Christmas Cry Baby

Had my first practice today with my first wah-wah pedal, the classic cry baby. Not sure why it has taken so long to get, but putting it on the Christmas list was obviously a good idea. 

Missed Moments

I know it's Chesterfield....couldn't find an Ipswich copy, but it must be generic

I didn't exactly 'miss' Hendrix playing Ipswich on 1st April, 1967, because I can't remember when I moved to England and Ipswich, but I do think it was later in the year. I wouldn't have been able to go anyway, being too young at 13 -  my parents wouldn't have allowed it. But what an incredibly eclectic, commercial line-up: imagine those there just to see Englebert. Hendrix did two numbers, Purple Haze and Wild Thing.

But I can't work out how I missed going to see Led Zeppelin. I really don't recall them playing Ipswich, and I'm sure I would have known. It's an amazing oversight. I can only recall seeing three other acts at St Matthews Baths Hall: Sandy Denny, Tir Na Nog, and......Sweet!

There's a very good audio recording of Stairway To Heaven from this '71 gig here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1i-tBFxfC8
There must be a bootleg of the whole concert out there somewhere.

I did, however, see many great bands at Ipswich and Felixstowe in the early 70s. Really must make a list one day, before it all disappears from memory.

Mike Cooper - The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper

Suggestive Sax

With the melody of Tim Buckley and the vocal sound of Country Joe McDonald, opening track Song for Abigail from The Machine Gun Co. With Mike Cooper, released in 1972, could seem as far musically from Cooper’s latest release [previous review] as it is in time. But it isn’t as clear as that: the biggest difference is in the vocal register where that earlier folk alto has dropped to a gutsier blues tenor; the guitar work is quite different though his definite skill is the same, and the jazzier improvisations indicate Cooper’s more experimental movement through his career, and of course in his recent work. Second track The Singing Tree would seem even more distinctly different – as relatively conventional – apart from the freeform sax solo running through its latter stages.

Third Midnight Words offers more of the McDonaldesque vocal warble, and a contemporary countryfolk tinge, though that pesky avant-garde saxophone asserts itself again. It’s the fifteen minutes of fourth track So Glad [That I Found You] which signals the more experimental trajectory Cooper would take and which I so enjoy in his latest release Radio Paradise. As a song, So Glad.. encapsulates the mix of the whole album: there is a straightforward folk melody, but this is wrapped within an opening jazz/funk/electronic salvo, and then after establishing that melodic centre at about four minutes in, there is a return at six minutes to a jazz improvisation where the saxophone of Geoff Hawkins [long time friend and collaborator], which has teased elsewhere, becomes a more prominent and wonderfully wild element squealing and screeching and reverberating. At twelve minutes there is a reprise of the ‘song’ and the track then draws to a slowing, freeform close.

Final number Lady Anne is a classic slice of folk beauty – but skewed by the saxophone here gently wailing as if there is a tension at breaking point between the directions it should take: the melodic, electric piano layered folk tune, or that light squeal of sax and what it suggests of beyond.

Jeff Beck & Joss Stone (2) Live at Mama Stones, Exeter, UK 13/12/12

Mike Cooper - Radio Paradise: Mike Cooper in Beirut

Deconstructed

This is special because it is special: the blues are in the mix always as a variable core, and the picked/slide guitar work is also at various moments distinct, precise and impressive [e.g. on fourth track Special Rider which is the most ‘conventional’ cut of the six on this album], but what delights and teases at the same brilliant time are the effects which are electronic and experimental – and for the geeks, perpetrated by use of Kaos Pad, Zoom Sampletrack, and Boss Pitch Shifter pedal.

I’m sure there are many precursor echoes of which I am totally unaware – though I want to stress this is overall a unique sound to me – but at times I am reminded of the Third Ear Band and their Music From Macbeth soundtrack. There is perhaps another touchstone with Captain Beefheart, especially on the 15 minute Migrant Song/Heartbreak Hotel. Cooper complements this brilliant guitar-with-effects sound with superb vocals as on opener If I Get Lucky, and these are even more central to the blues core.

The merging of Cooper’s playing on his acoustic and electric lap steel with the electronic manipulations is subtle in as much as neither dominates nor, if this makes sense, detracts from the other. Both are simultaneously distinct, and Cooper would seem to me to be virtuoso across both approaches as these are played and recorded in ‘real time’: there are reviews out there from those much more informed and adept at the technicalities of this playing should anyone reading this want to find out more. In my more layman’s aural understanding, and thinking of the recent death of Ravi Shankar, it occurs to me that these also have the repetitive and hypnotic effect of sitar ragas. My favourite track, and one which illustrates this merging perfectly, is second A Dream of Arrival. At eight minutes, the first four do mesmerise with looped and repeated sounds - scratches, bowed strings, other noises - then at 4.02 Cooper suddenly sings over this continued set of sounds [also picking and sliding more 'conventionally on his guitar], and it is a fulsome, jazzblues croon that is wonderful.

Whatever their technical intricacies and various genre mirroring, the six songs on the fine album are compulsive and absorbing listening. Here is difference with substance – and to be linguistically hip it would be fair to comment that Copper does deconstruct the familiar and makes it new. 

Photo taken by Greg Weight www.gregweightphoto.com.au 

Christmas Without Fritos

Christmas

without Fritos

is like trifle

without jello

like goodbye

without hello

like a pad

without brillo

like pleasure

with no dildo

like tugging

with no heave-ho

like a bed

with no pillow

like samosas

without filo

like Santa

without ho ho

like Christmas

without panto

like nonplussed

without so so

like brightness

without dayglow

like pace

without tempo

like misteaks

with no typo

like recorded

without TiVo

like striking

with no go-slow

like action

without say so

like the ark

with no dodo

like ink

with no biro

like pops

with no coco

like orienting

with no gyro

like moulding

without playdough

like a fax

with no filo

like up

without below

like a soul

with no window

like mad

without mellow

like a copse

with no hollow

like IBMs

with no silo

like Richard

with no Stilgoe

like an angel

with no halo

like gravy

without bisto

like a baton

with no maestro

like Buck

without Ratso

like a rabbit

without Darko

like a second

with no nano

like a march

with no demo

like Parker

with no alto

like reliving

without retro

like a nerd

without his/her saddo

like a sombrero cordobes                                 

without Zorro

like mud

with no wallow

like chicken

without Nando

like posh

without polo

like a virtuoso

with no solo

like H

without 2O

like coffee

with no bistro

like a diet

with no fatso

like flooring

without lino

like iconic

without Monroe

like the Prom

with no limo

like the Greeks

with no hero

like the Greeks

with no ouzo

like cause

without ergo

like le

with no assho

like suction

without lipo

like custard

without yellow

like a wheel

with no barrow

like zilch

without zero

like Steinbeck

with no hobo

like divining

without tarot
like a tomb
without its Pharoah

like yawning

without Dido

like fire

with no bellow

like Cuba

without Castro

like sleeping

without cocoa

like id

without ego

like a bulge
with no speedo
like Farah
with no-Mo

Al Green - Greatest Hits, 1975 - Top Fifty

The Reverend 

Released in 1975, this is the album that consolidated my appreciation of the brilliance of Al Green. I will have been aware of his genius during the early 70s with his string of hits, but this record collected the majority of those songs by which his distinctive silky soul funk has been defined.

As well as loving my poles of pretty folk/Americana and heavy rock, I have always also loved soul music [which is hardly an astonishing range]. I’ve written elsewhere that the first albums I bought were in fact Wilson Pickett, The Four Tops and an Atlantic soul selection, albums I threw/gave away after buying and feeling I had to adhere wholly, and ridiculously, to Hendrix and similar psychedelic, underground music – and those soul albums have subsequently been replaced. But I bought and kept the Green after that late 60s, teenage nonsense.

Whilst I haven't seen Al Green live, nor a great range of soul artists, I feel privileged that I did get to see The Stylistics, The Detroit Spinners, Sister Sledge and  Jimmy Ruffin, as well as Hot Chocolate [different soul skew, I know] a little later, and then the great The Isley Brothers, but much later in their career.

This preamble is probably somewhat of a filler as it is hard to describe at any illuminating length Al Green’s soul sound: it is so distinct and famous that the attempt does seem more superfluous than usual when writing about a genuinely great talent [Rolling Stone place him at 66 in their list 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time, but I’m sure I’d have him higher]. The relevance of the history of my love of soul is in how Green epitomised its spirit in those measured but funky grooves, the lyrics about enduring love, and the stunning expressive sweetness of his vocal.

It is that voice of course – quite restrained in terms of volume, but gliding around and around at his falsetto with such soulful feeling – yet those arrangements too: the funky female chorus interjections, stabs of horns, the rolling organ grooves. Movement encapsulated in music. Obviously it’s sexual.

The opening track Tired of Being Alone introduced those distinctive horn hits. Green groans and squeals as if he is right there in that moment, stuttering as he conveys his urge and need and the seduction of it all. Third I’m Still in Love With You lets the horns introduce again, then he almost whispers the premise of his singing – female vocal support echoing bits of the message – and there he goes again, emoting with such genuine yearning and persuasion, all wrapped up in the love.

Then there’s fifth How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. So slow, so pained, so glorious. The organ pumps brooding empathy in the background, strings layering their own pain, then menace [even a quick mimetic ‘breeze’]. And throughout, Green’s voice is all questioning and despair for mending, the repetition rising in an agonising rhetorical climb. Sixth Let’s Stay Together – here we go: horn jabs, organ wisps and rolls, a funkier rhythm, chorus supporting with together, good or bad, happy or sad, such reasoning in his declaration of that enduring love already mentioned as a key theme. 

The coolest picture there is of Green, so here it is again

I’ve purposefully focused on those slow, sensitive numbers. There are upbeat tracks, like the wonderful Here I Am [Come and Take Me] where the horns are more active and strutting throughout, the rhythm chugging within the familiar organ’s increased huff and puff, so an honourable mention here as well to Green’s musical collaborator/engineer/arranger Willie Mitchell.

All of this nostalgic revisiting of Green’s music during the soul 70s, and listening as I write this,  reminds me of how much I lived it then. As a longhair who headbanged to so much heavy rock of the time I also had my soul/disco alter-ego where I’d don a three-piece suit or velvet jacket and go to the local nightclub to dance so-smooth all night to those cool grooves. I’m sure it was smooth – even if in this picture I look rather foppish. I’m certain it is just an aberrant stance. And I don’t think those background flowers help.....

Jeff Beck - Performing This Week ... Live at Ronnie Scott's

Diurnal Jeff

Today has musically been a Jeff Beck celebration, listening mainly to the 2008 recording Jeff Beck - Performing This Week ... Live at Ronnie Scott's which is about as good as it gets for rock guitar at its greatest and showcasing Beck’s work over the years. I did also dip into the two Beck/Joss Stone collaborations on his quite eclectic 2010 album Emotion and Commotion, the tracks I Put a Spell on You and There’s No Other Me, the latter written by Stone and performed at last night’s gig.

As I type this I’m listening to Angel [Footsteps], and Beck gave a superb performance of this too last night, his subtlety on the slide, and the quiet of its emotive close, totally mesmerising. There is the ability to watch this whole concert live at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIwSt2R54Xs which I have also done today – dipping in and out really - and there is a fine example of the generous performance spirit I referenced in my previous review where Beck here raises his arms in adulation at the stunning bass work of the amazing Tal Wilkenfeld.

Favourite on this recording, though it is a nuanced call, is not surprisingly his brilliant merging of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat/Brush With The Blues. If you aren’t sure what Jeff Beck is all about, well here it is. 

Jeff and Tal