Quick Recap

Notes and comment and lessons from summer

The summer months used to be dreary in recordland, with labels big and small saving releases for the fall and the holidays. Not anymore. Since I jetted outtahere in the middle of July, each week has brought multiple projects that (at the least) expand our understanding of the artists and the times in which they worked. (Which, no surprise, were quite radically different from our current attention-strapped moment….). These projects have things to say about music, and (for lack of a better term) the philosophical orientations artists brought to making music.  In no particular order, here are a few highlights…..

Nina Simone: You’ve Got To Learn

Some songs are evergreens because of their haunting melodies or clever turns of phrase. Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” is evergreen because of the diverse ways its creator expressed rage through it. This performance, from a storied previously unreleased 1966 set at the Newport Jazz Festival, veers from the music-theater approach Simone employed on the most well-known version of the song, which was recorded in 1964 at Carnegie Hall. Here, she channels the emotion into a resolute, sometimes severe blues shuffle. Sounding more downcast and startled by the continuing racial tension and violence in America than she did two years before, Simone shows how elastic the tune can be, even as her regal phrases arrive soaked in anger and slightly terrified blues trembles.

Little Richard: I Am Everything (documentary).

At last we have a conclusive answer to this question: What’s more compelling? A bunch of musicologists and gender-studies academics talking speculatively about the challenges of being a queer supernova in 1950s rock and roll? Or Little Richard in live performance?

The footage is the draw of this film, and it’s spectacular – we follow as Richard Penniman goes from local curiosity in Macon Georgia to incandescent presence, gaining confidence (and chops!) at each point on the staircase of fame. Little Richard is sometimes described as the “architect” of rock and roll, and sure, that tag fits. But these clips highlight something more earthy and elemental: The exuberance he brought to his stage coupled with the exuberance he triggered (unleashed?) in his audience created an exotic joy that moved with neck-snapping velocity. Watching one performance and loopy TV-talk-show appearance after another, you couldn’t help but wonder if this type of contagious, riotously upbeat live-performance intensity exists anymore, anywhere on Planet Earth.

Shakti 50^th Anniversary Tour (live performance, New Jersey Performing Arts Center).

When the musicians of the Indian music/jazz fusion band Shakti took the stage for performances on a 50^th anniversary tour this summer, the setup looked pretty much like it did on the group’s first tour: Musicians sitting crosslegged on a riser just inches above the floor, in a three-sided box configuration. This wasn’t really stagecraft, though: It facilitated a degree of eye contact and non-verbal communication that’s vital to the execution of  the music.

It was powerful to witness founding members Zakir Hussain (tabla) and John McLaughlin (guitar) and the others exchanging looks as they explored the intricate and profoundly assymetrical structures derived from Indian classical music. Their faces sometimes betrayed the complexity of the forms, and, just as often, delight at the wild, ever-searching improvisations emerging from them. As the guitar melodies tumbled out and gave birth to subsequent deeper melodies and elaborations, the eyes went up. As crisp rhythmic motifs bounced from foreground to background to describe a fluid forcefield, the musicians volleyed glances to each other and the room at large, as if to glory in and share the serenity of the pulse. Everyone involved was attending to the fleeting fine points of a shape-shifting target, and it was one of those rare times when closing one’s eyes to engage the sublime sound wasn’t fully satisfying: The spirit of Shakti is rooted in cooperative engagement, and a hyper-alert, keen-eyed form of creativity. We need more of it.

Marvin Gaye: Let’s Get It On (Deluxe Digital Edition)

We tend to romanticize the ethos of music culture in the 1970s – the stylistically diverse triple-bill tours, the impromptu collaborations that started with a rock star crashed on a couch in some studio control room while his or her rock-star friends were working.

It was a rich era, but it wasn’t all last-minute happenstance: Many artists and producers were deeply intentional about the search for new sounds and new juxtapositions of sounds. This is the case made by a newly expanded digital edition of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On (1973): Its 18 previously unreleased tracks include a cache known to collectors as the David Van DePitte sessions, a series of Gaye originals arranged by DePitte and featuring pianist Herbie Hancock. The singer abandoned these before vocals were added in most cases, but the bones are sturdy — it represents an experimental spirit while being right inside what people would think of as “Marvin Gaye music.” Hancock sounds right at home in this context – there are a few smooth noodling moments, but most of the time he sounds like classic Herbie, providing enough sparkle to inspire the singer but not enough to get in the way. His playing here is a genreblind lesson in restraint.

Various Artists: Playing for the Man at the Door

This trove of field recordings represents a small part of the collection amassed by the untrained documentarian Robert “Mack” McCormick. Traveling throughout Texas and adjacent states in search of the blues and other styles during the 1960s, McCormick earned the trust of established musicians (this 3-disc Smithsonian Folkways set begins with a blistering “Mojo Hand” from Lightnin’ Hopkins) as well as accomplished players and singers who were known mainly to locals. McCormick had an open mind; he didn’t care about name talents, and was curious about pianists and gospel singers as well as the (many) hotshot guitarists he met.

Using basic recording equipment, McCormick logged both music and conversation with those he visited; some snippets are used to introduce the pieces where appropriate. The recordings are (for the most part) clear – even the hard-to-capture upright piano comes across decently on the rascally Kid Wiggins’ “Sugar Blues” and E.B. Busby’s brisk “Swanee River Boogie.” Among the more unusual tracks: “My Work Will Be Done” by the Spiritual Light Gospel Group and nearly two minutes from a “Medicine Show Pitch” by the fast-talking Murl “Doc” Webster.

Wayne Shorter: Zero Gravity (documentary).

Lately it seems like every once-known musical artist is the subject of a sober and earnest documentary. The line affixed to this one, a three-part look at the life and work of saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, describes it as a “cinematic ode.” That might sound pretentious but it’s exactly the precise description of the work – a whirlwind of straight documentary, philosophy lessons, animated fantasias into deep space, frank assessments from colleagues and collaborators, all wrapped up with disarmingly poignant and arrestingly beautiful music.

This not-entirely-linear narrative approach is temperamentally suited to Shorter, a whimsical cosmic trickster who created some of the most gorgeous ear-stretching compositions in jazz history. Do you yearn for a definition of jazz? Here’s Shorter: “Jazz is “I Dare You.”

The guiding notion here is the way Shorter’s lifelong dedication to pure creativity has spread to inspire legions of artists and thinkers far from jazz. The folks who were lucky enough to get a direct transmission, including members of his last quartet, speak in elegant ways about how they’ve been affected by Shorter. The folks who have picked up the inspiration from Shorter’s work are compelling as well. Every frame seems to underscore the film’s message that in addition to being a musician, Shorter was a rare meteoric singularity, a cosmic event in human form.

Eddie Bo: The Other Side of Eddie Bo (1977).

While we’re at it, here’s another torrid larger-than-life figure who defies easy classification (and shares history with both jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet and Little Richard): The New Orleans pianist and singer/songwriter Edwin Joseph Bocage, better known as Eddie Bo, whose mythic first album The Other Side of Eddie Bo was just rescued from oblivion by Tipitina’s Record Club.

Bo’s family was steeped in music (his cousins played with early jazz legend Sidney Bechet). Bo studied jazz piano but gravitated to blues and R&B, and began his recording career in the mid ‘50s with the first of a long string of singles, “Baby.” His 1956 regional hit, “I’m Wise,” was transformed by Little Richard into “Slippin’ and Slidin,” a success that brought Bo more national attention and work as a songwriter and producer for other artists. The only single under his own name to reach the national charts was “Hook & Sling Pts. 1 & 2,” from 1969.

Still, it took Bo a while longer to make a full album. The Other Side of Eddie Bo reflects the ascendence of funk and the rapid evolution of New Orleans R&B that was guided by performers and producers like Allen Toussaint. Tracks like “Don’t Stop It” and “Steppers Step” argue that Bo was more integral to those developments than was commonly understood at the time – he had a knack for bringing sophistication to simple dance tunes. The Other Side offers a glimpse of a lost chapter in music history, but it’s no dry scholarly lecture: Like so much from New Orleans, it’s a delirious hard-grooving multi-dimensional good time, from start to finish.

Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah (1976/77).

This week brought further fruit from an unlikely collaboration – between the pathfinding saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the electronic musician Sam Shephard, who works under the moniker Floating Points.

The duo’s placid and lovely Promises, which drew significant acclaim beyond jazz when it appeared in 2021, became one of Sanders’ most significant late projects. (He died in 2022). But according to this context-rich Giovanni Russonello story in the New York Times, Shepherd didn’t move immediately to other vistas: He convinced the label that issued Promises, Luaka Bop, to fill some gaps in Sanders’ catalog. The first of these is an intimate studio journey from 1976, featuring the saxophonist’s wife Bedria on harmonium and a few other players, that was released as Pharoah. After quickly disappearing from the marketplace, it was circulated by musicians and collectors in bootleg form, mostly on cassette. Then it was reissued briefly on CD in the ‘90s. Then it disappeared again.

The three-song album dwells on the contemplative side of Sanders’ output – over the enchanting drone phrase that anchors “Harvest Time,” the saxophonist uses broad low-register tones and slight recurring melodies to shape a kind of sermon. The new release augments the (nicely recorded) studio pieces with two arresting and epic versions of “Harvest Time” captured on a 1977 European tour.