A Consumer Guide to the Trailing Edge: June, 2005

Recycled Goods (#20)

by Tom Hull

When I put these columns together I often try to round up sets of related records, figuring the relationships will add up usefully. Usually, this amounts to one lead section review plus a few more under Briefly Noted. However, this time I have a set that deserves its own section: I've managed to accumulate about a third of the Atavistic Unheard Music Series, so rather than cover them in dribs and drabs over several columns, I grouped them under a new heading, "In Series." This won't happen often in the future, although I plan to do the same thing with the 15 volumes of Verve's Free America series before too long, and I see two more slightly smaller piles in the queue.


Africa Unite: In Dub (2005, Echo Beach). The group name comes from a Bob Marley song, reinforced here by the opening remix of Marley's "Is This Love." The second piece is an exceptionally lovely one called "A Sangue Freddo E In Pieno Dub" -- after all, the group, which dates back to 1981, comes from Italy. Much of the rest was mixed or remixed, dubbed or redubbed, by Mad Professor -- a relationship that isn't especially clear, especially given that I haven't heard dub so light and graceful since Augustus Pablo. Just goes to show that dub is universal, world music defined not as foreign but as coming from everywhere. A-

This Right Here Is Buck 65 (2005, V2). When Warners' Canadian subsidiary signed Nova Scotian dj/rapper Richard Terfly they started by reissuing his whole back catalog of clever rhymes and deft beats. They're all worth picking up on your next drug run up north -- not least his first exploits on Weirdo Magnet. When a U.S. label finally gets serious they should do the same thing. Meanwhile, V2 has stuck one toe in the water with this new album of older pieces recut with a band. The remakes are toughened up, Buck 65's voice all grit and gravel, the beats honed to sharp points -- maybe he figures menace is as American as apple pie? Three new songs, one from Woody Guthrie bathed in pedal steel. The rhymes astonish less the second time around, and working with the band distracts from his search for the perfect sample, but gives the music a consistent muscularity. They rock. A-

Billy Crystal Presents: The Milt Gabler Story (1938-64 [2005], Verve). Gabler was Crystal's uncle, but he's better known as the founder of Commodore Records, the producer of Billie Holiday's anti-lynching lament "Strange Fruit," and for his long hit-making tenure at Decca. At Commodore he specialized in hot jazz, only lightly sampled here in tracks by Eddie Condon and Wild Bill Davison. Commodore was a small independent, but at Decca he worked with stars like Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, Louis Jordan and Louis Armstrong, while cultivating Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and launching two key songs that paved the way for rock and roll: Lionel Hampton's (aka Illinois Jacquet's) "Flying Home" and Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." With so much to choose from, Crystal selected a rich and wildly disparate schmeer of mostly '50s pazz and jop. Irresistible: "The Glow Worm"; marvelous: "Little Things Mean a Lot"; de trop: "Three Coins in the Fountain"; perfect closer snuck in on a technicality, Nat King Cole's "L-O-V-E." A

The Everly Brothers: It's Everly Time (1960 [2005], Collectors' Choice). The hits -- "Bye Bye Love," "Wake Up Little Susie," "All I Have to Do Is Dream," "Bird Dog" -- didn't end when they left Cadence for Warners but they tailed off, partly because that's the way it usually works. The real career damage happened a couple of years later when they were drafted and wasted by a U.S. Army that was powerless to fend off the British Invasion. But for their first Warners album they were confident enough to hold back "Cathy's Clown" -- their first Warners single and last number one hit. Or too chintzy. Collectors' Choice has reissued fifteen Warners Everlys albums in their original form, which means short and mostly filler. This one gets by on their close harmonies, but the songs aren't often up to the singers. B+

The Fall: 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong (1978-2003 [2004], Beggars Banquet, 2CD). Mark E. Smith sings like John Lydon only less idiosyncratically, while his bands play like New Order with more drone and no chance of lift-off. And they've been doing this with near-perfect consistency for a quarter of a century -- even the Ramones evolved more, peaked higher, and dipped lower. Their second tier status makes their frequent albums marginal by expectation, and they never were ones to surprise or disappoint. On the other hand, one expects their infrequent compilations to sort them out well enough to lift them to first tier, which is exactly what 458489 A-Sides did. But that was just one six year stretch. This one scales up to 25 years, which proves to be no stretch at all. A

Dizzy Gillespie: Dizzy: The Music of John Birks Gillespie (1950-63 [2005], Verve). Two problems with this compilation: one is that it is a tie-in with Donald L. Maggin's biography of Gillespie covers his whole career, but the comp only surveys one chunk, leaving out his breakthrough (and most famous) records on Musicraft, Savoy and RCA, the live concerts on Vogue, the later sessions for Pablo; the other is that it slices the Verve recordings so thin that it never develops any flow. Any attempt to cover Gillespie's breadth would run into the latter problem. We tend to think of bebop, hence Gillespie, as a small group aesthetic -- as an explosion of individualist virtuosity opposed to the previous big band era. Gillespie, of course, could do that, but he grew up in big bands, invented bebop in big bands, and continued to expand the horizons of big bands into the '60s -- indeed, the most scintillating music here is with his big band. If this comp becomes your first encounter, you will be amazed. But be aware that the two poles of his Verve recordings -- the big band on Gillespiana and the jousts on Sonny Side Up are more satisfactory and more amazing as separate discs. And that he was even greater earlier on. B+

Wes Montgomery: Smokin' at the Half Note (1965 [2005], Verve). The front cover shows this as originally credited, with the Wynton Kelly Trio on top, Montgomery on the bottom. The Kelly Trio had its start as the rhythm section of the Miles Davis Quintet, but when Miles decided not to tour in the early '60s Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb set out on their own. Montgomery had done his major work for Riverside up to 1963 before moving to Verve where he mostly cut overly slick and saccharine versions of pop hits, but this date has grown in his canon, regarded by many as one of the essential milestones in jazz guitar. That judgment strikes me as overly generous. The five cuts on the original album -- three actually recut in the studio by Creed Taylor after finding the originals somehow lacking -- were precariously balanced between Kelly and Montgomery, providing tantalizing moments of each. This new edition tilts the balance decisively toward the guitarist with six extra cuts meant for radio, most with MC intros and chatter, but most also with sterling examples of Montgomery's melodic lines. A-

The Rough Guide to Astor Piazzolla (1957-88 [2005], World Music Network). It's proper to regard the Argentine tango master as a composer -- indeed there are whole operas in his oeuvre -- but I prefer to think of him as a performer, more specifically an improviser on his ever present bandoneon. He rarely strayed from tango, but he turned it out in a vast assortment of ways, like a brilliant chef might turn out a panoply of ducks. The one early piece here is the odd one out, still feeling much like he wishes to dignify tango as a classical music, but when we jump into the '70s he's found a powerful groove, and in that his own distinct voice and mission. A

You Ain't Talking to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music (1902-40 [2005], Columbia/Legacy, 3CD). Poole's group, the North Carolina Ramblers, arranged old tunes for banjo, fiddle and guitar -- creating the classic string band sound of what we now like to call old-timey music. Poole's banjo was the group's engine, and he had a knack for tweaking songs to freshen them up -- never wrote one, but renamed many, skipped a few verses and swapped a lot of words. But more importantly, he had the first great voice in country music: a deep but clear twang with a wry twist, the prototype for everyone from Hank Williams to Peter Stampfel. His first record in 1925 was his biggest hit, "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down." He recorded 110 songs up through 1930, but as the depression settled in he headed back to the Carolina mills and his always heavy drinking, dying in 1931 after a prolonged bender. He's not exactly unknown -- I've long treasured his three discs on County, and note that JSP has just released a 4-CD set -- but Columbia, owner of most of his originals, ignored him until this odd box. What's odd about it? Well, the packaging is a faux cigar box, mostly air. Moreover, the second and third discs are only half Poole. The other half are older versions of songs Poole covered, going back as far as Arthur Collins in 1902 and a few more recent versions -- the idea being to provide a context showing how Poole worked and how country music evolved through him. Hank Spoznik's booklet sorts out some of these details, but the rest is home study. This should only be of interest to musicologists, but surprisingly enough, the real obscurities that Poole's fame rescues here are listenable and interesting in their own right, even though the versions that stand out are Poole's. A

Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter (1960-2001 [2004], Columbia/Legacy, 2CD). Shorter has been a major jazz figure since he recorded Introducing Wayne Shorter in 1959, but he was unusual in his avoidance of the spotlight. His major work early on was in bands led by Art Blakey and Miles Davis, while his own records on Blue Note sort of lurked in the background. He wasn't unnoticed: he was distinctive on tenor sax, and later soprano sax, but he was even more noted as a composer, and his tenures with both Blakey and Davis -- arguably the best periods either ever had -- were built on his writing. But in 1970 he submerged under Joe Zawinul's Weather Report fusion, and he wandered much thereafter, only to emerge as a certifiable Living Legend with his recent string of Verve albums. This particular comp was intended as a supplement to a biography, so it's appropriate that it stradles every facet of his career, but it does so uncomfortably. It ignores his Vee-Jays, short changes his Blue Notes (cf. The Classic Blue Note Recordings, with one disc from his own records and the other from others, and not just Blakey), stoops to session work (Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell), and ends with a mixed bag licensed from Verve, while padding heavily from Legacy's own catalog. As befits a biography, it covers warts and all. But most of us could pass on the warts. B

In Series

John Corbett writes a column for Downbeat called "Vinyl Freak," where he digs up and reviews LPs so obscure they've never been reissued on CD. But Corbett does more than write: since 2000 he has directed Atavistic's Unheard Music Series -- now up 53 titles. Some are legends, such as Alexander Von Schlippenbach's Pakistani Pomade (reviewed back in Oct. 2003) and the early Joe McPhee records below. Some are marginal even for historians. Most fall somewhere in between, and a few really are undiscovered gems.

Briefly Noted

Notes

Lead-in:

In an infinite universe, all the music you'll ever need already exists somewhere. We find more each month: country roots (Charlie Poole), avant-jazz (Atavistic's Unheard Music Series), dub (Africa Unite), Canadian rap (Buck 65), tango (Astor Piazzolla), jazz legends (Dizzy Gillespie, Wayne Shorter), post-WWII pop (Milt Gabler, Everly Brothers, Herb Alpert), much more (55 records).


Copyright © 2005 Tom Hull.