriously professional dance moves while he sings it. The track comes and goes quickly. For a moment you’re in it and then you’re out of it.

    I Don’t Mind

    Originally recorded in September 1960. The studio version feels a tad different from the Live at the Apollo version.

    The live version is amazing, even if it feels slightly off-kilter in some ways. It sounds like the band is negotiating a strange pace with Brown. Listen closely with headphones and the reward is you start to hear the crowd really becoming involved. A woman in the audience screams after Brown’s “I’m gonna miss you.” She says, I sure do, baby.

    The vowel vocalizing from the background singers is my favorite part of this song on the live record. There’s something about the register they’re in that’s transporting in a way that’s so emotionally affecting. This is an off-kilter track, but to me it’s a high point of the recording.

    Lost Someone

    After the final instrumental interlude, we’re now into something completely different from what came before. After the opening run of hits, what’s coming is a stretch of improvisational, pure musical emotion. A live performance hitting its extreme peak and not relenting until the final note.

    Brown starts with another introduction, something like what Fats Gonder did, but this one is James. He’s pleading with the audience to feel what he feels. And when he finally gets into the first line, “I lost someone,” we are fully engaged in this long, drawn-out song full of vocal power.

    The responding muted horns after each line are a welcome, easy punctuation to the vocal prowess Brown displays. He’s really going for it, and each crash and horn response is the cue for the crowd to respond. And respond they do. By now they are screaming in ecstasy.

    The repeated “I’m so weak.” He gives each one the same justice. Douglas Wolk posits that even here, since Brown knew he was being recorded and wanted to avoid distortion from overloading the microphone, he was holding back. It’s really difficult to comprehend that. With “I’m so weak,” he sounds distant from the mic, perhaps offering more to the live audience in the room than to future audiences listening in the living room. But his method here is an amazing piece of solo artistry. It demands to be heard.

    On the 1980 Solid Smoke reissue, this track is split in half between the last song on side one and the first song on side two. An interesting quirk for folks back then. To my ears it’s a tad jarring. Full recordings of the track are out there and worth seeking out to really hear the power and feel the whole arc of the performance. It’s remarkable through and through. A two-minute pop song stretched to eleven minutes. That was just insane for 1962.

    Medley: Please, Please, Please / You’ve Got the Power / I Found Someone / Why Do You Do Me / I Want You So Bad / I Love You Yes I Do / Why Does Everything Happen to Me / Bewildered / Please, Please, Please

    Within this medley we hear a touch of “Please, Please, Please,” the song that put Brown on the map and was his first hit. The crowd’s response when that kicks in is just staggering. They have been waiting for this moment for hours, or for some, probably their entire lives.

    What a curious song “Please, Please, Please” is. For Brown it’s a signature, one of his likenesses. And it’s a one-word chorus. That’s James Brown for you. The man only needed one word to make his effect.

    That effect is felt for about the first thirty seconds of the medley. A brief notice of the full track, but enough to set the proverbial souls of some audience members on fire. They are literally going insane.

    “You’ve Got the Power” is given only a brief snippet, barely the first line, before it moves on. “I Found Someone” gets thirty-nine seconds and functions as a natural answer song to “Lost Someone.” “Why Do You Do Me” is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, only four lines, Brown in a lower register. “I Want You So Bad” gets another four lines of ballad. “I Love You Yes I Do”: Brown sings the first line in crooner mode and the band responds by going into the track. Astonishingly, it’s been noted that this medley was not prearranged. The band had to follow Brown’s cues, whether vocal or gestural, to know when to be ready. I’ll go ahead and say it: that’s insane, and I don’t know how they did it. They deserve recognition as some of the hardest working musicians in showbusiness. There’s also some great organ work in this stretch.

    “Why Does Everything Happen to Me” gets another short snippet, the crowd rolling along with what’s happening. “Bewildered” gets only twenty-five seconds, four lines, but that first Bewildered shoots the crowd off like a rocket. And then the finale of the medley turns back into “Please, Please, Please.” We’re back where we started, and the crowd and the band are back with us. We’ve just traveled through Brown’s late ’50s and early ’60s career in under five minutes.

    Was this where the cape routine happened? The cape routine, where Brown falls to his knees, pleading for mercy or forgiveness or submission, whatever you wish, and one of the band members, later it would be Danny Ray, comes over and drapes a cape over the singer as an offering of respite from the pain and sorrow of the performance. By the time of this recording, the cape routine would have been well known enough that Brown didn’t need to draw it out. The two pieces of “Please, Please, Please” would have been enough to trigger the image in everyone’s minds. On the recording the same effect is there. We must imagine some form of the cape routine likely occurred.

    Night Train

    A jazz standard from 1951, originally recorded by Jimmy Forrest. James Brown first recorded his version in 1961, replacing the original lyrics with a list of cities on his East Coast touring circuit. On this live record, that tradition maintains, and it makes for a deeply moving finale to everything that came before. It gets the folks moving, that’s for sure. And it’s got that train motif, which by tradition is a passed-down metaphor for the life of the musician. The constant movement, the place-to-place lifestyle that so many artists come to love and live with. The long lonely nights. The city-to-city movement. The loneliness. The Night Train coming along.

    James revisits the narrative: I’ve lost someone, but I know where to find them. All aboard?

    The crowd answers, and someone in the audience knows what’s coming, responding with the song title before Brown even announces it. It’s the Night Train.

    He starts southern and moves north: Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh, Washington D.C. Wait, we forgot Richmond, Virginia. Back north: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston. And finally, New Orleans gets the most honorable mention. The home of the blues.

    If you think to today, the modern hip-hop or rap artist mentioning all the towns where they have people, you start to wonder if this litany from James Brown was the first example of that method.

    The music is pretty simple. A recurring guitar riff and a blast of horns driving alongside it. Motivating and relentless to the end. The Night Train carrying him home. New York City, the end. He goes a couple of rounds, like an ouroboros. The tour circle keeps going round and round. The conductor is James Brown. He wants us all to come along with him, and whether we like it or not, we’re going to come along. Captivating.

    Night. The way James Brown closes this show. A fitting ending to an amazing piece of recorded music.

    Closing

    Live at the Apollo marks a specific moment in the life and career of James Brown. It also marks a specific moment in history. Harlem, New York. The Apollo Theater. The Chitlin’ Circuit. The United States, in the midst of an unprecedented paranoia: the Cold War, Soviet aggression, civil rights, nuclear war. Amidst all of it, James Brown and his band are putting out Black energy to a Black audience that probably needed it most. If that’s not a formula for a legendary show and a legendary recording, I don’t know what else you need.

    The legacy this album holds is impeccable. I really enjoy hearing about how DJs would play the entire first side uninterrupted, giving it the honor and space to breathe and letting the effect land. It’s one of the most memorable live records ever made. It was James Brown’s idea, and it became a massive commercial success. After this record’s release, it went to number two on the Billboard 200 pop album chart. The R&B albums chart didn’t yet exist. The success of this record led Billboard to create the R&B Albums chart in 1965.

    The record made James Brown a megastar. We must all bear witness to this creation. Hear it and visualize it for yourself. Hop on the Night Train. Go visit the Augusta History Museum and read up on the star. Be educated. James implores us all, children.

  • Ennio Morricone — A Fistful Of Dollars

    Ennio Morricone — A Fistful Of Dollars

    Film Score | Film Released 12 September 1964 (Italy) | Soundtrack Originally Released in 1966 in Italy

    Sergio Leone. Ennio Morricone. Two masters of their form who converged to create great films and great soundtracks. I remember watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when I was young, probably middle school or high school, and feeling more moved by the soundtrack than the film itself. I immediately had to see and hear more. Soon after, I realized that film occurs at the end of a trilogy, with the beginning being A Fistful of Dollars. Released in 1964 in Italy, this movie revolutionized the film industry, the western genre in America, and most importantly, the film soundtrack and score.

    “I tried to vary as much as I could to break the rules of the craft and avoid boredom.” — Morricone

    Hollywood dominated the western scene in the 60s. Italian westerns had been made before, but until Sergio Leone made A Fistful of Dollars, there had not been a western like it. It was rugged, expertly shot with cutting-edge techniques, and had a main character unrivaled up to that point in Clint Eastwood. The film is generally a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but with a gunslinger instead of a samurai. The plot is simple: a lone gunman enters a town, gets on the bad side of two rival gangs, plays the gangs against each other, saves a family, and leaves town with the loot.

    What was different about this western was mainly the main character’s rugged coolness, and the fact that he is pretty much as bad as the villains. The classic, quintessential antihero. Clint Eastwood’s portrayal of the “Man with No Name” in these three films shot him to the top of international celebrity and stardom. There’s reason to believe, then, that on this soundtrack release, it’s his name that’s on top. Not Ennio Morricone’s. Also different about the film is the violence. Leone made the film in Italy, allowing him to play by his own rules and do whatever he wanted. The Hollywood rules were out the window, and now we have a protagonist as equally reckless and greedy as the villains.

    What we see with this movie is a soundtrack that dramatizes the action and the hero to the fullest extent. I fully believe that if these films were not scored by Morricone, we don’t see the popularity of the trilogy, and we don’t see the celebrity of Eastwood rise. Every cool moment from the main character in the film is punctuated by, or comes along with, a piece of the soundtrack.

    Morricone had, up until that point, made movie scores, even westerns, that followed the rulebook. They weren’t experimental, but they were still seen as good, well-written music. At the time, Morricone had started experimenting with different sounds as a composer, including different approaches to the human voice, and musique concrète, like using a typewriter as a rhythm instrument. What appears on this soundtrack didn’t sound like anything before it. There was a Fender guitar, unheard of in westerns that had been pleasant, orchestral pieces. The guitar was synonymous with rock and blues, and must have sounded absurd compared to what folks were used to. It must have sounded violent. To modern ears, the guitar Morricone uses is fantastic, played with an expert ear. It’s western through and through. Violent and folk.

    There is also the motif of the whistle, which, how can you beat that as a western motif? It’s always struck me as making sense in these films, and it’s hard to realize how radical it must have sounded to an American audience in the early 60s, used to the Hollywood pomp and graciousness. Along with the whistling, the voices you hear are sometimes a shout, or a chant. Set to mimic the film’s environment, this soundtrack was Morricone making the music that would fit the film best. And the film is violent, so the music has a violent edge too.

    Sergio Leone said that Morricone was his best screenwriter. The meaning here is the relationship between the two around what’s going to appear on the screen. The order of events usually goes: screenwriting, filming, soundtrack composition. With Leone and Morricone it was different, and revolutionary. The writing of the screenplay usually happened alongside the writing of the soundtrack and score. Morricone helped Leone realize what images he had in his head. There were even times when Leone would play the music during the shoot. A true melding of image and sound.

    Fistful of Dollars was Ennio and Sergio’s first time working together, but oddly enough, in a great piece of kismet or serendipity, when they first met they slowly realized they were schoolmates long ago. Ennio had proof: a picture of the two together during elementary school. The two had similar backgrounds, as became known between them. Morricone’s father was a trumpeter, and Leone’s father was also involved in show business. They both converged at a point in their lives where things were growing stale; they needed more out of their creative fields. Morricone’s path to their meeting was pretty straightforward. Leone had a different path but ended up finding his way as a director.

    Morricone had a background in composition, but by way of being a trumpeter first. He grew up learning the trumpet from his father, but entered the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome in order to learn the trumpet as well as harmony and composition. This was his training course in music composition. He did well and was starting to get noticed. Life went on. He married and had a son. He kept composing, but started working for radio, television, and theater, and eventually started working on films. This was generally the path that brought Morricone to work with Leone.

    The Object

    My copy is an original release of the soundtrack from 1967. It is an RCA Victor release, in stereo. It’s in great shape and came from Discogs at a generally solid price, no less. You can’t go wrong picking up cheap used movie soundtracks on vinyl. They are, still to me, some of the most enjoyable music on the format. Depending on movie and composer, of course.

    My copy is true 60s movie soundtrack vinyl. Marketed using the name of the film and the name of the lead, what we don’t see prominent on the cover is Ennio Morricone’s name. We also don’t see Sergio Leone’s name up there either. We see Clint Eastwood, in name and image, prominent as all get out. He’s there, centered in the stylized frame, his name in bold letters atop the bold stylized letters of the film’s title. I really like this artwork, even if it doesn’t give the composer center stage. For the 60s releases of Ennio Morricone soundtracks, this one may have the best artwork. The front has a mash-up of characters and scenes from the film in a dashing burnt orange. Eastwood’s visage and character pop on top of all of it, showing the potential buyer the true character of the music within. The music was meant to offer style and substance to the main character’s actions, so if that was the main goal of the artwork, they accomplished it.

    The rear of the cover does more to describe the film itself than the music on the vinyl disc. There are small black-and-white vignettes showing all the characters of the film, with brief captions of their intentions and goals in the plot.

    The Music

    Essentially, what both wanted from the score was a turn away from the over-orchestrated folk melodies that were occurring in the Hollywood westerns of the 60s. They wanted the audience to experience a western as if they were in the environment, dealing with the dust, the wind, the clash of gunmetal, and the walk of boots in the gravel. The score imitates naturalist feelings on occasion, and gives you the experience of being on the frontier. Every sound has a purpose, and the motivation was for music and sound to interact essentially with the picture.

    Budget constraints had an effect on the score. There is no full woodwind or brass section, only flutes, cor anglais, and trumpet. Trombones only appear here and there. Morricone had to recycle from earlier work, and it can be questioned just how much effort he put into this project, not expecting it to have the impact that it did. There was also no way to pre-record music for the set, something they would later try to make happen. That did not become fully realized until The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

    The music for this film defied any convention up to that point. It must have felt at the time so distinctive and unlike the norm that it was completely immersive. The music feels contemporary to the era and the landscape of the film, with the exception of the sweet Fender guitar. The music intensifies the drama of the film.

    For the film’s music, Morricone won the Nastro d’Argento for Best Score, and there was a popular single featuring the film’s music. Morricone was a success from then on, and a celebrity figure in Italy. Even with the success, the director and composer were not happy with their work. Morricone later said the score was his worst. The two would go on to work together after this film, and they truly achieved the greatness they had ambitions for with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

    Titoli

    Another piece that was arranged before Leone’s involvement and their working together: this was an arrangement of Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” which Morricone had produced in 1962 for the RCA Victor label and for the television show Piccolo Concerto. The Morricone-Tevis version departed substantially from Guthrie’s original. It featured a thin texture moving through minor-key triadic harmonies, modal melodies, and an unlikely ensemble of nylon-string guitar, men’s chorus, recorder, strings, and percussion comprising drums, whip, bell, and anvil. American expatriate Peter Tevis sang the vocal line. Morricone later described this arrangement as his attempt to evoke the solitude and aural environment of the American West. Scholars have argued this was effectively the musical progenitor of Morricone’s entire western vernacular.

    Ennio Morricone & Peter Tevis – Pastures of Plenty

    Leone heard this arrangement and was interested in the music, but did not enjoy the vocal from Tevis. It was western-ballad style, not what Leone wanted. Morricone had kept a master recording without the vocal, and Leone requested this version. Alessandro Alessandroni added a whistled melody to the track, and an electric guitar was added on top. The texture and instrumentation were pretty much the same. Title music born.

    “My thought was to put listeners in touch with the faraway pastures described by Guthrie; this is why I inserted the timbres of the whip and the [clay] whistle. The bells were intended to suggest the countryman who longs for the life in the city, away from his daily routine.”

    The whistle is a definite highlight of this entire score, along with the churning voices and strings. Above it all, we have a guitar sharing the melody. The picking style is utility, only notes, but it captures the essence so well. Throughout the soundtrack, and most explicitly shown here, is the use of the human voice and vocal method as an instrument, hence the use of the whistle. Morricone wanted music that evoked an escape to the prairie or desert, and solitude. The whistle is one person making one sound with their mouth. It can be done anywhere, and is deeply connected with western or remote locations. A lone cowboy working his land, whistling a tune to make the day go by faster. It’s an expression of being alone in a desolate place. Perfectly matching the main character’s vibe.

    The use of sound effects is also used to extreme pleasure for the viewing audience. The piccolo or flute flourish, which sounds like a bird call to me, is used throughout the film as a sort of punctuation when Clint Eastwood does something really cool and badass, or is about to. The whip is also used here. You see, Morricone had been exposed to the works of John Cage, who introduced into composition the idea that all sound is music. This concept and its execution seeped into Morricone’s inspiration for this score.

    Almost Dead

    A piano chugging a dirgeful melody. A harmonica. Then a surge. This track really notes the tension at the introduction, and then opens up into a reuse of the motif of the original title, with strings and a slower tempo. It takes the original title and makes it more emotional, effectively bringing the hurried tension into something more sympathetic and moody.

    Square Dance

    A full composition that evokes the time period well. Sounds like a Civil War jaunt through a town. The title pretty much tells you the feeling of this song.

    The Chase

    The most chugging, intense song from the score. High tempo and boisterous, with horns used to their biggest emotional effect here. Trumpets and violins screeching. A fanfare, basically. Then the track opens with the choir singing a progressive melody, and you’re out in the open, moving along with the action. Then the single horn and a slow motif that will appear in full force later on the album: the deguello motif. Very emotionally affecting.

    The Result

    Another very rousing track. Uses violins, a snare drum, and a piano as a band, pretty much. Then the flute motif returns, but more to confuse and disorient the viewer with sound along with the action. Not a flowery melody here. A disorienting mood to make the viewer follow the action and await what comes next.

    Without Pity

    A two-minute piece. The introduction is right out of Bernard Herrmann’s style. Just strings, a horror scene. What follows is a rousing, action-packed trumpet fanfare similar to what happens in “The Chase,” but cut shorter for the next track to begin.

    A Fistful of Dollars

    For “A Fistful of Dollars,” there was a mixture of inspirations between the two. Leone wanted something similar to what was being heard in the American westerns of the time, such as Rio Bravo. A piece by Dimitri Tiomkin, “Deguello,” appears in Rio Bravo, and Leone wanted Morricone to write something similar. Deguello is the slit throat or cut throat song. It’s a dance of death song. The Mexicans played it for the boys that were holed up in the Alamo before the big fight. Nothing more dramatic than that, I would say, and a great piece of historical inspiration for what would become one of the key pieces for the first film of the Dollars Trilogy.

    Rio Bravo –   Deguello

    Morricone instructed the trumpeter Michele Lacerenza to play the theme with a little Mexican flavor. The flourishes are extremely evocative. It’s a truly effective theme that became a lasting touchstone for Italian-western composition. When the trumpet hits its high point in the solo, man, that is some transforming music. It’s as good as anything you’ll hear in a film.

    Side Two

    A Fistful of Dollars Suite

    The entire second side of this release is essentially the entire soundtrack from the first side. It covers all the notes of the first compositions, but allows them all to meld together into a mélange of composition.

    Closing

    The Dollars Trilogy contains some of my favorite western films. The cause of these films’ fame is owed to Morricone’s work on the soundtrack. What we see with A Fistful of Dollars is a composer trying something new, and turning away from convention. What follows in the second film is more of the same, a development on the first film. The third film in the trilogy features a soundtrack that most argue to be the best of all time. What Morricone went on to do with Leone, their works together, are stationary pieces, artistic masterworks in the medium of film and film score. Morricone understood his assignment. These films are good because they have good scores. The score stands alone. Always a mark of a good score, in my opinion. Morricone’s scores also pretty much invented the popular film soundtrack, and drew folks to record stores to buy soundtracks pressed onto the vinyl medium. That just about makes anything Ennio Morricone did essential vinyl listening in my book.

    Thanks for reading. RTR.

  • Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady

    Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady

    Studio Album | Released July 1963 | Impulse! | Produced by Bob Thiele

    Charles Mingus defied conception. His personality, his words, his volatility all condensed into a maelstrom of creative energy and flow. His work is distinguished by composition. The man was a sponge for all forms of music, and he used his compositional abilities, the written format in musical terms, to create some amazingly unique pieces and records. The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady stands at the mountaintop as one of the greatest achievements in jazz composition and orchestration, but Mingus would not want his work given any labels. He made music the way he imagined it, and his MO seemed to be to defy all convention. This is not the everyday jazz album. This is a work of uniqueness and something to feel.

    This isn’t a record to put on at quarter volume in the background while you fold laundry. It’s a record to turn up, absorb, let envelop your senses. It has hallucinatory qualities. It’s intricate and complex, but also simple and powerful. It’s chaotic, but it finds a way through the chaos. It generally makes sense, but also doesn’t.

    I got acquainted with Mingus while looking for music to accompany my mind during intensive, long-form intelligence analyst work at Fort Meade, Maryland during a short three-month stint. It was a very busy time for me. I was deconstructing layers of information for twelve to fourteen hours a day. It was a heady period personally as well. I was in a stasis of confusion about my professional future, in the forest essentially, looking over my shoulder and trying to find my way. I was staring down a rough road. Within that time there was a lot of revelation about what the term success meant. What draws people to want to be the best at what they do. What draws people to want to be renowned, or recognized.

    As I learned more about Mingus and his life, I began to connect those feelings to my understanding of how he may have felt about his own place in the world and in the music business. It seems like he self-pariahd, or he just always felt like the underdog. He made work that people had a hard time understanding or accepting. It was just too brilliant for the status quo.

    In all honesty, I see jazz brilliance as a passive observer. I’m in the audience watching a performance, marveling at the technicality, but without a firm grasp on theory or the decision-making behind composition. With that said, I do believe that determining whether a jazz record or any piece of music is brilliant comes down to whether the listener derives something from the listening session. The art itself is true. It may contain a meaning somewhere in it, but pure art, as cliché as it sounds, is just art. It doesn’t have to be anything else. If you like it, if it moves you, that’s enough.

    Mingus once stated, “What do I care what the world sees, I’m only trying to find out how I should feel about myself.” The argument stands. For some that applies to Mingus. For others, it may not. Some music can only be felt, and attaching words to it, as I’m doing with this post, is either ill-advised, too challenging, or just plain meaningless.

    What this record is, as I’ve come to understand it, is a direct contradiction to anything normal at the time. I think it was so unique, so different from conventional jazz, even within Mingus’s own catalogue, that it went too far over some people’s heads. But it wasn’t avant-garde for the sake of it. It wasn’t complex on purpose. If you sit down without any jazz acumen, you will derive some feeling or emotion from it. That’s what all the great records in any genre can do. The ones that still get talked about, that still matter. This is one of those records. It was a milestone in 1963.

    The record deals with texture from the very first notes. It’s a sound collage, a stack of cards. The sonic scale is massive. The onslaught of some of the pieces is unmatched, yet even at peak volume, every instrument sounds crisp and purposeful. Approach it from any angle and your attention will be rewarded. You’ll be immersed in the world of Mingus. Placing it in a genre is futile. Mingus disliked labels, and the critics who used them.

    Mingus Psychology

    The central psychological framework for understanding Mingus comes from the opening of Beneath the Underdog, where he describes himself as three simultaneous people:

    “One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching…. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there’s an over-loving gentle person who… gets talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what’s been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can’t — he goes back inside himself.”

    “Which one is real?”

    “They’re all real.”

    Mingus One is passive and observant. Mingus Two is afraid. Mingus Three is the angry man. He could be the most loving person in the world to someone he cared about and at the next turn erupt like a volcano of rage and emotion. These traits were what made Mingus who he was as a person and as an artist. He had tendencies across every part of the spectrum, and so did his music.

    Scholars have read this not as pathology but as a sophisticated self-portrait, Mingus maintaining multiple real selves rather than collapsing into a unified public persona. The “middleman” who watches is the narrator; the others are competing expressions of the same consciousness. Al Young, a friend, found even more than three Minguses: “Don Juan Mingus…, Mingus as lightweight Iceberg Slim…, Mingus the son, Mingus the husband, Mingus the father, Mingus the comic sufferer on the psychiatrist’s couch.”

    His music, and especially The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, is psychologically dense because it emerges directly from that psyche. In his view, the only person truly qualified to annotate the record was his psychologist, Dr. Edmund Pollock, who wrote the liner notes.

    Dr. Pollock’s Analysis

    One of the most unusual features of the album is that Mingus invited his analyst, Dr. Edmund Pollock (fictionalized as “Dr. Wallach” in Beneath the Underdog), to write an interpretive essay for the liner notes.

    Pollock’s reading of the album centers on a few key observations: that Mingus “seems to state that the black man is not alone but all mankind must unite in revolution against any society that restricts freedom and human rights,” and that Mingus “feels intensely… He cannot accept that he is alone, all by himself, he wants to love and be loved.” Most strikingly, Pollock concluded that “Mr. Mingus is inarticulate in words, he is gifted in musical expression which he constantly uses to articulate what he perceives, knows, feels… It must be emphasized that Mr. Mingus is not yet complete. He is still in a process of change and personal development. Hopefully the integration in society will keep pace with his.”

    Barry Ulanov corroborated this view: Mingus was “alternately eloquent and tongue-tied with words,” but held the conviction that someday he could make his ideas perfectly clear on his own instrument or someone else’s.

    Mingus voluntarily committed himself to Bellevue in the late 1950s, driven by desperate insomnia and disorientation. “I couldn’t think who I was, I wanted to lay down and sleep. I was like a child lost with people milling all around me and no one to love me.” He chose Bellevue over his private analyst partly because they were estranged, and partly to avoid appearing to seek sympathy.

    His experience there became a crystallizing image of institutional oppression in his memoir. The doctor told him within minutes: “Negroes are paranoiac, unrealistic people who believe the whole world is against them,” and immediately proposed a lobotomy. Mingus wrote to Nat Hentoff from inside: “There’s a Nazi-thinking Jew called Dr. Bonk or something down here saying all Negroes are paranoid and he knows just the treatment for them, which is frontal lobotomy.”

    He filed a formal complaint he titled “HELLVIEW OF BELLEVUE,” listing grievances including: “Dr. Bonk keeps saying I’m a failure. I did not come here to discuss my career or I would have brought a press agent.”

    His reflection on leaving says everything: “You know, I believe Bellevue did me some good. How could anybody outside bug me when I remember those closed-in helpless people? Everywhere I go I’ll take those bars with me in my mind… Those bars stand for power over others, the power to make you hold still and take it. Is that why I feel so much better out here where the real insanity is?”

    The Object

    My copy is a European import, looks to be from 2020 according to Discogs. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy that includes the original artwork or the original liner notes. Even with those qualities absent, the presentation of this record on vinyl feels authentic and important. The artwork is Mingus, though older. The track listings are displayed boldly alongside his name. It’s simplicity. It’s built on the lore of the record itself.

    The lore of any record will always be connected to its album artwork, and in this instance the artwork is pure: the name of the album, the name of the composer, and an uncanny image of the master behind the composition. Mingus is not giving the camera any recognition. In the original pressing he is working on lighting a pipe. In this recreation he appears older and is playing his instrument. It’s a captivating image, and that was always a draw for me. It gives the sense that the music contains secrets and stories, and the lore is right there on display. That quality has always been part of my attraction to jazz.

    The Music

    “This is the first time the company I have recorded with set out to help me give you, my audience, a clear picture of my musical ideas without that rush feeling. Impulse went to great expense and patience to give me complete freedom, along with engineer Bob Simpson, for balance and editing.”

    Pianist Mal Waldron described working with Mingus: “If you play in his band, you play his way. Mingus is the personality. But at the same time, playing with him brings you out and forces you to play yourself.”

    Mingus on the record itself:

    “Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is true music with much and many of my meanings. It is my living epitaph from birth til the day I first heard of Bird and Diz. Now it is me again. This music is only one little wave of styles and waves of little ideas my mind has encompassed through living in a society that calls itself sane… Crazy? They’d never get out of the observation ward at Bellevue. I did. So, listen how. Play this record.”

    In some way, The Black Saint is a response to everything in Mingus’s career up to that point. He had struggled with depression and anger, had issues with the music business, and had dealt with endless disrespect rooted in racism and in who he simply was as a person. The album is a fulcrum in his career. He was around forty years old, at his creative and emotional peak. It’s a rejection of the commercialism of jazz at the time, a rejection of the posturing around it, and an exhibition of who he truly was creatively and emotionally.

    Across multiple sources the same idea surfaces repeatedly: words failed Mingus in ways music did not.

    His own statement: “My music is evidence of my soul’s will to live beyond my sperm’s grave, my metathesis or eternal soul’s new encasement.” And most directly: “I play and write me, the way I feel. And I’m changing all the time. As long as I can remember, I’ve never been satisfied with the ways in which people and things seem to be. I’ve got to go inside, especially as far inside myself as I can.”

    And to Hentoff: “We create our own slavery, but I’m going to get through and find out the kind of man I am, or die.”

    The music on this record lends itself to nighttime listening, or closed-eyes, full-immersion listening. There is a lot going on. I think I could listen to this record my entire life and each play would be a rediscovery, a revisiting of a feeling, and I would always hear something new. It’s philosophically and psychologically dense, but oddly accessible enough that it rewards a patient listener. It’s reached a lot of people that way, in the same way intricate art reaches people, art that makes someone feel something real.

    The performances were recorded in a single session on January 20th, 1963, but months of work followed to complete the required overdubs.

    Mingus was deeply influenced by Duke Ellington and his orchestral arrangements. What Mingus did with that inspiration was create a space and a musical context of psychodrama, entering deeply personal realms. That’s what makes this music so fully realized and gives it an immense sense of truth. You feel what you hear. If these trumpets and trombones are speaking, they are in some places wailing in agony, and in others singing a hymn of rejoice and a lust for freedom.

    Track A: Solo Dancer (Stop! And Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney!)

    The subtle tiss tiss drum beat and the contrabass trombone intro. Saxophones enter on top of one another. A tenor saxophone takes a solo over a swingier drum beat, and beneath all of it is Mingus on double bass, leading from within.

    The introduction is explosive and commanding, eleven pieces working as one, stacked on top of each other. The bass works on its own terms, not as a function of the rhythm section but as a leader in its own right. The bass was Mingus’s master instrument, and it was how he understood music. It was how he knew to layer instruments and compose the way he did.

    The saxes, horns, and trombone, when focused on closely, are distinguished enough to constitute a song in themselves.

    I see a cast of characters. The dancer and a surrounding ensemble. Everyone seems to be clapping, urging the dance to continue.

    Track B: Duet Solo Dancers (Heart’s Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces)

    Opens with a piano flourish, then bass and horns and drums settle in for a waltzy, languishing song. The piano is fantastic. Moody, melodic, and lush. The horns answer with a simple up-and-down motion and then a big crescendo, a walk down the stairs, and the trombones enter.

    This movement is more subdued. The horns are doing remarkable work mimicking the human voice. The muted trumpets make leering, harsh cries.

    This track shows the full intensity of Mingus. Drums like gunshots. The horn crying a slow death.

    Track C: Group Dancers (Soul Fusion: Freewoman and Oh This Freedom’s Slave Cries)

    Another track that begins with piano, though this time it feels more technical, more hurried, on a pace rather than an emotional flourish. Piano tinkles and an interplay of in/out, black/white, good/bad. The piano on this track is my favorite thing on the album so far.

    Fantasy elements are being added to the narrative. New territory. Guitar and flutes enter.

    I hear the ills of society in the horns. There is no release.

    Side 2

    Side 2 is a medley, a group of three tracks. Motifs return from the previous three, but things begin to blend together. The menage.

    Track D: Trio and Group Dancers (Stop! Look! And Sing Songs of Revolutions)

    Seems like a continuation from before, then a Latin-inflected or Spanish guitar enters. Amazing guitar. Bullfighters, or just the bull.

    The pace is picking up. There is a wild energy flowing through everything.

    Have the characters from Track A returned?

    Track E: Single Solos and Group Dance (Saint and Sinner Join in Merriment on Battlefront)

    Things are becoming looser. On the second side, ideas are stated with more purpose versus the loose interpretation of Side 1. This music is in capital letters. It’s yelling.

    That tempo progression toward the end is very moving. Very strong.

    Track F: Group and Solo Dance (Of Love, Pain, and Passioned Revolt, Then Farewell My Beloved, ‘Til It’s Freedom Day)

    It’s getting wild and the heat is being turned up.

    Mingus’s masterwork coming to its conclusion with the full ensemble. This cacophony caps off a killer record. Must have driven people wild in 1963.

    Closing

    This record is one of the better examples of a jazz artist creating a truly unique composition. It can be approached from different angles. Close your eyes and focus and you’ll hear new things at every listen. You can imagine characters, voices, scenes from an imaginary film. It’s hallucinatory music, and I think Mingus designed it to be. This is probably the best single window into Charles Mingus among his entire catalogue, and he self-declared it the record he was most proud of, alongside one other he never named.

    I’m glad to have discovered this album at the time I did, and using it as a window into Mingus’s mentality is both rewarding and gives me perspective at another key point in my own working life. For that I’ll always hold Mingus in high regard and deep respect.

    RTR.

  • Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

    Bob Dylan – Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

    Studio Album | Released May 27, 1963

    Recorded July 9, 1962 – April 24, 1963 at Columbia Studio A, New York City | Label: Columbia | Producers: John Hammond & Tom Wilson

    My copy: 2025 Mono Reissue | Purchased in March 2026 | Discogs

    “Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can’t sing, I call a poem. Anything I can’t sing or anything that’s too long to be a poem, I call a novel. But my novels don’t have the usual story-lines. They’re about my feelings at a certain place at a certain time.”

    Bob Dylan. Lots of words written about the man. Should I add to this litany of myth and speculation? He currently lives inside of an ironic public persona, a continuation of what he’s always done. His internal argument, I suspect is that we as a society just don’t know what’s going on. He’s doing AI things now, apparently. I’m not entirely sure. What I find massively appealing is his anti-social, anti-establishment persona, cultivated carefully over decades. I think it’s a product of his uniqueness and his genuine struggle with accepting fame. He writes for himself and for his own myth. The constant “what does your song mean” onslaught must have gotten to him early on, and the rest is a long, deliberate, magnificent evasion.

    It started with Freewheelin’, his second album and the first record made up almost entirely of original tracks. This album is still a monument. The obelisk in the folk swamp. It reached a lot of people. The songs inspired people, gave them hope in a genuinely strange and frightening time. 1963. Things were getting real weird in America. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy shot. The Civil Rights Movement in full boil. Nuclear destruction a real and present possibility, and a fervent anti-communist government dragging the country toward a ground war in Vietnam.

    In 1962 Bob released his first album, simply titled Bob Dylan. It was a piecemealed collection of mostly folk standards previously recorded by other artists, with only two original songs: “Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York.” The second record was a massive jump in terms of songwriting ability, recording acumen, and vocal performance. A genuine career maker. You can sense with this album the good feelings Bob had writing and recording his own material. He was only 22 while making it.

    When the first record came out, it was largely a byproduct of the late 1950s and early 1960s New York City folk scene. On a small scale, a group of thrift shop clothes-wearing hipsters sitting around drinking coffee, listening to music of the vagabond. The guitar case and a few dollars in your pocket. Everyone dropping in to the club to see what new acts are trying to break out into show business. A real scene, and a conscious rejection of the corporate nature of rock and roll at the time. Rock radio, music industry moguls trying desperately to manufacture hits and cash in. It was a rejection of political trends as well. Youth moving toward new directions, thinking big ideas, and imagining the changes required to achieve them.

    Bob Dylan fell into this scene, but in his own way and with his own set of inspirations. His efforts to meet Woody Guthrie, the folk icon, were what brought him to New York City in the first place. His natural tendencies toward rock, blues, and Guthrie’s styles shaped his early sound. The first record was a transmuting of that blend, his songwriting and vocal delivery something between blues tradition and Woody Guthrie. You see this clearly on the debut, and the transformation into the second record was quick, because Bob had always understood the first album as something that just needed to get done so he could get on with what he actually wanted to say.

    Between the two records, behind the scenes, there was an uproar among the money men over the poor sales of the debut. John Hammond, Dylan’s benefactor and producer, possibly with some help from Johnny Cash, secured the contract for Bob to make another record. This next one would be a huge leap forward creatively. A money maker for the ones who cared about that, and possibly for Bob too, who was living place to place and shacking up with his girlfriend. This record would change the face of folk music and the rock music that followed in its wake.

    The Album Cover

    Bob and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, walking in Greenwich Village. Such innocence. Such youth. Honestly, for Bob, this is probably his best cover. A perfect representation of the vibe, the scene, and his life at that moment. That embrace against the cold is everything you need to know about the relationship. You can see the warmth, the appreciation. I also particularly enjoy the old VW bus in the background. Very cool, very of the time. Living in California, I find it quietly amusing that one of those was parked in New York City. But that’s just me.

    Suze was an important piece of the cover and of Dylan’s life. She was deep into the whole equality-freedom thing long before Bob got seriously involved in it. She was possibly the editor, or the litmus test for the content of these songs. Bob said he checked out the songs with her. She had strong left-wing political views and shared them openly with Bob, helping drive his interest in the disenfranchised. Her departure to Italy spurred a period of intensive songwriting, Bob relegated to a pad, a typewriter, a guitar, and a pack of smokes. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalled that he was writing at a feverish pace, missing Suze immensely, working on four songs at a time and flipping pages between a spiral notebook, getting one line down at a time.

    The songs were coming quickly. Often it only took a few moments to get a song finished and qualified as poetry. The melodies came from his spongy brain, his ability to pick up on nuance from the vast pool of musical influences around him. He would adopt an old folk tune and suddenly have his song complete. The recording sessions at Columbia’s New York studio started in April 1962 and got seriously productive in July, where the most distinctive material began getting laid down.

    The Object

    I used to own this record, but it was in very rough shape. Unable to be played. Resurrected here with this reissue, I’m finally happy to have a copy that does the music justice. This is where Bob broke out as a songwriter and artist. The songs are ripe with political commentary and imagery. The scene is Greenwich Village, the girlfriend on the cover, young Bob taking on the world and his own artistry.

    My copy is a 2025 RSD reissue, Mono, an MPO pressing. The album cover and rear cover are original, maintains the original liner notes, and retains the pre-controversial tracks. A very important note: it holds the original track listing from before certain songs were eliminated, which I’ll get into below.

    Call RSD what you will. I often regard it as a cash grab for most of those involved, but if it keeps local record stores alive I’m fine with it. There are a few RSD releases worth tracking down, and this is one of them. For collectors, this pressing offers a real alternative to hunting for an original Freewheelin’ with the pre-removal tracks, copies of which have become extremely rare and expensive.

    I bought it on Discogs in March 2026, still filling out the collection with greats from pre-1965.

    This copy sounds really good. Some of these tracks I’ve never heard this clean. The beauty of vinyl. Bob’s voice is front and center where it needs to be, right in the middle of the channel. Super flat and quiet. Perfect.

    I like this track listing. Not sure I’ll ever need the official, most recognized release with the standard tracks, though at some point it might make sense to have both. The familiar songs sound great here, but the new favorite for me is “Down the Highway.”

    It’s a happy time, owning this record. We all should own it. Bask in the greatness of early 1960s Bob and the world gets a little better.

    The Music

    Blowin’ in the Wind

    Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963)

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    “The idea came to me that you were betrayed by your silence, that all of us in America who didn’t speak out were betrayed by our silence, betrayed by the silence of the people in power. They refuse to look at what’s happening.”

    Unofficial anthem of the 1960s? This song was already a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary before this record even came out. Apparently written in ten minutes while sitting in a café. The theme of world peace. The question song. The tonal metronome of what was happening in the world at that moment.

    Dylan may have understood the immensity this song carried, or worried about it. More likely he put the thing out there and watched it begin to live a life of its own. It was his first real attempt at moving from reporting specific events to examining the general, and the vagueness was the whole strategy. Scholars have noted that the reason this song works is precisely because it doesn’t connect to any specific territory. There is no specific event, no villain, no proper name. The argument is exterritorial, and by being untethered it could attach itself to any freedom struggle anywhere.

    The life this song has lived is beyond anything Bob could have imagined when he wrote it. It’s anthemic at this point, embedded in the zeitgeist. We make each other feel something when we talk about what this song is about. Whether it’s stirring or inspiring or bittersweet, by 2026 the things this song helped set in motion have lived through generations, seen their ups and downs. When it really comes down to it, we’re still pondering the same questions Bob was asking when he wrote it.

    I love a song that asks questions, and this one along with “A Hard Rain” asks many, repeatedly. Maybe that’s the real subject. A song that made people question themselves, the institutions that govern them, and their place within those institutions. There’s a comment in No Direction Home noting that this song feels simultaneously brand new and two hundred years old. “Blowin’ in the Wind” became a cliché, and what a profitable one.

    A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

    A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    Dave Van Ronk recognized this song as a pivot point, the beginning of a new artistic revolution. The proof that poetry could be fully infused into folk music at this scale. That hadn’t been done before.

    Born out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A period of intense paranoia, genuine talk of mutually assured destruction, nuclear catastrophe on a real timetable. A song like this could only come from that moment, from a mind ripe with dread about the end of the world and eager enough to put one of his best songs ever to paper. More poem than song, a string of imagery inspired by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, one of Suze and Bob’s favorite writers.

    Epic. Seriously. Personally, this song has taken on different connotations for me over the years. After watching the Ken Burns Vietnam documentary and visiting the wall memorial in DC, hearing those first lines is enough to make the tears well up. For me this song is a collage that lives somewhere in the quiet grey between optimism and pessimism. A request. It wants to know something.

    Probably the best thing I’ve read about it is where Bob makes clear that every line in this song could be a song in itself. Every line starts and ends its own image.

    “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son” shifts to “What did you see”, then “What did you hear”, then “Who did you meet.” That’s the only narrative shift. The blue-eyed son: the wide-eyed youth, the wayward soul, the witness to the prosecution. The fundamental newness of childhood bearing witness to the evidence of the horrors and the beauties of life. Or just, you know, the good old-fashioned end of the world.

    It’s the sincerity, the soft-spoken cry for action in Bob’s voice on the question pieces that gets me. The subtle question is the more urgent one.

    Down the Highway

    Spooky blues, right up my alley. Or highway, as it were. It’s bare and basic, working within the twelve-bar scheme, but those single guitar strums that linger throughout are just maddening. Scary and menacing. Hear that at a crossroads at night and you’ll be looking over both shoulders, seeing things in the cornfields.

    The song is about Bob living in the void of Suze Rotolo’s absence. She’s gone to the far-off land of Italy, leaving the narrator poor and lonely, stripped down, nervous, and afraid. Left to gamble and booze it away. Bob had also been getting real thin and loose around this period of songwriting. Losing weight, appearing gaunt. The relationship with Suze had taken its toll, and this song sits in the middle of that toll.

    Bob Dylan’s Blues

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    A moment of respite in the sequencing. Recorded during the same session as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” it makes for a little breather between the heaviness of what comes before it and the second side. During the actual recording session it probably served the same purpose.

    “Bob Dylan’s Blues” was originally the working title for Freewheelin’ before the final title came along.

    The Lone Ranger and Tonto: the first characters in Bob Dylan’s menagerie, the kind that would multiply and populate his later albums. Welcome to the carnival.

    Let Me Die in My Footsteps

    One of the four tracks replaced after the John Birch situation.

    Side 2

    Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

    Recorded November 14, 1962

    A breakup song, directed at and inspired by the deterioration of Bob and Suze’s relationship. Bob shoots accusations across the table: “You just kind of wasted my precious time.” He’s the one traveling on. In reality, though, it was Suze who left Bob, not the other way around.

    A song with a lot of charisma for me. Bewitching. Just Bob and his guitar, a real knack for dynamic picking, and a voice he’d been sharpening during his New York years. One of those songs that sounds effortless and reveals itself as anything but over time.

    Rambling, Gambling Willie

    One of the four tracks replaced after the John Birch situation.

    Oxford Town

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    Another song written for and published in Broadside magazine, in response to a call for songs about topical events. Bob is making direct reference to one of the key moments in the Civil Rights Movement. James Meredith, a Black man who won a federal court ruling allowing him to register at the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss.

    The governor of Mississippi took extreme conflict with the situation. The whole episode is insane to read about even now, though we have to remind ourselves how far we’ve come. Meredith registered amid a mob of rioters, the National Guard, and an armed conflict that resulted in two deaths and roughly three hundred wounded.

    The final line remains relevant today: “Somebody better investigate soon.” A sarcastic tone. Somebody ought to do something about this. Well, we’ve been waiting and will continue to be waiting.

    Corrina, Corrina

    Recorded October 26, 1962

    The only song on the record not originally composed by Dylan. This composition dates back to 1918, a traditional blues tune about a lost love. Bob most likely knew it through Blind Lemon Jefferson, or possibly Robert Johnson’s version.

    The song is indicative of Bob’s deep connection to the original blues legends, and this adaptation is a direct byproduct of his loneliness in Suze’s absence. He wore that loneliness across most of the album, and here it takes on an older, rawer form.

    Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

    Deemed too controversial for the original release. Several of the protest songs on this record were published in Broadside, the folk and protest magazine. The first issue of that publication, of which Bob was a contributor, carried the lyrics of this talking blues. The alt-right gets picked apart in the song, with a great punch at the end: the narrator searches for communists everywhere, and eventually finds one looking back at him in the mirror.

    Dylan had planned to perform this on the Ed Sullivan Show, at the time the single most important platform for any musician wanting to get known or stay known. The censors got hold of it during rehearsal and immediately questioned the song, fearing libel against the John Birch Society. Bob made it clear without much deliberation: no song, no show. He walked out. Further down the line this helped his street cred with the anti-establishment Greenwich Village crowd, but that same fear of libel made it to the desks of the Columbia executives, who pulled the song from the album. Bob had to comply under contract. This led to the other songs being pulled as well. “Rocks and Gravel,” “Rambling Gambling Willie,” and “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” went with it.

    Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance

    Recorded July 9, 1962

    Another cover, this time drawing from Henry Thomas, an old Texas country bluesman. A pretty different mood from the rest of the album, more upbeat, though the subject matter still circles back to Suze’s absence and Dylan’s loneliness. A little lightness before the end.

    I Shall Be Free

    Recorded December 6, 1962

    The album ends on a comic note. Lots of nonsensical remarks in this track, almost a politically incorrect comedy routine. A loose, funny, deliberate exhale after everything that came before it. Bob letting the air out of the balloon before he sends you home.

    Closing

    Freewheelin’ contains some of my favorite Bob tunes ever. For that it will always hold a happy place in the collection. I probably heard Bob Dylan songs in my toddler years, maybe even earlier. I genuinely cannot remember the first time I heard him. But sometimes I listen to “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and it’s new again. Every single time. That is the sign of great music.

    He was in a unique creative period here. You can tug on a lot of different threads and they all lead to the same place: a spot of intense creativity, a spot of inspired songwriting, a young man taking on the world with a guitar and a typewriter and a burning need to say something. This was the start of Bob’s rise. The best records were still to come, but this one gave us proof of what was possible. An all-time classic if there ever was one.

    Thanks be to the Dylan.

    “If you told the truth, that was all well and good, and if you told the un-truth, well that was still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.”

    -RTR

  • Etta James – At Last!

    Etta James – At Last!

    Studio Album  ·  Released November 15th 1960  ·  Argo Records (Chess Subsidiary)

    Orchestral Arrangements and Conducted by Riley Hamilton ·  Produced by Phil and Leonard Chess

    Recorded: Between January and October 1960

    My copy: 2013 WaxTime Reissue ·  Purchased some time in 2016. Siren Records, CA

    “That’s why I don’t care to associate with a lot of other entertainers. Its not the drugs, its just that I’ve heard all that jive talk and ego games for too long. When I first started out, touring was fun — riding those old buses, eatin sardines out of a can, white folks runnin you out of town and everybody talkin about it for six months afterward.”

    — Etta James

    Jamesetta Hawkins was born in Los Angeles in 1938. She never knew her father, and her mother was only fourteen years old. She moved around, raised by relatives, not by her mother, attending a Baptist church with her grandparents. She had a natural talent for singing and was a soloist in her choir. While singing at church, she was subject to regular physical abuse. The director would punch her in the stomach if she didn’t sing correctly. As terrible as that sounds, James later related this period as what gave her the toughness to go it alone as a solo singer, and what gave her voice the raw edge that many came to appreciate. At twelve she started living with her mother, and began a slow drift into delinquency and general trouble.

    It was Johnny Otis who discovered her. Otis was a talent scout and bandleader with an extraordinary ear, responsible for unearthing several major artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first song James recorded, “Roll With Me Henry,” was an answer song to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me Annie” — sexual nuance included, racy undertones for the era. It was a sure-fire formula for a hit in those days. And it was a hit, until Georgia Gibbs covered it and scored a bigger chart position with the same song, now sung by a white artist for white radio. This was a routine injustice of the period. Black artists writing and recording the source material, white artists getting the commercial payoff. James’s dismay pushed her to seek out success as a solo artist on her own terms. She was strong-willed, massively talented, and not interested in compromises.

    Her solo career floundered until Leonard Chess signed her. Chess Records, by 1960, was the most important blues and R&B label in the country, with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Chuck Berry all on the roster. Argo, its subsidiary label, was positioned slightly differently. It was more pop-friendly and more open to orchestral production. That distinction matters when you listen to At Last!, because the lush string arrangements that Riley Hamilton brought to these sessions aren’t an accident or a concession. They’re a statement about where Etta James was meant to sit: not in the low-down gut-bucket blues tradition, but somewhere more expansive. Blues feeling, pop ambition, and genuine soul.

    What I hear when I listen to Etta James is a powerful singing voice, even allowing for her young age. There’s a depth and maturity behind that power that you don’t come by easily. You come by it the way she did, which was the hard way. She can growl, she can wail, and she can drop to a murmur in the same line. She has that intensity that very few could imitate because you can’t fake what’s underneath it. The hurt makes the beauty sparkle. And on the title track she shows that she can be delicate and glamorous and pop, and sing with a feeling of love that lands as something rare and real. The combination of roughness and the refinement is what makes this album unlike anything else Chess put out in this period.

    At Last! is not exactly a traditional album in the sense of a unified artistic statement. It reads more like a curated greatest-hits collection, pulling together singles, covers, and originals across different emotional registers. There’s raunchy, there’s blues, there’s pop, and there’s the timeless love song of the title track. What ties it together isn’t the songwriting or a conceptual thread — it’s her. She’s the constant.

    The Object

    This copy is a reissue from 2013 on WaxTime Records, added to the collection, from what I can remember 2016. I was in Arabic school at the time, so it was likely purchased in Monterey or Seaside, probably at Siren Records. It does not maintain the original track listing. There are four additional bonus tracks: “Don’t Cry Baby,” “You Know What I Mean,” “I’ll Dry My Tears,” and “Seven Day Fool.”

    The record sleeve is well made, a perfect reproduction of the original artwork. A beautiful side-profile pose — possibly a nod to Muddy Waters’s debut Chess LP — set against a yellow-orange background. Bold red lettering for Etta’s name, lowercase cursive for At Last! Her face is pensive, confident, and genuinely beautiful. The statement earring might be the entire reason for the decision to go with a profile shot — it adds a shine and distinguished class that points directly to what the music is: refined, bluesy, and elegant all at once.

    On the back of the cover, updated liner notes sit alongside the originals, with the new notes written by Santi Comelles. There are also archival images like show bills, photographs of Etta, original single record labels for the interested collector. This is her debut LP. Three of the tracks were released as singles, and all three were successful.

    The Music

    Songs and Listening Notes — January 6, 2026

    All tracks were recorded in Chicago between January and October 1960, except “You Know What I Mean,” recorded with an unidentified rhythm section, possibly in California.

    Anything to Say You’re Mine (Written by Sonny Thompson)

    A song of longing. Her crying and moaning here is just great. This a beautiful opener to a record that functions more like a greatest-hits collection than a conventional debut. Sonny Thompson was a popular bandleader in the 1940s and 1950s, and this is one of his better compositions, but Etta makes it hers.

    My Dearest Darling (A single from 1958 by Eddie Bo, early R&B legend, New Orleans-bred)

    A wailing cry and a sensitive soft whisper, effortlessly achieved in the same song. Range. When I listen to this track I can hear where Janis Joplin drew her inspiration. The cover was a solid hit for Etta.

    Trust in Me (Written by Ned Wever, Milton Ager, Jean Schwartz)

    A vintage composition taken from much earlier in the American songbook, and Etta treats it accordingly.

    “Come on daddy, face the future, why don’t you smile” — I just like that line a lot.

    Sunday Kind of Love

    Lost in the vibe of this song. A smoothly arranged track . The orchestra layers on the smoothness and the sensitivity with real care. This song sounds brand new. Her voice carries a patented soul edge that is legitimate and real and has never really been matched.

    Tough Mary (Written by Etta James and Joe Josea)

    Going to go ahead and say yes to the background singers and the saxophone solo. Both are highlights on this more uptempo track about a woman singing about exactly what she wants, no compromise.

    Don’t Cry Baby (Bonus track from 1961 — originally sung in 1929 by Bessie Smith, written by James P. Johnson)

    A slow, vampy blues, but with those strings and her voice it’s elevated well above the low-down blues of Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. This is exquisite blues. As far as the content goes, I wonder if anyone took this as emasculating to men — she’s pleading with her man not to cry, offering to reconcile and try the relationship one more time. Great song.

    You Know What I Mean (Bonus track)

    This one doesn’t benefit from the orchestral arrangements of the other material — the rhythm section is different, possibly recorded in California and it’s noticeably different. Despite that, it’s still another outstanding exhibition of her vocal style and ability. Real wails here, and she puts a lot of power behind nearly every line.

    Side 2

    I Just Want to Make Love to You (Willie Dixon)

    Picks up right where Muddy Waters left off, though it’s more swinging and swaying than power blues. The saxophone player goes for a walk. I really like how you can hear the air blowing into the mic on certain lines. And on the title line — she starts at the peak of vocal power, I JUST WANT — and in the second half of the line she lands in a place of softly spoken murmur. Power and class in the same line.

    At Last! (Written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren for the musical Sun Valley Serenade, 1941)

    Originally charted in 1942, when Etta was five years old. Glen Miller’s orchestra performed the version that first made it famous, and in its original context it’s a tender, soft-spoken love song — pleasant, well-crafted, and not much more than that.

    Knowing that origin and then listening to Etta’s version is what makes the recording so special. She injects her sadness, her emotion, and her life up to this point into every breath and tonal expression. It’s a song with meager origins taken to the peak of an emotional mountain. Many other artists have tried to imitate it. Privilege sometimes gets in the way of true art. Etta never wore her rough past on her sleeve, but it was always there inside the music, and here you can hear it in every note. The song became ubiquitous and that ubiquity has a way of flattening the source into sentiment.

    All I Could Do Was Cry (Billy Davis / Gwen Fuqua / Berry Gordy)

    A really sad song, and to my ears the best songwriting on the album. Etta gives it its due with another vocal performance equivalent to a grand-slam home run in a playoff game. It’s like she’s singing as if it’s her last song ever. The song could be a personal story about a past lover whoh had moved on. Whatever the inspiration was the result is devastating.

    Stormy Weather (Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler)

    Another sad and bluesy tune, but sung with a confidence that things will be okay. The arrangement here is restrained and smart.

    Girl of My Dreams (Rendered here as “Boy of My Dreams” — written by Charles Clapp)

    Another solid track, though by this point in the sequence the album begins to show the effects of its own emotional consistency. Most of the somber material ends up on Side 2, and the sequencing can feel a little front-heavy with sadness by the time you arrive here.

    I’ll Dry My Tears (Etta James and Clyde Walker — Bonus track, taken from a 1961 album)

    Another somber tune, relegated to the end of Side 2. Still really beautiful. The string arrangements are soaring here, providing a true call-and-response to the vocal.

    Seven Day Fool (Billy Davis / Berry Gordy / Sonny Woods — Bonus track)

    The album finishes on an upbeat, almost rocker-ish note, and it’s a sign of things to come. This sounds closer to the music on Tell Mama, which benefitted massively from the Muscle Shoals treatment, and that real swampy soul sound. Etta could transmute her blues into whatever container the session demanded, and here you hear the California girl who became the South, who became something else again, but always herself.

    Closing

    At Last! is Etta James’s debut LP, and in some ways it remains the definitive document of her abilities This is a record that functions simultaneously as a great blues album, a great pop album, and something harder to name, which is just a great album. Three singles, all successful, all now classics. The orchestral arrangements that Riley Hamilton brought to these sessions are sometimes dismissed as pop gloss. The strings are the frame that makes the painting visible. They create the space in which her voice does what it does.

    What gets lost in the conversation about Etta James is that the biographical context is inseparable from the music. The roughness of that early life, the church discipline, the years of near-misses and bad luck, the things she absorbed before working with Leonard Chess — all of it is present in these recordings in a way that can’t be manufactured.

    After this record and its subsequent success, James stayed in the public eye, following up with singles and performances across multiple genres, even venturing into country and western territory as the decade moved along. As the 1960s became the 1970s she struggled with drug use and lived through some hard years. She eventually got help, resurfaced with that class and vibrancy intact, played terrific live shows, and continued recording tribute material and original work alike. A great career, fully lived. And if you really sit with this record, past the familiarity of the title track, past whatever associations have accumulated around it, you’ll hear what all of that living sounded like when it was young and new and real.

    “I sing the songs that people need to hear.” — Etta James

    RTR

  • Miles Davis — Sketches of Spain

    Miles Davis — Sketches of Spain

    Studio Album  ·  Released July 18, 1960  ·  Columbia Records CL 1480

    Arranged and Conducted by Gil Evans  ·  Produced by Teo Macero and Irving Townsend

    Recorded: November 1959 and March 1960  ·  Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City

    My copy: 1974 Columbia Reissue  ·  Purchased April 2025, Habitat for Humanity, Seaside CA

    The Object

    This one ranks among Miles Davis’s best works. Before the 1970s funk experiments, before the electric period, there was this — the third entry in the Gil Evans trilogy alongside Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess, and in some ways the most personal of the three. It arrived right after Kind of Blue, which is to say it arrived at the apex of one of the most fertile periods any jazz musician has ever had. Miles was 34. He was at his peak.

    Sketches of Spain is an example of what gets called third stream music — an amalgamation of jazz improvisation and full orchestral arrangement. But that label doesn’t quite capture what happens when you actually sit with this record. The mood here is geographic, cinematic, emotional. It’s a sense of longing projected through trumpet into Spanish landscape. Miles made music for moods. On this one, the mood is an entire region of the world.

    I found this 1974 Columbia reissue at the Habitat for Humanity thrift shop in Seaside, California in April 2025. Whoever owned it before kept it well — the cover is clean, the wax still has its sheen. It’s a fine copy and it will stay in the collection. This is one of those records you know belongs in the collection as soon as you see it.

    I’ve played this album many times in headphones while working at the NSA building in Fort Gordon, Georgia. That context matters. This is music that transforms the space around you. Put it on and wherever you are — a government building, a small apartment, a car — becomes somewhere else. That kind of transportive quality is rare.

    On Sketches of Spain, Miles plays trumpet but you hear something other than trumpet. He mimics the human voice with an intimacy that is his particular genius, and on this record he also imitates — inhabits, really — the voice of a classical guitar. The way he rose to that challenge was through total immersion in his influences. He didn’t approach the Spanish material as an outsider. He lived inside it until it became personal.

    “That one is a motherfucker.”

    Don Cheadle, playing Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), says that about this record. He’s not wrong. Hearing him say this in the film, I now operate on a half-confident belief that this may have been Davis’s own favorite of his albums.

    “After we finished working on Sketches of Spain I didn’t have nothing inside of me. I was drained of all emotion and I didn’t know what to hear that music after I go through playing all that hard shit.”

    This tells you everything about what it cost him.

    The Music

    The Miles and Gil Evans Relationship

    Miles Davis and Gil Evans first met in 1947. Gil was 35, Miles was 21. Evans brought a classical and contemporary orchestral sensibility into the world of bebop at a moment when that world didn’t know it needed one. His apartment near the St. Regis Hotel in New York was a gathering place for artists — a room where ideas crossed over and contaminated each other in the best possible way, and Miles was one of the regular presences there.

    For Miles, Evans was something of a mentor — a man fourteen years older who understood both the jazz tradition and the European orchestral one, and who could build a bridge between them with an arranger’s precision and a composer’s imagination. Their collaborative trilogy — Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), Sketches of Spain (1960) — represents one of the sustained high points in recorded music of any kind. Evans brought functional perfection to these sessions. Miles brought the fire.

    The African connection to the Spanish material was not incidental to either of them. The Moorish influence on Andalusian music — the trace of North Africa and the Arabic world running through flamenco — was something both Evans and Miles were thinking about. Miles dove into Spanish folklore, flamenco, and the historical connections between Africa and Spain with the same depth of research he applied to everything. The Africa-by-way-of-Spain line in Western music was in both their heads. Miles made it personal by immersing himself so fully that the material stopped being research and started being instinct.

    The Inspiration

    In 1958, Miles was taken reluctantly, by his wife Frances Davis to see a company of Spanish dancers performing under choreographer Roberto Iglesias. The experience changed him. Back in New York, he bought every Spanish flamenco record he could find. Then he went deeper into Spanish folklore, into the traditional music, into the field recordings Alan Lomax had made in Spain. What you hear on this record is the result of that immersion. This record months of listening and absorbing before a single note was played in the studio.

    Miles always did this. One of the things I’ve come to understand about him is that underneath the iconoclasm and the myth was a serious researcher. He dove into rabbit holes with discipline. He didn’t play a tradition he hadn’t studied. On Sketches of Spain, that commitment is audible.

    Production

    Irving Townsend and Teo Macero were assigned by Columbia to produce the album, but Macero did most of the work. Teo Macero was already legendary. He was a saxophonist with real chops and a producer with serious ears. His collaboration with Miles on this record became the foundation for a working partnership that would last fifteen years and extend through Miles’s most experimental electric work.

    Miles’s approach in the studio was demanding and specific. He wanted his musicians to know the material by heart. He wanted them to read it, learn it, internalize it, and then play it from a place of genuine competence rather than sight-reading. The idea was freedom through preparation. You have to know the music completely before you can let go of it.

    The sessions were difficult. There was stopping and starting. Miles reportedly drank and doubted himself, saying at one point: ‘I always manage to try something I can’t do.’ That sentence is either the most honest thing a creative person can say or the most characteristic thing Miles Davis ever said. Eventually the sessions completed, and what they produced was one of the most cohesive records of his career.

    Trombonist Frank Rehak appears on this record as he did on Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess — a constant in the Evans sessions, and a player Miles fought hard to have on this date, working through scheduling complications to get him there. Rehak’s presence across all three Evans collaborations gives the trilogy a tonal consistency.

    The Tracks

    Listening notes — January 11, 2026

    Side One

    1. Concierto de Aranjuez

    Recorded November 15 and 20, 1959  ·  Adagio movement

    The Concierto de Aranjuez was written in 1939 by Joaquín Rodrigo, a Spanish composer who was blind from the age of three and who wrote the piece for guitar and orchestra. The origin story of it ending up on this record is straightforward and audacious in equal measure: Miles heard the adagio movement and decided he could play the guitar part with his horn. Only the adagio portion appears here — the slow, central movement — and it occupies most of Side One. We can all be grateful for that decision. It is a powerful work.

    Rodrigo, famously, did not appreciate Miles’s version when he first heard it. Miles’s response was essentially: wait until the royalty checks arrive.

    Listening to this is like being placed deep in the Spanish countryside. Not the tourist version — somewhere real and quiet and ancient. It transports you regardless of where you actually are. I’ve heard it in Georgia, in California, in various unremarkable rooms, and each time the room disappears. The middle section with the castanets and flutes is one of my favorite passages. The final build is dramatic in the best possible way — peak emotional impact from a jazz trumpet player playing a classical guitar concerto.

    2. Will o’ the Wisp

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    Written by Manuel de Falla, another Spanish composer, from his ballet El amor brujo — which translates as ‘Bewitching Love.’ De Falla wrote some of this material as processional music, and parts of it were associated with traditional Spanish ceremony. It’s a different texture entirely from the Concierto — bouncy, tinny, slightly playful, with a galloping quality that puts you somewhere different. If the Concierto puts you in the countryside at dusk, Will o’ the Wisp puts you on horseback in the morning. Short, vivid.

    Side Two

    1. The Pan Piper

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    Based on a Phrygian folk melody from the Lomax field recordings — a shepherd’s tune, stripped down and made strange by Miles’s trumpet. The source material here comes directly from the traditional Spanish folk music Miles had been studying. It’s the quietest thing on the record, and in that quiet there’s something genuinely haunting.

    2. Saeta

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    A saeta is a Spanish religious a cappella genre — a spontaneous, passionate vocal outpouring performed during Semana Santa processions at Easter, sung from balconies or from the crowd as the religious floats pass below. It is street music with the intensity of prayer. Miles plays the trumpet in the role of that voice. He is the lone cry rising above the procession while the orchestra surrounds him as the crowd and the street and the weight of the occasion.

    Saeta and Solea are the two original works on this record, both inspired by Spanish tradition rather than adapted from existing compositions. They are gifts from Miles Davis to his inspiration. That he could produce work of this quality while operating from outside the tradition he was honoring is one of the most impressive things about this record. He earned the right through the research and the immersion.

    3. Solea

    Recorded March 10, 1960

    The closer. Contains a ten-minute trumpet solo from Miles, and what a ten minutes it is. Solea is a foundational form of flamenco — serious, deep, traditionally associated with sorrow and dignity in equal measure. The drums sway underneath, the orchestra provides the weight of tradition, and Miles plays above it all with the assurance of someone who has made this music completely his own. Bullfighter music. Trips to Spain from the living room.

    Closing

    A key record in every serious collection, as far as I’m concerned. This is not background music. It’s not mood setting in the ambient sense. You don’t put on Miles Davis to fill a room. You can put him on with intention, and this record rewards that intention fully. You can feel the inspiration. What Miles said about being drained after the sessions is audible in the performances. He left everything in the studio.

    For some listeners this record sits right next to Kind of Blue in terms of greatness. I understand that argument. It’s a different kind of achievement. Where Kind of Blue opened a modal door for jazz to walk through, Sketches of Spain crossed a geographic and cultural boundary that shouldn’t have been crossable at all. It represents a peak of the Evans collaboration and a serious new direction simultaneously. Both things are true. It holds them without contradiction.

    Whoever left this copy at the Habitat for Humanity did me a favor.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR

  • Bernard Herrmann – Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Score)

    Bernard Herrmann – Vertigo (Original Motion Picture Score)

    Film Score  |  Film Released May 9th 1958 | Score Composed Between January and February 1958

    Bernard Herrmanns 4th film score as a collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock

    Mercury Golden Imports Series | 1977 | Netherlands

    Bought: Discogs | March 2026

    Vertigo is another film experience inseparable from its music. I don’t remember the exact first time I watched it, but I have a distinct memory of how the score made me feel. Watching Vertigo is like wading through a melancholic ocean of darkness and painful love. It’s a trance state. You don’t know what’s a dream and what’s real. The film is slow and strange, and the music meanders and weaves with it, spiraling, emoting, blooming in passages of real orchestral beauty. As a classical film score it stands up decades later without any qualification. Herrmann turned in something that belongs in a different category than most film music. It belongs in the same conversation as orchestra and concert halls.

    The Object

    Vertigo has always been a special film for me. It was one of the films that helped me fall in love with movies. I’ve also spent time near the Bay Area, and made it a point to visit with my wife some of the locations where it was filmed like Cypress Point and Mission San Juan Bautista. Standing in those places with the film in your head is a particular kind of experience. My appreciation for Vertigo is an appreciation for its art and its mood. I’m not drawn to any specific genre — not especially to noir — I’m drawn to what’s good and valued for what it is. A great score helps one hundred percent of the time, and this one helps considerably.

    My copy is a Mercury Golden Imports pressing from 1977, pressed in the Netherlands. I don’t have a similar pressing to compare it to directly, so I can only speak to what I have. It’s a characteristically European package — interesting fonts, an unusual label design, a gold strip across the top of the cover. The vinyl and the sleeve both have that thin, slightly flimsy quality typical of European pressings from this era. Very 1970s in every sense.

    The cover art draws inspiration from the film without using any images from it directly. A hand grasping from the darkness of an iris — a woman’s face transposed four times in a circle, the whole thing suggesting an eye, or a spiral, or both. Weird and alluring in a specifically 1970s way, the kind of image that would pull someone in at a record store whether they’d seen the film or not. By 1977 Vertigo was nearly twenty years old and had not yet been restored or widely reassessed — it was still in the vault. A large sticker on the front cover announces that it was imported from Europe, pressed in the Netherlands. I wish more European imports in American record stores were that straightforward about their origins. Many stores I visit today are quietly moving European pressings to American collectors without much acknowledgment of what they actually are.

    Before even playing the record, a genuine highlight: the back cover carries extensive liner notes by Jay Alan Quantrill. A full historical and critical write-up on the score, the film, the collaboration. That kind of documentation is exactly what the collector in me needs — context.

    Sound Quality

    The sound quality of this pressing leaves something to be desired. The vinyl is soft and the shelf life has taken its toll — there are pops throughout and some distorted passages that I suspect have more to do with the condition of the wax than with the producers’s intentions. Mercury claimed that most of the Golden Imports series were pressed on high-quality vinyl, and that may well be true, but they didn’t say much about how those pressings would age. What I have is what it is. The music survives.

    The Music

    Central to the theme of Vertigo is obsession, and central to the emotional language of Herrmann’s score is obsession. It manifests here as circling, spiraling, suspending sounds. This is music that builds and returns, builds and returns, never fully resolving, never letting you go. From the first cue through the last, the score provides immense emotional power to the scenes that demand it, and in the quieter scenes it functions as counterpoint giving you a subtle hint of what might be waiting around the next corner, or at the top of a staircase.

    Martin Scorsese, speaking of his favorite film, called the score tragically beautiful and absolutely essential to the spirit, the functioning, and the power of Vertigo. Critics have reached for words like symphony and propulsion when trying to describe how the music works inside the film.

    Herrmann was working deliberately in the tradition of the Romantic leitmotif — a technique associated most with Wagner, where specific characters, emotions, or ideas are assigned recurring musical themes that develop and transform over the course of the work. Kim Novak’s character carries her own motif, which Herrmann shapes and reshapes throughout the film to mirror what’s happening to Scottie’s perception of her. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde — an opera built around obsession, longing, and a love that cannot be consummated — was a direct influence on the Vertigo score, and if you know both works, you can hear it.

    Herrmann wrote the score in approximately 45 days, which seems impossible given how rich and fully developed the final result is. He described what Hitchcock wanted in two words: obsession and longing. Those two words contain the entire score. Herrmann dealt with both more personally and more deeply in this music than in any of his other work — he went headlong into the deep end and found something there that he had not quite found before.

    One practical complication: due to a musicians’ strike in America during the recording period, Herrmann was unable to conduct the score himself. The conducting fell to Muir Mathieson, which Herrmann resented deeply. He had always conducted his own work and considered it inseparable from composition. The sessions were recorded in Europe — not what he originally intended, and not something he ever fully made peace with. Given how personal this score was to him, that loss of control must have stung.

    The Cues

    Prelude (2:58)

    The opening cue, playing over the title sequence. Built around a relentless repeating figure called an ostinato — the same circular pattern cycling over and over, creating a dizzying effect that mirrors the film’s title and its central psychology. Herrmann uses the full orchestra here: strings, brass, woodwinds, harps, vibraphones, celeste, and a Hammond organ. The swirling figures in the strings and harps were designed to complement the hypnotic, spiraling visuals that Saul Bass created for the titles. The whole prelude is built around a single note — D — that keeps returning like an obsession that can’t be shaken. It ends not on a resolution but on that same unresolved D, as if the music itself cannot escape the loop. Herrmann described this kind of writing as creating a sense of going nowhere while moving constantly.

    A small aside: the note D appears in the low brass — in tuba form — at the precise moment the words ‘Directed by Alfred Hitchcock’ appear on screen. Who knows if that was Herrmann’s subtle editorial comment on the heavy-set director.

    Roof-Top (1:37)

    The film opens on a grey metallic bar across the screen. Scottie’s vertigo is introduced to the audience not through dialogue or explanation but through music — a rush of sensation that tells you exactly what the film’s title means before a word is spoken.

    The chase scene that opens the film is fast and aggressive, with the strings playing a dizzying circular figure — the same vertigo motif from the prelude, now at a sprint. The brass sustain long tones underneath while the strings race above them. When Scottie slips and hangs from the gutter in his first vertigo episode, the music abruptly stops its motion. The strings cease racing. The brass hold a massive, dissonant chord. Stillness where there was movement. It’s the musical equivalent of looking down.

    Madeleine (1:12) — The Restaurant

    Marked in the score lento amoroso — amorously slow. The first appearance of what will become the Madeleine theme, arriving at the precise moment her face enters the frame. All strings, all muted — con sordini — which produces a softer, silkier, slightly veiled tone. Herrmann uses this deliberately. The theme is built around rising and falling melodic phrases that feel like longing, like something beautiful just out of reach. No brass, no percussion, just muted strings and a single harp. The restraint makes it feel private, interior, as if we’re already inside Scottie’s head before he knows it himself.

    Carlotta’s Portrait (1:52)

    One of the score’s most quietly haunting cues. Built on the habanera rhythm — a Cuban dance rhythm, dotted and syncopated — which Herrmann associates throughout the score with Carlotta, with fate, with obsession. Here the vibraphone gently strikes a single note at regular intervals, like a clock ticking or a heartbeat. The melody passes between flutes, clarinets, and muted horns, each section taking its turn before handing it to the next. The effect is circular and inevitable and trance-like. Madeleine sits staring at the portrait. The music doesn’t dramatize the moment, it inhabits it.

    The Beach (3:26)

    Begins passionately — muted cellos playing an impassioned rising melody, the horns and strings joining in. This is Herrmann at his most romantically expressive, closer to the lush European Romantic tradition than his usual more economical style. As Madeleine talks about a long dark corridor, the strings quiet to a continuous sympathetic murmur — a flowing six-note figure repeated without pause, creating a hypnotic undertow beneath her words. When she talks about her gravestone, the trombones and tuba appear alone, playing spare half-note progressions — low, slow, heavy with everything they imply. The cue ends with the full orchestra at a passionate climax as Scottie and Madeleine embrace. It resolves to a bright major chord — the happiest the score gets.

    Farewell and The Tower

    The habanera tempo returns. The Madeleine theme returns with it — lush and full, confirming everything Scottie feels about her, the obsession made music one more time before the film takes it away.

    At the tower, the vertigo motifs from the prelude return and begin accumulating, the tension building bar by bar in a way that makes you desperate to know what’s coming. And then a scream and a fall, and Scottie’s confusion and despair are matched precisely by a score that equals both — music that has no resolution to offer because the scene has none either.

    The Nightmare and Dawn (2:22)

    Seductive and frightening in equal measure. The animated nightmare sequence begins with the Madeleine theme distorted and fragmented — the same notes, wrong — then shifts through several stages of increasing agitation. The habanera rhythm appears now beaten on timpani rather than plucked or bowed, growing louder bar by bar until the full orchestra erupts. Herrmann uses sul ponticello — bowing near the bridge of the instrument — to produce a harsh, metallic, thin string tone unlike anything else in the score. The flutes play flutter-tongue technique. At the climax, harps run wild glissandos in opposite directions simultaneously while the cymbals crash and the brass blare. Then the sequence ends and the orchestra simply stops.

    Scene d’Amour (4:58)

    One of the most bewitching pieces of music I know. In the film it’s matched with a wondrous transformation — Scottie caught up in a whirlwind of obsession, watching a woman who resembles Madeleine emerge from a bathroom as the woman he has lost. The theme fills the scene of her entry into the frame and it’s an emotional experience that the film could not achieve without it.

    This is the emotional and musical peak of the entire score. Herrmann begins with strings alone — the Madeleine theme in its fullest, most impassioned version. The music builds slowly, adding instruments gradually. Then Scottie waits alone while Judy is in the bathroom. The music shifts — strings playing sul tasto and sul ponticello alternately, an unstable and searching quality, the musical expression of a man holding his breath. When Judy emerges fully transformed, the music erupts: molto largamente e appassionato — broadly and passionately — the full string section in an unrestrained climax. It resolves at the end to C major, the clearest and most unambiguous chord in Western music. A moment of completion that is also, given everything we know by then, deeply tragic.

    The Necklace / The Return / Finale

    The habanera rhythm returns one final time when Judy puts on Carlotta’s necklace — the gesture that gives everything away. The brass blare it now. Not the subtle, muted versions from earlier in the film — the full brass, loud, inevitable. The return to the tower is built on a slow accumulation: violas, clarinets, bassoons, the timpani rolling underneath. Everything the score has been building toward arrives here, and then the finale follows, and then the film ends the only way it could.

    Closing

    The score is lush, vibrant, and genuinely beautiful. At times it gives the audience pain. At times it helps us remember things. We remember things not from the film, but from somewhere older in ourselves. It confuses us with wonder, keeps us guessing what’s real, and holds us in a sustained emotional state that very few pieces of music can maintain for two full hours. When I put this record on I’m pulled into the spiral. I’m Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak around another corner in San Francisco, not knowing what I’ll find.

    Thanks for reading.

    RTR