Cee Cee James - Seriously Raw [Live At Sunbanks]

You gotta learn how to grunt in life or it ain’t worth it....

I was very recently urged to experience Cee Cee James perform live and I look forward to that possibility when she next tours in the UK. The vocal prowess so evident on latest release Blood Red Blues, reviewed here a few days ago, would be a dynamic treat to hear. Indeed, having been so impressed with BRB I did track down this live recording, and James’ other blues album Low Down Where The Snakes Crawl is now on order from the States.

Seriously Raw [Live At Sunbanks] offers up fourteen superb blues tracks, opening with Robert Johnson’s Crossroad Blues, where Cee Cee ‘warms up the stage’ with an amazing vocal start just after the slick Rob Andrews slide intro. Her Joplin tone and volume ignites the song, and Jason Childs supplies skilful lead guitar. I’ve commented on the Joplin echo, as has every other reviewer I’ve read, and it seems James is comfortable with and honoured by the comparison – so much so that she delivers a version of Mercedes Benz on this album, and it takes confidence to risk such a direct juxtaposition. I wasn’t sure at first, but it works, especially as Cee Cee’s commentary – and then scream – makes the homage honest. This is followed by a lovely cover of Kristofferson’s Me and Bobby McGee. Her song I Got A Right To Sing The Blues from BRB gets an earlier outing here too. Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits gets a brilliant slowblues introduction and then launches into a raucous rendition. 

                                (C) Reed R. Radcliffe / TripleRPhotography.com

If you check out this page http://www.triplerphotography.com/Music/For%20Cee%20Cee/index.html there’s a sequence of great photographs that present the blood, sweat and tears of Cee Cee James performing, and they supply visual credence to the emotive energy of her singing. Great captures by Reed R. Radcliffe.

Scott McKenzie - San Francisco [Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair]

Scott McKenzie, who died on Saturday 18th August, aged 73, will be forever defined musically by his huge hit of 1967 San Francisco [Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair], a song written by John Phillips from The Mamas & The Papas to promote the Monterey Pop Festival.  It is a gorgeous pop song with which to be defined, and its hippie sentiments with all the innocent celebration of a geographical focus-point for a new generation of peace and love endure in that magnificant melody and moment.

Not that I shared in the moment. In 1967 I had just arrived in England as the all-American boy with a Beach Boys haircut and a patriotic fervour inculcated by a midwestern myopia where the only world outside Nebraska was the surf and hot rods of California, not flowers in very long hair. I was 13 years old. As I have articulated elsewhere on this blog, my beliefs and preconceptions were soon challenged and changed by those with alternative world views. I do recall loving the song for its melody, but I don't believe I had any idea about the hopeful meaning of its lyrics. Had I returned to San Francisco or similar in the early 70s, rather than an insular and redneck Michigan as I did, I might well have stayed to pursue that hippie dream rather than escape back to England from what I thought was an endemic small-town/small-minded hatred for what was then my incipient long hair and all it seemed to represent for those who despised such an appearance.

I may now have a knowing reflection, but I still hold a nostalgic reverance for the beauty of this song and its sentiments, even if it took me some years to understand, and even more to understand its fleeting dream. But as a song it has the power to transport the listener to its moment, no matter how transient, and we can thank Phillips and McKenzie and a whole generation for this. I do believe that fundamental principles from the world that song invokes have informed many aspects of my life so this is more than sentimental reverie, but that doesn't mean I've been wearing flowers in my hair to announce.

If you're going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you're going to San Francisco
You're gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there
In the streets of San Francisco
Gentle people with flowers in their hair

All across the nation such a strange vibration
People in motion
There's a whole generation with a new explanation
People in motion people in motion

For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there

If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there.

Pharoah Sanders - Shukuru

Late Night Leon

I was listening to this last night, and it is a late night listen with its predominantly soft and soothing cuts, but I have it playing again this morning as I am enjoying so much. The title track is lush in its calm, and follower Body and Soul mixes Sanders' rising tenor playing above a background angelic organ [sounding like a full-blown choir at times - similar on penultimate track Jitu]. This album teams Sanders with Leon Thomas again, but only on two tracks, and Thomas' warbling yodel gets its most idiosyncratic workout on fourth track Sun City. There is a calypso interlude with third Mas in Brooklyn, and the album closes on the atmospheric For Big George played before a live audience - a harmonium's drone providing the tone, and Thomas again providing the vocal teasing.

Cee Cee James - Blood Red Blues

 

Aural Doppleganger

Is it a burden or blessing to sing and sound like Janis Joplin? Cee Cee James has that startling replication, and it clearly isn’t an affectation – she has a naturally powerful and emotive voice delivering perfect blues, exemplified in the manifesto of sixth track I Got A Right To Sing The Blues on this latest album release. Many gutsy, gritty female vocalists get the Joplin comparison - as reference point and accolade - but if there is such a thing as an aural doppelganger, James occupies this role with I would suggest the blessing of an uncannily Joplinesque tone in addition to the requisite rasp and growl.

As the album title Blood Red Blues indicates, the blues roots and infusion separate James from Joplin in its singular focus. The self-penned songs, co-written with husband and band lead guitarist Rob ‘Slideboy’ Andrews, are the consummate reflection of over 20 years of performance and the musical learning curves and lifestyle this presents. The sultry and the sassy get a reflective romp in 100 Ways To Make Love; the pain that will intersperse those saucy times gets a mature review in the slow blues lament of Wounds, and this ninth track also features the resonant breadth of James’ vocal. But it’s the jaunt and swagger of the livelier blues tracks on this album that reveal the wonderful blessing of James’ singing, whatever its echoes.

                       (C) Reed R. Radcliffe / TripleRPhotography.com

Syd Arthur - On and On

City Boys

The band Syd Arthur hail from Canterbury which is a godsend for reviewers referencing their progressive and psychedelic rock sounds, the former of those musical tags most closely associated with that city. I understand, hear and now use the generic touchstone as well, but its folk roots are as evident, as are the jazz grooves, for example those of fourth track Dorothy which is a smooth ballad shifting away from the speedy and at times complex rhythms that precede and immediately follow this track, fifth Truth Seeker returning to jagged edges and a fuzzed then plucked violin. Both the folk and 60s/70s rock echoes waft from the violin of Raven Bush, and it is a distinct feature perhaps reminiscent of East of Eden.

What separates the band from its Canterbury musical precursors is the pop awareness of melody as well as actual length of songs, averaging 3 minutes, with the longest being final number Paradise Lost at 8.22. This track uses that time to present the band’s more psychedelic edge and apt musicianship, though again this isn’t sustained across indulgent jams and I’d actually like to hear some of that musical self-obsession. I don’t, however, feel the comparisons with bands like Caravan and Soft Machine are that useful or fair, the former much more memorable in their melodic expansiveness [this is to do with length of songs] and lyrical playfulness, and the latter having a jazz expertise and innovation Syd Arthur aren’t actually attempting to emulate. The gentle vocal of Liam McGill is a grower and Syd Arthur is overall a fine band in its own right.

Wallpaper

This Wave

the sea is
the soft chords
much softer than
the shore behind

i am waiting
until the wave
much softer than
the soft chords
is as if
the shore behind

the sea is
both of us
strung out along
until this wave

Jimmy Cliff - Rebirth

One More From Jimmy

As many reviewers have noted, this is a buoyant and joyous record by the 64 year old Jimmy Cliff. I'm no reggae aficionado, and a number of songs on this album have strong pop elements, but its Jamaican roots and Cliff's distinctive vocal are as catchy and movement-making as one would expect from such an accessible new offering by the popular reggae great. His voice is often at its best pushed to its highest register where the slight strain is not disguised, as on the beautiful Cry No More and the pulsating Bang. It is equally hypnotic when repeating the sounds of a wordless chorus, as on Children's Bread or Rebel Rebel. Opening track World Upside Down sounds like it has been transported straight from the 70s in both its reggae rhythms and lyrical musings on the state of the world. This is followed by a stand-out reggae beat in One More with its punchy brass and rousing background vocals.

John Sebastian - The Four Of Us: Top Fifty

Tie-dye Thinking

The sunshine melodic folkpop of The Lovin’ Spoonful always appealed to me, and in particular the beautiful singing of John Sebastian. Songs like Do You Believe In Magic, You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice, Daydream, Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind, Summer In The City, Darling Be Home Soon, You’re A Big Boy Now, She’s Is Still A Mystery and Younger Generation are all classics of what the band termed ‘good-time music’.

My affinity for Sebastian was not thwarted by the tie-dye naivety of his 1969 Woodstock incarnation because I too believed in its multi-coloured imaginings of a better tomorrow, with John singing I dreamed we all were alright in his stoned and spontaneous performance, and invoking the communal spirit of peace and love in his philosophical as well as good housekeeping advice:  Just love everybody all around ya and clean up a little garbage on your way out and everything’s gonna be alright.

The embodiment of this hippie nirvana was presented in Sebastian’s wonderful 1971 album The Four of Us and its title track suite that narrates fifteen minutes of quintessentially 60s/70s romantic love and hope. Side one rocks and rolls with Well Well Well, Black Snake Blues and Black Satin Kid, but it is the gorgeous folk of The Four Of Us on side two that caresses with its narrative of a hippie quest, a journey of self-discovery for John, then wife Catherine, and another couple Bart and Carolina Carpinelli. 

Sitting round a fireplace

We drew a smile across the States

We packed our truck with all our stuff

And four of us

Two to drive and two to sleep

Wrapped up in a rainbow sheet

And in the front my love will keep me

On the road and laughing

and thus begins the four-part central song cycle, interspersed with three various musical tangents: the Caribbean tones of Domenica with the Esso Trinidad Steel band, the Dr John assisted rock of Lashes LaRue, and the further sweet folk of Red Wing Colorado. Sebastian’s vocal is gorgeous in its earnest gentleness, and the central melody is one of his finest. I know it is twee and sentimental and, as I have already stated, naive. This is perhaps wholly embraced in the bland exclamation of Gee in the closing lines [!] but this is also the enduring charm of its wishful sincerity at a time when we all had the belief in such simple expectations and aspirations,

Yeah we finally made it home

And now the family’s on its own

Babies come and numbers grow

There’s more of us

Gee...we really miss those times

Seeing through each other’s eyes

Sure was nice

So here’s a little travelling song

Of talk that comes from dusk till dawn

So go and see and pass it on

Lest you miss it, lest it’s gone

Every lover keep your driver

On the road and laughing

Beyond Summer

all the summer beyond
and expecting something unknown
light glared through windows

and this is rarely the reason
in which the love
of awakening mountains

all helped the emphasis

Olympic Poems

110m Hurdles                 

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

                                           patt

it is all about the right stride        ern

it is all about the left stridamn     err

Olympic Poems

Omnium - Scratch Race

cat and mouse

cat and mouse

cat and mouse

cat and mouse

cat and mouse

ch     e         e

                              t             a                 h

GB Olympics Jingo Lingo, 2012

I've been enjoying the absolutely phenomenal London Olympics and especially the language of our national celebration of it: the adverbial pre-modifier absolutely dominating the attempts to articulate the quality of an experience which has then been further bolstered by  the adjectival phenomenal leading into whatever bathetic noun can only follow such linguistic if restricted exuberance.  Does this highlight the limits of our collective vocabulary or indeed the limits of language to capture this experience and reality? In observing this I am not being critical nor cynical. I think these Olympics have been everything superlative that language can only repeat/not wholly embrace in its attempts to articulate.

I thought Danny Boyle's opening ceremony was [place phenomenally positive platitude or neologism here please] and it made this American absolutely proud to also be British: so much of what shapes who I am was represented in Boyle's vision of our history and culture and politics. Even the buffoon Boris, interviewed post-ceremony on Channel 4, wanted to discuss the 'semiotics' of the presentation, joking he could use language like this on such a television channel, and in his inimitable accidental way also touching on how Boyle's filmic and storytelling expertise demonstrates how to overcome the limits of language.

I have only been annoyed by the compulsion of BBC commentators to question athletes failing to achieve gold, or a presumed medal, or to make it through to a final and so on as to what they did wrong and why they failed and how would they explain their disappointment! In this instance, language is geared to perfection to deflect such a miserable querying, and an instant Fuck Off would be absolutely and phenomenally apt.

Lonesome Sisters - Deep Water

The Basics

The harmonising and roots Country/Americana of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings is obviously not of their singular creation, but it is so clearly their popular shaping and consistently brilliant performance of its traditions that has influenced the contemporary lineage of similar performers with echoing musical proclivities.

Another in this line is the Lonesome Sisters, Sarah Hawker and Debra Clifford, who offer a more ragged harmonising in terms of timing but no less tight in its pitching. Their latest album Deep Water mixes self-penned tracks by both artists with the requisite sample of traditional songs, for example the a cappella version of Hungry and Faint and Poor by Amazing Grace composer John Newton. Other traditional sounds emanate from the instrumentation, like the gourd banjo played by Clifford on her composition Ooh Song. This and Clifford's other song 20 Doors are stripped to simple instrumentation and harmony to impress in the simplicity of their empathetic performances. Hawker generally takes lead vocal and also shares in the apt playing, with clawhammer banjo on three tracks, and harmonium on another three. It is basic, and basically superb.

Jeff Larson - The World Over

Easy on the Harmony, Burrs in the Diddly

Easy listening harmony that soothes rather than scorches - and Jeff Larson assures this generic sound with the support of Gary Beckley and Dewey Brunnel from America as well as further West Coastesque buttressing from Jedrah Schmidt, daughter of Eagle's Timothy, and Jeffrey Foskett who works with Biran Wilson. If any of the underpinning precursor sounds dominate, it's America, and such tracks are Midhaven Getaway, Monday Clouds Tuesday Rain and This Morning in Amsterdam. Hank Linderman and Bob Brozman provide the burrs within the album's velvet exterior with a range of guitars, including for Hank a Turbo Diddly, and for Bob a National Resophonic and a Bear Creek Hawaiian Slide. No, I don't know what the guitars are, but they all sound damn fine. A gentle album reflecting rather than forging.

Natalie Duncan - Devil in Me

Goldie Standard

Former reality-TV chancer Natalie Duncan has a real voice and proves her talent on this debut release. Channelled through the BBC's Godlie's Band: By Royal Appointment, that institution's television credentials perhaps underpin the authority of Duncan's emergence as a singer in her own right, though I have already acknowledged on this blog the X Factor's part in the revelation of Rebecca Ferguson - however, in both cases the talent is inherent and the programmes offered transport rather than transcendence.

This album is itself a reliable vehicle for Duncan's fine vocal, both gritty and full, and best represented on the strong opener and title track Devil In Me where Duncan is at her raunchiest peak with its unaccompanied start and then emotive breaks around classical piano riffs and bluesy horns. Later track Flower has a hint of Laura Nyro about it; Black Thorn with its acoustic guitar and hand claps foregrounds the grittier voice, and the sweet harmonies temper it all to excellence. There are seventeen tracks in all, and most have a jazz/blues inclination, but this does stretch the album out too far and the aural focus can be dissipated by too many neutral offerings.

John Martyn Jokes

I fell off stage in Spain once because I was drunk - and I got three encores

Joss Stone - The Soul Sessions Vol. 2

Stone Soul Picnic

Returning to the formula that launched Stone's singing career aged 16, this is a summer picnic spread with food from a more seasoned soul and a tasty treat from the seasoning of its predominantly soul roots. And its reassuring to say that the preceding line is more full of flash than Stone's honest and honestly very good interpretation and delivery throughout. It seems to me that there is a mature voice excelling here and never needing to indulge in vocal pyrotechnics, just empathy supported by both class production and excellent accompanying artists. Early reviews have seemed to be most positive and it would be refreshing to see Stone's clear talent recognised and encouraged through this wholly entertaining set. An early favourite from these Stone covers is the Cecil and Linda Womack song Teardrops, but that is also because it is such a beautifully written song.

Lock

The lock goes through the metal loop from the right,

not the left as you do it - though I know it locks in

both positions - and whilst this isn’t the only difference

that does not matter, there is more than metaphor in this

varying way we secure what is behind those doors.

It is the same with our eating diverse meals at our

differing times, or how each night as you go to sleep

I go to bed on the following day. And though we rise

at similar moments, it will be like this for the rest our

life, each of us heading for the equivalent place by

alternative routes.

                               So when I returned from being away

it seemed so much had been rearranged;

and whilst mere things remain as if the same

there is a sense that more has been forever changed.

Meat Market - Covent Garden

Another Hippie

Finally got to try the Dead Hippie burger at the Meat Market in Jubilee Hall at Covent Garden on Wednesday. Two beef patties, seeping juice and grease, winking pink, onions held: it was delicious. No queue, and great to sit up in the mezzanine watching the market surfers below. Next time it's the chili dog and the corn puppies [corn meal wrapped around polish sausage, deep fried]. My kinda food.