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4 episodes with Bud Shank
Del disco 'Bossa nova U.S.A.' (1963), del Dave Brubeck Quartet, 'Bossa nova U.S.A', 'Cool wind', 'Tender heart' y 'The trolley song'; del disco 'Cannonball´s bossa nova' (1963), del saxofonista Cannonball Adderley, 'Clouds', 'Batida diferente', 'Joyce´s samba' y 'O amor em paz'; del disco 'Collaboration' (1964), de The Modern Jazz Quartet con Laurindo Almeida, 'One note samba' y 'Foi a saudade'; del disco 'Do the bossa' (1964), del flautista Herbie Mann, 'Menina feia' y 'Deve ser amor' y, del disco recopilatorio 'Bossa nova years', del saxofonista y flautista Bud Shank, con grabaciones realizadas entre 1962 y 1965, 'Silk stop' e 'Ilusão'. Escuchar audio
Bossa nova con grabaciones de Stan Getz y Charlie Byrd ('Desafinado', 'O pato'), Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell y Herbie Mann ('Samba de uma nota só'), Paul Horn, Cal Tjader, Clare Fischer y Laurindo Almeida ('Se é tarde me perdoa'), Lalo Schifrin ('Silvia', 'Lalo´s bossa nova'), Herbie Mann y Baden Powell ('Consolação'), Ike Quebec ('Loie'), Sergio Mendes ('Tristeza de nós dois', 'Disa'), George Shearing ('Pensativa'), Paul Winter ('Insensatez'), Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank, Shelley Manne y Laurindo Almeida ('Chega de saudade'), Dave Brubeck ('Castilian blues'), Coleman Hawkins ('Um abraço no Bonfá), Luiz Bonfá ('Lamento no morro') y Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass ('Desafinado'). Escuchar audio
GERRY MULLIGAN “GERRY MULLIGAN QUARTET” Phil Turetsky's house, Los Angeles, August 29, 1952Bernie's tune, Lullaby of the leaves, Utter chaosChet Baker (tp) Gerry Mulligan (bar,arr) Bob Whitlock (b) Chico Hamilton (d) Los Angeles, October 15, 1952Nights at the turntable, Soft shoe, FreewayChet Baker (tp) Gerry Mulligan (bar,arr) Bob Whitlock (b) Chico Hamilton (d) PETE RUGOLO “RUGOLO PLAYS KENTON” Los Angeles, October 25 & 26, November 24, 1958Eager beaver, Artistry in rhythm, Capitol punishment, Southern scandal (1), Painted rhythm (1), Minor riff (1)Al Porcino, Ollie Mitchell, Buddy Childers, Don Fagerquist (tp) Milt Bernhart, Frank Rosolino, Harry Betts (tb) Ken Shroyer (btb) Red Callender (tu) Harry Klee, Bud Shank (as,fl) Bob Cooper (ts,oboe) Dave Pell (ts,cl) Chuck Gentry (bar,bcl) Claude Williamson (p) Howard Roberts (g) Don Bagley (b) Shelly Manne (d) Pete Rugolo (arr,cond KENTON PRESENTS JAZZ – BOB COOPER Los Angeles, May 14, 1954 The way you look tonight, Polka dots and moonbeams, Solo flight Bob Cooper (ts) Bud Shank (bar) Howard Roberts (g) Joe Mondragon (b) Shelly Manne (d) Los Angeles, July 30, 1954 She didn't say yes, When the sun comes out, Tongue twister (1) Bob Cooper (ts) Bud Shank (bar) Claude Williamson (p) Howard Roberts (g) Curtis Counce (b) Stan Levey (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 29 enero 2024 at PuroJazz.
GERRY MULLIGAN “GERRY MULLIGAN QUARTET” Phil Turetsky's house, Los Angeles, August 29, 1952Bernie's tune, Lullaby of the leaves, Utter chaosChet Baker (tp) Gerry Mulligan (bar,arr) Bob Whitlock (b) Chico Hamilton (d) Los Angeles, October 15, 1952Nights at the turntable, Soft shoe, FreewayChet Baker (tp) Gerry Mulligan (bar,arr) Bob Whitlock (b) Chico Hamilton (d) PETE RUGOLO “RUGOLO PLAYS KENTON” Los Angeles, October 25 & 26, November 24, 1958Eager beaver, Artistry in rhythm, Capitol punishment, Southern scandal (1), Painted rhythm (1), Minor riff (1)Al Porcino, Ollie Mitchell, Buddy Childers, Don Fagerquist (tp) Milt Bernhart, Frank Rosolino, Harry Betts (tb) Ken Shroyer (btb) Red Callender (tu) Harry Klee, Bud Shank (as,fl) Bob Cooper (ts,oboe) Dave Pell (ts,cl) Chuck Gentry (bar,bcl) Claude Williamson (p) Howard Roberts (g) Don Bagley (b) Shelly Manne (d) Pete Rugolo (arr,cond KENTON PRESENTS JAZZ – BOB COOPER Los Angeles, May 14, 1954 The way you look tonight, Polka dots and moonbeams, Solo flight Bob Cooper (ts) Bud Shank (bar) Howard Roberts (g) Joe Mondragon (b) Shelly Manne (d) Los Angeles, July 30, 1954 She didn't say yes, When the sun comes out, Tongue twister (1) Bob Cooper (ts) Bud Shank (bar) Claude Williamson (p) Howard Roberts (g) Curtis Counce (b) Stan Levey (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 29 enero 2024 at PuroJazz.
#231 Passaram bem o natal ? Bruno Bocayuva, João Valente e Júlio Adler desceram a chaminé com alguns mimos, cortesia do Tito, Dragão, Warshaw e voce mesmo que nos atura toda semana. A trilha ficou por conta dos Novos Baianos com Mistério do Planeta, Cleo Sol com When I'm in Your Arms e Bud Shank com Shoeless Beach Meeting. Que a noite de 31 seja suave, bela e magnífica como uma rasgada da Steph em Snapper. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/boia/message
MIKI YAMANAKA – SHADES OF RAINBOW Vancouver, BC, Canada, February 6, 2023That ain't Betty, Shades of rainbowMark Turner (ts) Miki Yamanaka (p,el-p,comp) Tyrone Allen (b) Jimmy Macbride (d) HERB ELLIS – MEETS JIMMY GUIFFREI Los Angeles, March 26, 1959Goose grease, When your lover has gone, Remember, You knowArt Pepper, Bud Shank (as) Richie Kamuca, Jimmy Giuffre (ts) Lou Levy (p) Herb Ellis (g) Jim Hall (rhythm-g) Joe Mondragon (b) Stan Levey (d) BAD PLUS & JOSHUA REDMAN – THE BAD PLUS/JOSHUA REDMAN Brooklyn, NY, July, 2012Dirty blonde, Silence is the question Joshua Redman (ts) Ethan Iverson (p) Reid Anderson (b) David King (d) Continue reading Puro Jazz 14 diciembre 2023 at PuroJazz.
A mediados de los años 60, músicos estadounidenses de jazz grabando bossa nova: Herbie Mann ('Deve ser amor', 'Menina feia'), Ike Quebec ('Loie', 'Me and you'), Modern Jazz Quartet con Laurindo Almeida ('One note samba', 'Foi a saudade'), Laurindo Almeida con Bud Shank ('Rio rhapsody', 'Nocturno', 'Atabâque'), Bud Shank con Clare Fischer ('O barquinho', 'Elizete'), Dave Brubeck ('Lamento') y Stan Kenton ('Eager beaver', 'Brasilia').Escuchar audio
Hablamos con Fernando Trueba y Javier Mariscal de su película 'Dispararon al pianista', que se estrena en los cines el día 6 de octubre. Una conversación con música de samba jazz de João Donato ('Muito à vontade', Minha saudade'), Tamba Trio ('Influência do jazz'), Tenório Jr. ('Embalo', 'Nebulosa'', 'Fim de semana em Eldorado', 'Sambinha'), Bud Shank & Clare Fischer ('Samba da borboletta') y João Donato & Paulo Moura ('Copacabana'). Escuchar audio
La mezcla con la samba, en los años sesenta, entusiasmó a los músicos estadounidenses de jazz: Cal Tjader ('Aquarius'), Paul Desmond ('Marta e Romão'), Wes Montgomery ('Moça flor'), Oscar Peterson ('Wave'), Quincy Jones ('Samba de uma nota só', 'Lalo bossa nova', 'Desafinado'), Coleman Hawkins ('Desafinado', 'Stumpy bossa nova'), Stan Gezt & Charlie Byrd ('Samba dees days', 'Samba triste'), Bud Shank & Clare Ficher ('Samba da borboletta', 'Ilusão', 'Pensativa') y Zoot Sims ('Recado bossa nova part.1'). Escuchar audio
João Donato foi um dos maiores gênios da nossa música. Começou ainda no período formador da Bossa Nova e sendo um dos personagens da própria cena, mas mesmo assim nunca se pensou parte do movimento, desde o começo Donato misturava muitos estilos e ritmos regionais variados. Se tinha o samba, jazz, bossa, samba-canção, tinha também, choro, forró, baião. Não é por acaso que Donato primeiro de tudo foi um acordeonista, depois pianista e multi-intstrumentista. João viaja pros Eua nos anos 60 e entra em contato com o jazz latino de Mongo Santamria, Carl Tjader, Joohny Martines, Tito Puente, volta pro Brasil e grava dois discos de bossa com seu trio. Bossa, mas com esses ingredientes calientes caribenhos, “Muito à vontade” e “A bossa muito moderna de João Donato”. Depois volta pros Eua e toca com Bud Shank, Herbie Mann, Ron Carter, Eumir Deodato, Rosinha Valencia. Volta pro Brasil nos em 72, dois anos depois de gravar o disco fusion psicodélico “A bad Donato” nos EUA ainda, e grava “Quem é Quem” e “Lugar Comum”, e é principalmente desse disco que vamos falar. Nessa fase, principalmente em “Lugar Comum”, João entra forte em um universo afro brasileiro, de ancestralidade e ritmos africanos. Tudo isso junto com bossa, funk, baião e etc. Isso tudo se deve muito ao fato de Gilberto Gil ser parceiro da maioria das composições . Nessa época João se antenou com o pós-tropicalismo e foi tocar e arranjar, compor com os Baianos Caetano e Gil. O disco Cantar da Gal é arranjado inteiro por João, mas a gente fala principalmente aqui de“Lugar Comum”, de 1975. Bora lá, aperta o play!MúsicasBaião da GaroaSe Acaso Você ChegasseBluchangaThe FrogChorou ChorouBananeiraEmoriô A Bruxa de MentiraÊ meninaNaturalmenteTudo TemXangô é de BaêPatumbalacundêSegue a gente lá no insta: @umpaposobresom Produção: Baioque ConteúdoRoteiro e apresentação: Pedro SchwarczDireção: Newman CostaEdição: Felipe CaldoRedação: Luiz Fujita e Paulo BorgiaArte: CRIO.LAH
La flauta es un instrumento secundario para muchos saxofonistas, algunos lo han transformado en su especialidad o lo tocan en forma exclusiva.Definimos la flauta y sus diferentes tipos y escuchamos a Frank Wess, Bud Shank, Yusef Lateef, Sam Most, Herbie Mann y otros. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A principios de los años sesenta muchas cosas se etiquetaban como 'bossa nova' por el impacto de la música nacida en Río de Janeiro. Grabaciones de aquellos días en Estados de Quincy Jones ('Soul bossa nova', 'Lalo´s bossa nova'), Lalo Schifrin ('Lalo´s bossa nova', 'Bossa cha chá'), Coleman Hawkins ('Stumpin bossa nova'), Zoot Sims ('Recado bossa nova I', 'Recado bossa nova II'), Dizzy Gillespie ('In a shanty in old shanty town', 'One note samba'), Ike Quebec ('Me 'n you', 'Loie'), Bud Shank & Clare Fischer ('Pensativa'), Stan Kenton ('Eager beaver'), Dave Brubeck ('Bossa USA') y Joe Henderson ('Blue bossa'). Escuchar audio
Tonight's program features Lester Young and Billie Holiday from the 1940s in the first half. We'll year Young with the Kansas City Six, with Nat "King" Cole and Buddy Rich, and accompanying Holiday. West Coast cool in the second half: Bud Shank, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz with Kenny Barron, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, and Victor Biglione.
Ritorna “Note sulle note”, il programma musicale settimanale, nel quale annoto per voi piccoli appunti prima di lasciarvi ai brani scelti, che di puntata in puntata andiamo a conoscere. Oggi tratteremo il Jazz Samba Bossa Nova. Con Jazz Samba si intende un particolare stile musicale che fonde il jazz con i ritmi, gli strumenti, la melodia tipici della Bossa Nova brasiliana. Il suo nome deriva da quello che è ritenuto il primo disco del genere: “Jazz Samba” di Stone Getz e Charlie Byrd, datato 1962. In precedenza, nell'ambito della musica, il termine Samba indicava brani normalmente ballabili suonati da grandi orchestre, su ritmi tropicali tipici del Carnevale e del folclore carioca. Negli Stati Uniti, intorno ai primi anni '40, il grande successo della ballerina e attrice Carmen Miranda impose la musica ed il folclore brasiliano. Molti di voi ricorderanno i suoi copricapi “Tuttifrutti”, soprattutto un casco di banane che usava per rimediare alla sua piccola statura. Paradossalmente Carmen Miranda era portoghese, ma diventò il simbolo dello stile di vita di Rio de Janeiro e di Copacabana. Con Vinicius de Moraes ed altri musicisti, divenne nota la Bossa Nova, che pian piano si fuse con il Jazz ed i ritmi brasiliani. Lo stile “Bossa Nova” è spesso associato alla musica da “Night Club”, come forma di musica d'intrattenimento, ovvero d'atmosfera. Andremo ad ascoltare: “Desafinado” (Astrud Gilberto, Joao Gilberto), “Brazil”(Antonio Carlos Jobim), “Samba Batucada” (Sergio Mendez), “Deve Ser Amor” (Herbie Mann), “Caculinha” (Holhar De Mulher), “Samba da bencao” (Vinicius de Moraes), “Samba de uma nota so” (Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz), “Mas que nada” (Dizzie Gillespie), “Inquietacao”(Laurinda Almeida e Bud Shank), “Misty” (Bud Shank), “The girl from Ipanema” (Antonio Carlos Jobim). Buon ascolto da Lorella Turchetto Michieli. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/radio-nostra/support
My 2002 BBC Radio 2 documentary series, “The Arrangers”, featured this documentary and my exclusive interview with Composer/Arranger PETE RUGOLO. He studied with Darius Milhaud, and had a long association with the STAN KENTON orchestra, becoming one of the most influential composers in modern jazz. He went on to produce and arrange for stars such as June Christy, The Four Freshmen and Nat King Cole, and write brilliant scores for film and TV including The Fugitive, The Untouchables, and Richard Diamond. As A&R for Capitol, he signed and produced the Miles Davis project known as “The Birth of the Cool”, enabling music that created the “cool school” of jazz. Here is his fascinating story, in his own words, assisted by contributions from Gene Lees, Stephanie Stein Crease, and Bud Shank. PETE RUGOLO – EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – Kenton, Cole and MILES! Watch this episode in video HERE #peterugolo #richardniles #radiorichard #richardnilesinterview #milesdavis #thefugitive #theuntouchables Please Like, Share, and Subscribe to our YouTube channel HERE Buy Richard's acclaimed books HERE Buy Richard's astounding music HERE Check our channel's official online shop for great & exclusive memorabilia HERE Send me enough for a cup of coffee at The Ritz to keep our Radio Richard growing: Via PayPal Via Patreon Radio Richard Theme ©2020 Niles Smiles Music (BMI) By Richard Niles, Performed by Kim Chandler & Richard Niles
We start season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs with an extra-long look at "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, and at the Monterey Pop Festival, and the careers of the Mamas and the Papas and P.F. Sloan. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Up, Up, and Away" by the 5th Dimension. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Scott McKenzie's first album is available here. There are many compilations of the Mamas and the Papas' music, but sadly none that are in print in the UK have the original mono mixes. This set is about as good as you're going to find, though, for the stereo versions. Information on the Mamas and the Papas came from Go Where You Wanna Go: The Oral History of The Mamas and the Papas by Matthew Greenwald, California Dreamin': The True Story Of The Mamas and Papas by Michelle Phillips, and Papa John by John Phillips and Jim Jerome. Information on P.F. Sloan came from PF - TRAVELLING BAREFOOT ON A ROCKY ROAD by Stephen McParland and What's Exactly the Matter With Me? by P.F. Sloan and S.E. Feinberg. The film of the Monterey Pop Festival is available on this Criterion Blu-Ray set. Sadly the CD of the performances seems to be deleted. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Welcome to season four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. It's good to be back. Before we start this episode, I just want to say one thing. I get a lot of credit at times for the way I don't shy away from dealing with the more unsavoury elements of the people being covered in my podcast -- particularly the more awful men. But as I said very early on, I only cover those aspects of their life when they're relevant to the music, because this is a music podcast and not a true crime podcast. But also I worry that in some cases this might mean I'm giving a false impression of some people. In the case of this episode, one of the central figures is John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Now, Phillips has posthumously been accused of some truly monstrous acts, the kind of thing that is truly unforgivable, and I believe those accusations. But those acts didn't take place during the time period covered by most of this episode, so I won't be covering them here -- but they're easily googlable if you want to know. I thought it best to get that out of the way at the start, so no-one's either anxiously waiting for the penny to drop or upset that I didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room. Separately, this episode will have some discussion of fatphobia and diet culture, and of a death that is at least in part attributable to those things. Those of you affected by that may want to skip this one or read the transcript. There are also some mentions of drug addiction and alcoholism. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things that causes problems with rock history is the tendency of people to have selective memories, and that's never more true than when it comes to the Summer of Love, summer of 1967. In the mythology that's built up around it, that was a golden time, the greatest time ever, a period of peace and love where everything was possible, and the world looked like it was going to just keep on getting better. But what that means, of course, is that the people remembering it that way do so because it was the best time of their lives. And what happens when the best time of your life is over in one summer? When you have one hit and never have a second, or when your band splits up after only eighteen months, and you have to cope with the reality that your best years are not only behind you, but they weren't even best years, but just best months? What stories would you tell about that time? Would you remember it as the eve of destruction, the last great moment before everything went to hell, or would you remember it as a golden summer, full of people with flowers in their hair? And would either really be true? [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco"] Other than the city in which they worked, there are a few things that seem to characterise almost all the important figures on the LA music scene in the middle part of the 1960s. They almost all seem to be incredibly ambitious, as one might imagine. There seem to be a huge number of fantasists among them -- people who will not only choose the legend over reality when it suits them, but who will choose the legend over reality even when it doesn't suit them. And they almost all seem to have a story about being turned down in a rude and arrogant manner by Lou Adler, usually more or less the same story. To give an example, I'm going to read out a bit of Ray Manzarek's autobiography here. Now, Manzarek uses a few words that I can't use on this podcast and keep a clean rating, so I'm just going to do slight pauses when I get to them, but I'll leave the words in the transcript for those who aren't offended by them: "Sometimes Jim and Dorothy and I went alone. The three of us tried Dunhill Records. Lou Adler was the head man. He was shrewd and he was hip. He had the Mamas and the Papas and a big single with Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction.' He was flush. We were ushered into his office. He looked cool. He was California casually disheveled and had the look of a stoner, but his eyes were as cold as a shark's. He took the twelve-inch acetate demo from me and we all sat down. He put the disc on his turntable and played each cut…for ten seconds. Ten seconds! You can't tell jack [shit] from ten seconds. At least listen to one of the songs all the way through. I wanted to rage at him. 'How dare you! We're the Doors! This is [fucking] Jim Morrison! He's going to be a [fucking] star! Can't you see that? Can't you see how [fucking] handsome he is? Can't you hear how groovy the music is? Don't you [fucking] get it? Listen to the words, man!' My brain was a boiling, lava-filled Jell-O mold of rage. I wanted to eviscerate that shark. The songs he so casually dismissed were 'Moonlight Drive,' 'Hello, I Love You,' 'Summer's Almost Gone,' 'End of the Night,' 'I Looked at You,' 'Go Insane.' He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song—maybe twenty seconds on 'Hello, I Love You' (I took that as an omen of potential airplay)—and we were dismissed out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked. We stood up, the three of us, and Jim, with a wry and knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and coolly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man. We don't want to be *used*, anyway.'" Now, as you may have gathered from the episode on the Doors, Ray Manzarek was one of those print-the-legend types, and that's true of everyone who tells similar stories about Lou Alder. But... there are a *lot* of people who tell similar stories about Lou Adler. One of those was Phil Sloan. You can get an idea of Sloan's attitude to storytelling from a story he always used to tell. Shortly after he and his family moved to LA from New York, he got a job selling newspapers on a street corner on Hollywood Boulevard, just across from Schwab's Drug Store. One day James Dean drove up in his Porsche and made an unusual request. He wanted to buy every copy of the newspaper that Sloan had -- around a hundred and fifty copies in total. But he only wanted one article, something in the entertainment section. Sloan didn't remember what the article was, but he did remember that one of the headlines was on the final illness of Oliver Hardy, who died shortly afterwards, and thought it might have been something to do with that. Dean was going to just clip that article from every copy he bought, and then he was going to give all the newspapers back to Sloan to sell again, so Sloan ended up making a lot of extra money that day. There is one rather big problem with that story. Oliver Hardy died in August 1957, just after the Sloan family moved to LA. But James Dean died in September 1955, two years earlier. Sloan admitted that, and said he couldn't explain it, but he was insistent. He sold a hundred and fifty newspapers to James Dean two years after Dean's death. When not selling newspapers to dead celebrities, Sloan went to Fairfax High School, and developed an interest in music which was mostly oriented around the kind of white pop vocal groups that were popular at the time, groups like the Kingston Trio, the Four Lads, and the Four Aces. But the record that made Sloan decide he wanted to make music himself was "Just Goofed" by the Teen Queens: [Excerpt: The Teen Queens, "Just Goofed"] In 1959, when he was fourteen, he saw an advert for an open audition with Aladdin Records, a label he liked because of Thurston Harris. He went along to the audition, and was successful. His first single, released as by Flip Sloan -- Flip was a nickname, a corruption of "Philip" -- was produced by Bumps Blackwell and featured several of the musicians who played with Sam Cooke, plus Larry Knechtel on piano and Mike Deasey on guitar, but Aladdin shut down shortly after releasing it, and it may not even have had a general release, just promo copies. I've not been able to find a copy online anywhere. After that, he tried Arwin Records, the label that Jan and Arnie recorded for, which was owned by Marty Melcher (Doris Day's husband and Terry Melcher's stepfather). Melcher signed him, and put out a single, "She's My Girl", on Mart Records, a subsidiary of Arwin, on which Sloan was backed by a group of session players including Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston: [Excerpt: Philip Sloan, "She's My Girl"] That record didn't have any success, and Sloan was soon dropped by Mart Records. He went on to sign with Blue Bird Records, which was as far as can be ascertained essentially a scam organisation that would record demos for songwriters, but tell the performers that they were making a real record, so that they would record it for the royalties they would never get, rather than for a decent fee as a professional demo singer would get. But Steve Venet -- the brother of Nik Venet, and occasional songwriting collaborator with Tommy Boyce -- happened to come to Blue Bird one day, and hear one of Sloan's original songs. He thought Sloan would make a good songwriter, and took him to see Lou Adler at Columbia-Screen Gems music publishing. This was shortly after the merger between Columbia-Screen Gems and Aldon Music, and Adler was at this point the West Coast head of operations, subservient to Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, but largely left to do what he wanted. The way Sloan always told the story, Venet tried to get Adler to sign Sloan, but Adler said his songs stunk and had no commercial potential. But Sloan persisted in trying to get a contract there, and eventually Al Nevins happened to be in the office and overruled Adler, much to Adler's disgust. Sloan was signed to Columbia-Screen Gems as a songwriter, though he wasn't put on a salary like the Brill Building songwriters, just told that he could bring in songs and they would publish them. Shortly after this, Adler suggested to Sloan that he might want to form a writing team with another songwriter, Steve Barri, who had had a similar non-career non-trajectory, but was very slightly further ahead in his career, having done some work with Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears. Barri had co-written a couple of flop singles for Connors, before the two of them had formed a vocal group, the Storytellers, with Connors' sister. The Storytellers had released a single, "When Two People (Are in Love)" , which was put out on a local independent label and which Adler had licensed to be released on Dimension Records, the label associated with Aldon Music: [Excerpt: The Storytellers "When Two People (Are in Love)"] That record didn't sell, but it was enough to get Barri into the Columbia-Screen Gems circle, and Adler set him and Sloan up as a songwriting team -- although the way Sloan told it, it wasn't so much a songwriting team as Sloan writing songs while Barri was also there. Sloan would later claim "it was mostly a collaboration of spirit, and it seemed that I was writing most of the music and the lyric, but it couldn't possibly have ever happened unless both of us were present at the same time". One suspects that Barri might have a different recollection of how it went... Sloan and Barri's first collaboration was a song that Sloan had half-written before they met, called "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann", which was recorded by a West Coast Chubby Checker knockoff who went under the name Round Robin, and who had his own dance craze, the Slauson, which was much less successful than the Twist: [Excerpt: Round Robin, "Kick that Little Foot Sally Ann"] That track was produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche, and Nitzsche asked Sloan to be one of the rhythm guitarists on the track, apparently liking Sloan's feel. Sloan would end up playing rhythm guitar or singing backing vocals on many of the records made of songs he and Barri wrote together. "Kick That Little Foot Sally Ann" only made number sixty-one nationally, but it was a regional hit, and it meant that Sloan and Barri soon became what Sloan later described as "the Goffin and King of the West Coast follow-ups." According to Sloan "We'd be given a list on Monday morning by Lou Adler with thirty names on it of the groups who needed follow-ups to their hit." They'd then write the songs to order, and they started to specialise in dance craze songs. For example, when the Swim looked like it might be the next big dance, they wrote "Swim Swim Swim", "She Only Wants to Swim", "Let's Swim Baby", "Big Boss Swimmer", "Swim Party" and "My Swimmin' Girl" (the last a collaboration with Jan Berry and Roger Christian). These songs were exactly as good as they needed to be, in order to provide album filler for mid-tier artists, and while Sloan and Barri weren't writing any massive hits, they were doing very well as mid-tier writers. According to Sloan's biographer Stephen McParland, there was a three-year period in the mid-sixties where at least one song written or co-written by Sloan was on the national charts at any given time. Most of these songs weren't for Columbia-Screen Gems though. In early 1964 Lou Adler had a falling out with Don Kirshner, and decided to start up his own company, Dunhill, which was equal parts production company, music publishers, and management -- doing for West Coast pop singers what Motown was doing for Detroit soul singers, and putting everything into one basket. Dunhill's early clients included Jan and Dean and the rockabilly singer Johnny Rivers, and Dunhill also signed Sloan and Barri as songwriters. Because of this connection, Sloan and Barri soon became an important part of Jan and Dean's hit-making process. The Matadors, the vocal group that had provided most of the backing vocals on the duo's hits, had started asking for more money than Jan Berry was willing to pay, and Jan and Dean couldn't do the vocals themselves -- as Bones Howe put it "As a singer, Dean is a wonderful graphic artist" -- and so Sloan and Barri stepped in, doing session vocals without payment in the hope that Jan and Dean would record a few of their songs. For example, on the big hit "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", Dean Torrence is not present at all on the record -- Jan Berry sings the lead vocal, with Sloan doubling him for much of it, Sloan sings "Dean"'s falsetto, with the engineer Bones Howe helping out, and the rest of the backing vocals are sung by Sloan, Barri, and Howe: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] For these recordings, Sloan and Barri were known as The Fantastic Baggys, a name which came from the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Oldham and Mick Jagger, when the two were visiting California. Oldham had been commenting on baggys, the kind of shorts worn by surfers, and had asked Jagger what he thought of The Baggys as a group name. Jagger had replied "Fantastic!" and so the Fantastic Baggys had been born. As part of this, Sloan and Barri moved hard into surf and hot-rod music from the dance songs they had been writing previously. The Fantastic Baggys recorded their own album, Tell 'Em I'm Surfin', as a quickie album suggested by Adler: [Excerpt: The Fantastic Baggys, "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'"] And under the name The Rally Packs they recorded a version of Jan and Dean's "Move Out Little Mustang" which featured Berry's girlfriend Jill Gibson doing a spoken section: [Excerpt: The Rally Packs, "Move Out Little Mustang"] They also wrote several album tracks for Jan and Dean, and wrote "Summer Means Fun" for Bruce and Terry -- Bruce Johnston, later of the Beach Boys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] And they wrote the very surf-flavoured "Secret Agent Man" for fellow Dunhill artist Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But of course, when you're chasing trends, you're chasing trends, and soon the craze for twangy guitars and falsetto harmonies had ended, replaced by a craze for jangly twelve-string guitars and closer harmonies. According to Sloan, he was in at the very beginning of the folk-rock trend -- the way he told the story, he was involved in the mastering of the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man". He later talked about Terry Melcher getting him to help out, saying "He had produced a record called 'Mr. Tambourine Man', and had sent it into the head office, and it had been rejected. He called me up and said 'I've got three more hours in the studio before I'm being kicked out of Columbia. Can you come over and help me with this new record?' I did. I went over there. It was under lock and key. There were two guards outside the door. Terry asked me something about 'Summer Means Fun'. "He said 'Do you remember the guitar that we worked on with that? How we put in that double reverb?' "And I said 'yes' "And he said 'What do you think if we did something like that with the Byrds?' "And I said 'That sounds good. Let's see what it sounds like.' So we patched into all the reverb centres in Columbia Music, and mastered the record in three hours." Whether Sloan really was there at the birth of folk rock, he and Barri jumped on the folk-rock craze just as they had the surf and hot-rod craze, and wrote a string of jangly hits including "You Baby" for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] and "I Found a Girl" for Jan and Dean: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "I Found a Girl"] That song was later included on Jan and Dean's Folk 'n' Roll album, which also included... a song I'm not even going to name, but long-time listeners will know the one I mean. It was also notable in that "I Found a Girl" was the first song on which Sloan was credited not as Phil Sloan, but as P.F. Sloan -- he didn't have a middle name beginning with F, but rather the F stood for his nickname "Flip". Sloan would later talk of Phil Sloan and P.F. Sloan as almost being two different people, with P.F. being a far more serious, intense, songwriter. Folk 'n' Roll also contained another Sloan song, this one credited solely to Sloan. And that song is the one for which he became best known. There are two very different stories about how "Eve of Destruction" came to be written. To tell Sloan's version, I'm going to read a few paragraphs from his autobiography: "By late 1964, I had already written ‘Eve Of Destruction,' ‘The Sins Of A Family,' ‘This Mornin',' ‘Ain't No Way I'm Gonna Change My Mind,' and ‘What's Exactly The Matter With Me?' They all arrived on one cataclysmic evening, and nearly at the same time, as I worked on the lyrics almost simultaneously. ‘Eve Of Destruction' came about from hearing a voice, perhaps an angel's. The voice instructed me to place five pieces of paper and spread them out on my bed. I obeyed the voice. The voice told me that the first song would be called ‘Eve Of Destruction,' so I wrote the title at the top of the page. For the next few hours, the voice came and went as I was writing the lyric, as if this spirit—or whatever it was—stood over me like a teacher: ‘No, no … not think of all the hate there is in Red Russia … Red China!' I didn't understand. I thought the Soviet Union was the mortal threat to America, but the voice went on to reveal to me the future of the world until 2024. I was told the Soviet Union would fall, and that Red China would continue to be communist far into the future, but that communism was not going to be allowed to take over this Divine Planet—therefore, think of all the hate there is in Red China. I argued and wrestled with the voice for hours, until I was exhausted but satisfied inside with my plea to God to either take me out of the world, as I could not live in such a hypocritical society, or to show me a way to make things better. When I was writing ‘Eve,' I was on my hands and knees, pleading for an answer." Lou Adler's story is that he gave Phil Sloan a copy of Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home album and told him to write a bunch of songs that sounded like that, and Sloan came back a week later as instructed with ten Dylan knock-offs. Adler said "It was a natural feel for him. He's a great mimic." As one other data point, both Steve Barri and Bones Howe, the engineer who worked on most of the sessions we're looking at today, have often talked in interviews about "Eve of Destruction" as being a Sloan/Barri collaboration, as if to them it's common knowledge that it wasn't written alone, although Sloan's is the only name on the credits. The song was given to a new signing to Dunhill Records, Barry McGuire. McGuire was someone who had been part of the folk scene for years, He'd been playing folk clubs in LA while also acting in a TV show from 1961. When the TV show had finished, he'd formed a duo, Barry and Barry, with Barry Kane, and they performed much the same repertoire as all the other early-sixties folkies: [Excerpt: Barry and Barry, "If I Had a Hammer"] After recording their one album, both Barrys joined the New Christy Minstrels. We've talked about the Christys before, but they were -- and are to this day -- an ultra-commercial folk group, led by Randy Sparks, with a revolving membership of usually eight or nine singers which included several other people who've come up in this podcast, like Gene Clark and Jerry Yester. McGuire became one of the principal lead singers of the Christys, singing lead on their version of the novelty cowboy song "Three Wheels on My Wagon", which was later released as a single in the UK and became a perennial children's favourite (though it has a problematic attitude towards Native Americans): [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Three Wheels on My Wagon"] And he also sang lead on their big hit "Green Green", which he co-wrote with Randy Sparks: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] But by 1965 McGuire had left the New Christy Minstrels. As he said later "I'd sung 'Green Green' a thousand times and I didn't want to sing it again. This is January of 1965. I went back to LA to meet some producers, and I was broke. Nobody had the time of day for me. I was walking down street one time to see Dr. Strangelove and I walked by the music store, and I heard "Green Green" comin' out of the store, ya know, on Hollywood Boulevard. And I heard my voice, and I thought, 'I got four dollars in my pocket!' I couldn't believe it, my voice is comin' out on Hollywood Boulevard, and I'm broke. And right at that moment, a car pulls up, and the radio is playing 'Chim Chim Cherie" also by the Minstrels. So I got my voice comin' at me in stereo, standin' on the sidewalk there, and I'm broke, and I can't get anyone to sign me!" But McGuire had a lot of friends who he'd met on the folk scene, some of whom were now in the new folk-rock scene that was just starting to spring up. One of them was Roger McGuinn, who told him that his band, the Byrds, were just about to put out a new single, "Mr. Tambourine Man", and that they were about to start a residency at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. McGuinn invited McGuire to the opening night of that residency, where a lot of other people from the scene were there to see the new group. Bob Dylan was there, as was Phil Sloan, and the actor Jack Nicholson, who was still at the time a minor bit-part player in low-budget films made by people like American International Pictures (the cinematographer on many of Nicholson's early films was Floyd Crosby, David Crosby's father, which may be why he was there). Someone else who was there was Lou Adler, who according to McGuire recognised him instantly. According to Adler, he actually asked Terry Melcher who the long-haired dancer wearing furs was, because "he looked like the leader of a movement", and Melcher told him that he was the former lead singer of the New Christy Minstrels. Either way, Adler approached McGuire and asked if he was currently signed -- Dunhill Records was just starting up, and getting someone like McGuire, who had a proven ability to sing lead on hit records, would be a good start for the label. As McGuire didn't have a contract, he was signed to Dunhill, and he was given some of Sloan's new songs to pick from, and chose "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?" as his single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "What's Exactly the Matter With Me?"] McGuire described what happened next: "It was like, a three-hour session. We did two songs, and then the third one wasn't turning out. We only had about a half hour left in the session, so I said 'Let's do this tune', and I pulled 'Eve of Destruction' out of my pocket, and it just had Phil's words scrawled on a piece of paper, all wrinkled up. Phil worked the chords out with the musicians, who were Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass." There were actually more musicians than that at the session -- apparently both Knechtel and Joe Osborn were there, so I'm not entirely sure who's playing bass -- Knechtel was a keyboard player as well as a bass player, but I don't hear any keyboards on the track. And Tommy Tedesco was playing lead guitar, and Steve Barri added percussion, along with Sloan on rhythm guitar and harmonica. The chords were apparently scribbled down for the musicians on bits of greasy paper that had been used to wrap some takeaway chicken, and they got through the track in a single take. According to McGuire "I'm reading the words off this piece of wrinkled paper, and I'm singing 'My blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'", that part that goes 'Ahhh you can't twist the truth', and the reason I'm going 'Ahhh' is because I lost my place on the page. People said 'Man, you really sounded frustrated when you were singing.' I was. I couldn't see the words!" [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] With a few overdubs -- the female backing singers in the chorus, and possibly the kettledrums, which I've seen differing claims about, with some saying that Hal Blaine played them during the basic track and others saying that Lou Adler suggested them as an overdub, the track was complete. McGuire wasn't happy with his vocal, and a session was scheduled for him to redo it, but then a record promoter working with Adler was DJing a birthday party for the head of programming at KFWB, the big top forty radio station in LA at the time, and he played a few acetates he'd picked up from Adler. Most went down OK with the crowd, but when he played "Eve of Destruction", the crowd went wild and insisted he play it three times in a row. The head of programming called Adler up and told him that "Eve of Destruction" was going to be put into rotation on the station from Monday, so he'd better get the record out. As McGuire was away for the weekend, Adler just released the track as it was, and what had been intended to be a B-side became Barry McGuire's first and only number one record: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction"] Sloan would later claim that that song was a major reason why the twenty-sixth amendment to the US Constitution was passed six years later, because the line "you're old enough to kill but not for votin'" shamed Congress into changing the constitution to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. If so, that would make "Eve of Destruction" arguably the single most impactful rock record in history, though Sloan is the only person I've ever seen saying that As well as going to number one in McGuire's version, the song was also covered by the other artists who regularly performed Sloan and Barri songs, like the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Eve of Destruction"] And Jan and Dean, whose version on Folk & Roll used the same backing track as McGuire, but had a few lyrical changes to make it fit with Jan Berry's right-wing politics, most notably changing "Selma, Alabama" to "Watts, California", thus changing a reference to peaceful civil rights protestors being brutally attacked and murdered by white supremacist state troopers to a reference to what was seen, in the popular imaginary, as Black people rioting for no reason: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Eve of Destruction"] According to Sloan, he worked on the Folk & Roll album as a favour to Berry, even though he thought Berry was being cynical and exploitative in making the record, but those changes caused a rift in their friendship. Sloan said in his autobiography "Where I was completely wrong was in helping him capitalize on something in which he didn't believe. Jan wanted the public to perceive him as a person who was deeply concerned and who embraced the values of the progressive politics of the day. But he wasn't that person. That's how I was being pulled. It was when he recorded my actual song ‘Eve Of Destruction' and changed a number of lines to reflect his own ideals that my principles demanded that I leave Folk City and never return." It's true that Sloan gave no more songs to Jan and Dean after that point -- but it's also true that the duo would record only one more album, the comedy concept album Jan and Dean Meet Batman, before Jan's accident. Incidentally, the reference to Selma, Alabama in the lyric might help people decide on which story about the writing of "Eve of Destruction" they think is more plausible. Remember that Lou Adler said that it was written after Adler gave Sloan a copy of Bringing it All Back Home and told him to write a bunch of knock-offs, while Sloan said it was written after a supernatural force gave him access to all the events that would happen in the world for the next sixty years. Sloan claimed the song was written in late 1964. Selma, Alabama, became national news in late February and early March 1965. Bringing it All Back Home was released in late March 1965. So either Adler was telling the truth, or Sloan really *was* given a supernatural insight into the events of the future. Now, as it turned out, while "Eve of Destruction" went to number one, that would be McGuire's only hit as a solo artist. His next couple of singles would reach the very low end of the Hot One Hundred, and that would be it -- he'd release several more albums, before appearing in the Broadway musical Hair, most famous for its nude scenes, and getting a small part in the cinematic masterpiece Werewolves on Wheels: [Excerpt: Werewolves on Wheels trailer] P.F. Sloan would later tell various stories about why McGuire never had another hit. Sometimes he would say that Dunhill Records had received death threats because of "Eve of Destruction" and so deliberately tried to bury McGuire's career, other times he would say that Lou Adler had told him that Billboard had said they were never going to put McGuire's records on the charts no matter how well they sold, because "Eve of Destruction" had just been too powerful and upset the advertisers. But of course at this time Dunhill were still trying for a follow-up to "Eve of Destruction", and they thought they might have one when Barry McGuire brought in a few friends of his to sing backing vocals on his second album. Now, we've covered some of the history of the Mamas and the Papas already, because they were intimately tied up with other groups like the Byrds and the Lovin' Spoonful, and with the folk scene that led to songs like "Hey Joe", so some of this will be more like a recap than a totally new story, but I'm going to recap those parts of the story anyway, so it's fresh in everyone's heads. John Phillips, Scott McKenzie, and Cass Elliot all grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few miles south of Washington DC. Elliot was a few years younger than Phillips and McKenzie, and so as is the way with young men they never really noticed her, and as McKenzie later said "She lived like a quarter of a mile from me and I never met her until New York". While they didn't know who Elliot was, though, she was aware who they were, as Phillips and McKenzie sang together in a vocal group called The Smoothies. The Smoothies were a modern jazz harmony group, influenced by groups like the Modernaires, the Hi-Los, and the Four Freshmen. John Phillips later said "We were drawn to jazz, because we were sort of beatniks, really, rather than hippies, or whatever, flower children. So we used to sing modern harmonies, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross. Dave Lambert did a lot of our arrangements for us as a matter of fact." Now, I've not seen any evidence other than Phillips' claim that Dave Lambert ever arranged for the Smoothies, but that does tell you a lot about the kind of music that they were doing. Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross were a vocalese trio whose main star was Annie Ross, who had a career worthy of an episode in itself -- she sang with Paul Whiteman, appeared in a Little Rascals film when she was seven, had an affair with Lenny Bruce, dubbed Britt Ekland's voice in The Wicker Man, played the villain's sister in Superman III, and much more. Vocalese, you'll remember, was a style of jazz vocal where a singer would take a jazz instrumental, often an improvised one, and add lyrics which they would sing, like Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross' version of "Cloudburst": [Excerpt: Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, "Cloudburst"] Whether Dave Lambert ever really did arrange for the Smoothies or not, it's very clear that the trio had a huge influence on John Phillips' ideas about vocal arrangement, as you can hear on Mamas and Papas records like "Once Was a Time I Thought": [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Once Was a Time I Thought"] While the Smoothies thought of themselves as a jazz group, when they signed to Decca they started out making the standard teen pop of the era, with songs like "Softly": [Excerpt, The Smoothies, "Softly"] When the folk boom started, Phillips realised that this was music that he could do easily, because the level of musicianship among the pop-folk musicians was so much lower than in the jazz world. The Smoothies made some recordings in the style of the Kingston Trio, like "Ride Ride Ride": [Excerpt: The Smoothies, "Ride Ride Ride"] Then when the Smoothies split, Phillips and McKenzie formed a trio with a banjo player, Dick Weissman, who they met through Izzy Young's Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village after Phillips asked Young to name some musicians who could make a folk record with him. Weissman was often considered the best banjo player on the scene, and was a friend of Pete Seeger's, to whom Seeger sometimes turned for banjo tips. The trio, who called themselves the Journeymen, quickly established themselves on the folk scene. Weissman later said "we had this interesting balance. John had all of this charisma -- they didn't know about the writing thing yet -- John had the personality, Scott had the voice, and I could play. If you think about it, all of those bands like the Kingston Trio, the Brothers Four, nobody could really *sing* and nobody could really *play*, relatively speaking." This is the take that most people seemed to have about John Phillips, in any band he was ever in. Nobody thought he was a particularly good singer or instrumentalist -- he could sing on key and play adequate rhythm guitar, but nobody would actually pay money to listen to him do those things. Mark Volman of the Turtles, for example, said of him "John wasn't the kind of guy who was going to be able to go up on stage and sing his songs as a singer-songwriter. He had to put himself in the context of a group." But he was charismatic, he had presence, and he also had a great musical mind. He would surround himself with the best players and best singers he could, and then he would organise and arrange them in ways that made the most of their talents. He would work out the arrangements, in a manner that was far more professional than the quick head arrangements that other folk groups used, and he instigated a level of professionalism in his groups that was not at all common on the scene. Phillips' friend Jim Mason talked about the first time he saw the Journeymen -- "They were warming up backstage, and John had all of them doing vocal exercises; one thing in particular that's pretty famous called 'Seiber Syllables' -- it's a series of vocal exercises where you enunciate different vowel and consonant sounds. It had the effect of clearing your head, and it's something that really good operetta singers do." The group were soon signed by Frank Werber, the manager of the Kingston Trio, who signed them as an insurance policy. Dave Guard, the Kingston Trio's banjo player, was increasingly having trouble with the other members, and Werber knew it was only a matter of time before he left the group. Werber wanted the Journeymen as a sort of farm team -- he had the idea that when Guard left, Phillips would join the Kingston Trio in his place as the third singer. Weissman would become the Trio's accompanist on banjo, and Scott McKenzie, who everyone agreed had a remarkable voice, would be spun off as a solo artist. But until that happened, they might as well make records by themselves. The Journeymen signed to MGM records, but were dropped before they recorded anything. They instead signed to Capitol, for whom they recorded their first album: [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "500 Miles"] After recording that album, the Journeymen moved out to California, with Phillips' wife and children. But soon Phillips' marriage was to collapse, as he met and fell in love with Michelle Gilliam. Gilliam was nine years younger than him -- he was twenty-six and she was seventeen -- and she had the kind of appearance which meant that in every interview with an older heterosexual man who knew her, that man will spend half the interview talking about how attractive he found her. Phillips soon left his wife and children, but before he did, the group had a turntable hit with "River Come Down", the B-side to "500 Miles": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "River Come Down"] Around the same time, Dave Guard *did* leave the Kingston Trio, but the plan to split the Journeymen never happened. Instead Phillips' friend John Stewart replaced Guard -- and this soon became a new source of income for Phillips. Both Phillips and Stewart were aspiring songwriters, and they collaborated together on several songs for the Trio, including "Chilly Winds": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Chilly Winds"] Phillips became particularly good at writing songs that sounded like they could be old traditional folk songs, sometimes taking odd lines from older songs to jump-start new ones, as in "Oh Miss Mary", which he and Stewart wrote after hearing someone sing the first line of a song she couldn't remember the rest of: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Oh Miss Mary"] Phillips and Stewart became so close that Phillips actually suggested to Stewart that he quit the Kingston Trio and replace Dick Weissman in the Journeymen. Stewart did quit the Trio -- but then the next day Phillips suggested that maybe it was a bad idea and he should stay where he was. Stewart went back to the Trio, claimed he had only pretended to quit because he wanted a pay-rise, and got his raise, so everyone ended up happy. The Journeymen moved back to New York with Michelle in place of Phillips' first wife (and Michelle's sister Russell also coming along, as she was dating Scott McKenzie) and on New Year's Eve 1962 John and Michelle married -- so from this point on I will refer to them by their first names, because they both had the surname Phillips. The group continued having success through 1963, including making appearances on "Hootenanny": [Excerpt: The Journeymen, "Stack O'Lee (live on Hootenanny)"] By the time of the Journeymen's third album, though, John and Scott McKenzie were on bad terms. Weissman said "They had been the closest of friends and now they were the worst of enemies. They talked through me like I was a medium. It got to the point where we'd be standing in the dressing room and John would say to me 'Tell Scott that his right sock doesn't match his left sock...' Things like that, when they were standing five feet away from each other." Eventually, the group split up. Weissman was always going to be able to find employment given his banjo ability, and he was about to get married and didn't need the hassle of dealing with the other two. McKenzie was planning on a solo career -- everyone was agreed that he had the vocal ability. But John was another matter. He needed to be in a group. And not only that, the Journeymen had bookings they needed to complete. He quickly pulled together a group he called the New Journeymen. The core of the lineup was himself, Michelle on vocals, and banjo player Marshall Brickman. Brickman had previously been a member of a folk group called the Tarriers, who had had a revolving lineup, and had played on most of their early-sixties recordings: [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Quinto (My Little Pony)"] We've met the Tarriers before in the podcast -- they had been formed by Erik Darling, who later replaced Pete Seeger in the Weavers after Seeger's socialist principles wouldn't let him do advertising, and Alan Arkin, later to go on to be a film star, and had had hits with "Cindy, O Cindy", with lead vocals from Vince Martin, who would later go on to be a major performer in the Greenwich Village scene, and with "The Banana Boat Song". By the time Brickman had joined, though, Darling, Arkin, and Martin had all left the group to go on to bigger things, and while he played with them for several years, it was after their commercial peak. Brickman would, though, also go on to a surprising amount of success, but as a writer rather than a musician -- he had a successful collaboration with Woody Allen in the 1970s, co-writing four of Allen's most highly regarded films -- Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery -- and with another collaborator he later co-wrote the books for the stage musicals Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. Both John and Michelle were decent singers, and both have their admirers as vocalists -- P.F. Sloan always said that Michelle was the best singer in the group they eventually formed, and that it was her voice that gave the group its sound -- but for the most part they were not considered as particularly astonishing lead vocalists. Certainly, neither had a voice that stood out the way that Scott McKenzie's had. They needed a strong lead singer, and they found one in Denny Doherty. Now, we covered Denny Doherty's early career in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, because he was intimately involved in the formation of that group, so I won't go into too much detail here, but I'll give a very abbreviated version of what I said there. Doherty was a Canadian performer who had been a member of the Halifax Three with Zal Yanovsky: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Land"] After the Halifax Three had split up, Doherty and Yanovsky had performed as a duo for a while, before joining up with Cass Elliot and her husband Jim Hendricks, who both had previously been in the Big Three with Tim Rose: [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] Elliot, Hendricks, Yanovsky, and Doherty had formed The Mugwumps, sometimes joined by John Sebastian, and had tried to go in more of a rock direction after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. They recorded one album together before splitting up: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] Part of the reason they split up was that interpersonal relationships within the group were put under some strain -- Elliot and Hendricks split up, though they would remain friends and remain married for several years even though they were living apart, and Elliot had an unrequited crush on Doherty. But since they'd split up, and Yanovsky and Sebastian had gone off to form the Lovin' Spoonful, that meant that Doherty was free, and he was regarded as possibly the best male lead vocalist on the circuit, so the group snapped him up. The only problem was that the Journeymen still had gigs booked that needed to be played, one of them was in just three days, and Doherty didn't know the repertoire. This was a problem with an easy solution for people in their twenties though -- they took a huge amount of amphetamines, and stayed awake for three days straight rehearsing. They made the gig, and Doherty was now the lead singer of the New Journeymen: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "The Last Thing on My Mind"] But the New Journeymen didn't last in that form for very long, because even before joining the group, Denny Doherty had been going in a more folk-rock direction with the Mugwumps. At the time, John Phillips thought rock and roll was kids' music, and he was far more interested in folk and jazz, but he was also very interested in making money, and he soon decided it was an idea to start listening to the Beatles. There's some dispute as to who first played the Beatles for John in early 1965 -- some claim it was Doherty, others claim it was Cass Elliot, but everyone agrees it was after Denny Doherty had introduced Phillips to something else -- he brought round some LSD for John and Michelle, and Michelle's sister Rusty, to try. And then he told them he'd invited round a friend. Michelle Phillips later remembered, "I remember saying to the guys "I don't know about you guys, but this drug does nothing for me." At that point there was a knock on the door, and as I opened the door and saw Cass, the acid hit me *over the head*. I saw her standing there in a pleated skirt, a pink Angora sweater with great big eyelashes on and her hair in a flip. And all of a sudden I thought 'This is really *quite* a drug!' It was an image I will have securely fixed in my brain for the rest of my life. I said 'Hi, I'm Michelle. We just took some LSD-25, do you wanna join us?' And she said 'Sure...'" Rusty Gilliam's description matches this -- "It was mind-boggling. She had on a white pleated skirt, false eyelashes. These were the kind of eyelashes that when you put them on you were supposed to trim them to an appropriate length, which she didn't, and when she blinked she looked like a cow, or those dolls you get when you're little and the eyes open and close. And we're on acid. Oh my God! It was a sight! And everything she was wearing were things that you weren't supposed to be wearing if you were heavy -- white pleated skirt, mohair sweater. You know, until she became famous, she suffered so much, and was poked fun at." This gets to an important point about Elliot, and one which sadly affected everything about her life. Elliot was *very* fat -- I've seen her weight listed at about three hundred pounds, and she was only five foot five tall -- and she also didn't have the kind of face that gets thought of as conventionally attractive. Her appearance would be cruelly mocked by pretty much everyone for the rest of her life, in ways that it's genuinely hurtful to read about, and which I will avoid discussing in detail in order to avoid hurting fat listeners. But the two *other* things that defined Elliot in the minds of those who knew her were her voice -- every single person who knew her talks about what a wonderful singer she was -- and her personality. I've read a lot of things about Cass Elliot, and I have never read a single negative word about her as a person, but have read many people going into raptures about what a charming, loving, friendly, understanding person she was. Michelle later said of her "From the time I left Los Angeles, I hadn't had a friend, a buddy. I was married, and John and I did not hang out with women, we just hung out with men, and especially not with women my age. John was nine years older than I was. And here was a fun-loving, intelligent woman. She captivated me. I was as close to in love with Cass as I could be to any woman in my life at that point. She also represented something to me: freedom. Everything she did was because she wanted to do it. She was completely independent and I admired her and was in awe of her. And later on, Cass would be the one to tell me not to let John run my life. And John hated her for that." Either Elliot had brought round Meet The Beatles, the Beatles' first Capitol album, for everyone to listen to, or Denny Doherty already had it, but either way Elliot and Doherty were by this time already Beatles fans. Michelle, being younger than the rest and not part of the folk scene until she met John, was much more interested in rock and roll than any of them, but because she'd been married to John for a couple of years and been part of his musical world she hadn't really encountered the Beatles music, though she had a vague memory that she might have heard a track or two on the radio. John was hesitant -- he didn't want to listen to any rock and roll, but eventually he was persuaded, and the record was put on while he was on his first acid trip: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"] Within a month, John Phillips had written thirty songs that he thought of as inspired by the Beatles. The New Journeymen were going to go rock and roll. By this time Marshall Brickman was out of the band, and instead John, Michelle, and Denny recruited a new lead guitarist, Eric Hord. Denny started playing bass, with John on rhythm guitar, and a violinist friend of theirs, Peter Pilafian, knew a bit of drums and took on that role. The new lineup of the group used the Journeymen's credit card, which hadn't been stopped even though the Journeymen were no more, to go down to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, along with Michelle's sister, John's daughter Mackenzie (from whose name Scott McKenzie had taken his stage name, as he was born Philip Blondheim), a pet dog, and sundry band members' girlfriends. They stayed there for several months, living in tents on the beach, taking acid, and rehearsing. While they were there, Michelle and Denny started an affair which would have important ramifications for the group later. They got a gig playing at a club called Duffy's, whose address was on Creeque Alley, and soon after they started playing there Cass Elliot travelled down as well -- she was in love with Denny, and wanted to be around him. She wasn't in the group, but she got a job working at Duffy's as a waitress, and she would often sing harmony with the group while waiting at tables. Depending on who was telling the story, either she didn't want to be in the group because she didn't want her appearance to be compared to Michelle's, or John wouldn't *let* her be in the group because she was so fat. Later a story would be made up to cover for this, saying that she hadn't been in the group at first because she couldn't sing the highest notes that were needed, until she got hit on the head with a metal pipe and discovered that it had increased her range by three notes, but that seems to be a lie. One of the songs the New Journeymen were performing at this time was "Mr. Tambourine Man". They'd heard that their old friend Roger McGuinn had recorded it with his new band, but they hadn't yet heard his version, and they'd come up with their own arrangement: [Excerpt: The New Journeymen, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Denny later said "We were doing three-part harmony on 'Mr Tambourine Man', but a lot slower... like a polka or something! And I tell John, 'No John, we gotta slow it down and give it a backbeat.' Finally we get the Byrds 45 down here, and we put it on and turn it up to ten, and John says 'Oh, like that?' Well, as you can tell, it had already been done. So John goes 'Oh, ah... that's it...' a light went on. So we started doing Beatles stuff. We dropped 'Mr Tambourine Man' after hearing the Byrds version, because there was no point." Eventually they had to leave the island -- they had completely run out of money, and were down to fifty dollars. The credit card had been cut up, and the governor of the island had a personal vendetta against them because they gave his son acid, and they were likely to get arrested if they didn't leave the island. Elliot and her then-partner had round-trip tickets, so they just left, but the rest of them were in trouble. By this point they were unwashed, they were homeless, and they'd spent their last money on stage costumes. They got to the airport, and John Phillips tried to write a cheque for eight air fares back to the mainland, which the person at the check-in desk just laughed at. So they took their last fifty dollars and went to a casino. There Michelle played craps, and she rolled seventeen straight passes, something which should be statistically impossible. She turned their fifty dollars into six thousand dollars, which they scooped up, took to the airport, and paid for their flights out in cash. The New Journeymen arrived back in New York, but quickly decided that they were going to try their luck in California. They rented a car, using Scott McKenzie's credit card, and drove out to LA. There they met up with Hoyt Axton, who you may remember as the son of Mae Axton, the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel", and as the performer who had inspired Michael Nesmith to go into folk music: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] Axton knew the group, and fed them and put them up for a night, but they needed somewhere else to stay. They went to stay with one of Michelle's friends, but after one night their rented car was stolen, with all their possessions in it. They needed somewhere else to stay, so they went to ask Jim Hendricks if they could crash at his place -- and they were surprised to find that Cass Elliot was there already. Hendricks had another partner -- though he and Elliot wouldn't have their marriage annulled until 1968 and were still technically married -- but he'd happily invited her to stay with them. And now all her friends had turned up, he invited them to stay as well, taking apart the beds in his one-bedroom apartment so he could put down a load of mattresses in the space for everyone to sleep on. The next part becomes difficult, because pretty much everyone in the LA music scene of the sixties was a liar who liked to embellish their own roles in things, so it's quite difficult to unpick what actually happened. What seems to have happened though is that first this new rock-oriented version of the New Journeymen went to see Frank Werber, on the recommendation of John Stewart. Werber was the manager of the Kingston Trio, and had also managed the Journeymen. He, however, was not interested -- not because he didn't think they had talent, but because he had experience of working with John Phillips previously. When Phillips came into his office Werber picked up a tape that he'd been given of the group, and said "I have not had a chance to listen to this tape. I believe that you are a most talented individual, and that's why we took you on in the first place. But I also believe that you're also a drag to work with. A pain in the ass. So I'll tell you what, before whatever you have on here sways me, I'm gonna give it back to you and say that we're not interested." Meanwhile -- and this part of the story comes from Kim Fowley, who was never one to let the truth get in the way of him taking claim for everything, but parts of it at least are corroborated by other people -- Cass Elliot had called Fowley, and told him that her friends' new group sounded pretty good and he should sign them. Fowley was at that time working as a talent scout for a label, but according to him the label wouldn't give the group the money they wanted. So instead, Fowley got in touch with Nik Venet, who had just produced the Leaves' hit version of "Hey Joe" on Mira Records: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Fowley suggested to Venet that Venet should sign the group to Mira Records, and Fowley would sign them to a publishing contract, and they could both get rich. The trio went to audition for Venet, and Elliot drove them over -- and Venet thought the group had a great look as a quartet. He wanted to sign them to a record contract, but only if Elliot was in the group as well. They agreed, he gave them a one hundred and fifty dollar advance, and told them to come back the next day to see his boss at Mira. But Barry McGuire was also hanging round with Elliot and Hendricks, and decided that he wanted to have Lou Adler hear the four of them. He thought they might be useful both as backing vocalists on his second album and as a source of new songs. He got them to go and see Lou Adler, and according to McGuire Phillips didn't want Elliot to go with them, but as Elliot was the one who was friends with McGuire, Phillips worried that they'd lose the chance with Adler if she didn't. Adler was amazed, and decided to sign the group right then and there -- both Bones Howe and P.F. Sloan claimed to have been there when the group auditioned for him and have said "if you won't sign them, I will", though exactly what Sloan would have signed them to I'm not sure. Adler paid them three thousand dollars in cash and told them not to bother with Nik Venet, so they just didn't turn up for the Mira Records audition the next day. Instead, they went into the studio with McGuire and cut backing vocals on about half of his new album: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire with the Mamas and the Papas, "Hide Your Love Away"] While the group were excellent vocalists, there were two main reasons that Adler wanted to sign them. The first was that he found Michelle Phillips extremely attractive, and the second is a song that John and Michelle had written which he thought might be very suitable for McGuire's album. Most people who knew John Phillips think of "California Dreamin'" as a solo composition, and he would later claim that he gave Michelle fifty percent just for transcribing his lyric, saying he got inspired in the middle of the night, woke her up, and got her to write the song down as he came up with it. But Michelle, who is a credited co-writer on the song, has been very insistent that she wrote the lyrics to the second verse, and that it's about her own real experiences, saying that she would often go into churches and light candles even though she was "at best an agnostic, and possibly an atheist" in her words, and this would annoy John, who had also been raised Catholic, but who had become aggressively opposed to expressions of religion, rather than still having nostalgia for the aesthetics of the church as Michelle did. They were out walking on a particularly cold winter's day in 1963, and Michelle wanted to go into St Patrick's Cathedral and John very much did not want to. A couple of nights later, John woke her up, having written the first verse of the song, starting "All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey/I went for a walk on a winter's day", and insisting she collaborate with him. She liked the song, and came up with the lines "Stopped into a church, I passed along the way/I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray/The preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm going to stay", which John would later apparently dislike, but which stayed in the song. Most sources I've seen for the recording of "California Dreamin'" say that the lineup of musicians was the standard set of players who had played on McGuire's other records, with the addition of John Phillips on twelve-string guitar -- P.F. Sloan on guitar and harmonica, Joe Osborn on bass, Larry Knechtel on keyboards, and Hal Blaine on drums, but for some reason Stephen McParland's book on Sloan has Bones Howe down as playing drums on the track while engineering -- a detail so weird, and from such a respectable researcher, that I have to wonder if it might be true. In his autobiography, Sloan claims to have rewritten the chord sequence to "California Dreamin'". He says "Barry Mann had unintentionally showed me a suspended chord back at Screen Gems. I was so impressed by this beautiful, simple chord that I called Brian Wilson and played it for him over the phone. The next thing I knew, Brian had written ‘Don't Worry Baby,' which had within it a number suspended chords. And then the chord heard 'round the world, two months later, was the opening suspended chord of ‘A Hard Day's Night.' I used these chords throughout ‘California Dreamin',' and more specifically as a bridge to get back and forth from the verse to the chorus." Now, nobody else corroborates this story, and both Brian Wilson and John Phillips had the kind of background in modern harmony that means they would have been very aware of suspended chords before either ever encountered Sloan, but I thought I should mention it. Rather more plausible is Sloan's other claim, that he came up with the intro to the song. According to Sloan, he was inspired by "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "Walk Don't Run"] And you can easily see how this: [plays "Walk Don't Run"] Can lead to this: [plays "California Dreamin'"] And I'm fairly certain that if that was the inspiration, it was Sloan who was the one who thought it up. John Phillips had been paying no attention to the world of surf music when "Walk Don't Run" had been a hit -- that had been at the point when he was very firmly in the folk world, while Sloan of course had been recording "Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'", and it had been his job to know surf music intimately. So Sloan's intro became the start of what was intended to be Barry McGuire's next single: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] Sloan also provided the harmonica solo on the track: [Excerpt: Barry McGuire, "California Dreamin'"] The Mamas and the Papas -- the new name that was now given to the former New Journeymen, now they were a quartet -- were also signed to Dunhill as an act on their own, and recorded their own first single, "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song apparently written by John about Michelle, in late 1963, after she had briefly left him to have an affair with Russ Titelman, the record producer and songwriter, before coming back to him: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] But while that was put out, they quickly decided to scrap it and go with another song. The "Go Where You Wanna Go" single was pulled after only selling a handful of copies, though its commercial potential was later proved when in 1967 a new vocal group, the 5th Dimension, released a soundalike version as their second single. The track was produced by Lou Adler's client Johnny Rivers, and used the exact same musicians as the Mamas and the Papas version, with the exception of Phillips. It became their first hit, reaching number sixteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The 5th Dimension, "Go Where You Wanna Go"] The reason the Mamas and the Papas version of "Go Where You Wanna Go" was pulled was because everyone became convinced that their first single should instead be their own version of "California Dreamin'". This is the exact same track as McGuire's track, with just two changes. The first is that McGuire's lead vocal was replaced with Denny Doherty: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Though if you listen to the stereo mix of the song and isolate the left channel, you can hear McGuire singing the lead on the first line, and occasional leakage from him elsewhere on the backing vocal track: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] The other change made was to replace Sloan's harmonica solo with an alto flute solo by Bud Shank, a jazz musician who we heard about in the episode on "Light My Fire", when he collaborated with Ravi Shankar on "Improvisations on the Theme From Pather Panchali": [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] Shank was working on another session in Western Studios, where they were recording the Mamas and Papas track, and Bones Howe approached him while he was packing his instrument and asked if he'd be interested in doing another session. Shank agreed, though the track caused problems for him. According to Shank "What had happened was that whe
Among highlights on this week's episode is a 1989 recording of the Bud Shank Quintet playing music by David Peck, who was pianist in Bud's Northwest group. This recording was made at Fort Worden Theatre in Port Townsend.
Anexos al abecé de la música popular de Brasil en forma de compilaciones. Intervienen: Laura Villa, Sylvia Telles, Lalo Schifrin, Carlos Lyra, Bud Shank, Sérgio Ricardo, Stan Getz, Sergio Mendes, Herbie Mann, Joâo Gilberto, Charlie Byrd & Stan Getz, Barney Kessel, Cannonball Adderley y Tamba. Escuchar audio
Anexos al abecé de la música popular de Brasil en forma de compilaciones. Intervienen: Charlie Rouse, Sergio Mendes, Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd, Herbie Mann, Luiz Bonfá, Bud Shank, Sylvia Telles, Shorty Rogers & His Giants, Lalo Schifrin, Carlos Lyra, Cannonball Adderley, Os Cariocas y Walter Wanderley. Escuchar audio
Grabaciones de la década de los sesenta del saxofonista y flautista Bud Shank. Jazz samba y bossa nova con Clare Fischer ('Ilusão', 'Pensativa', 'João', 'Samba da borboleta', 'Que mais'), João Donato y Rosinha de Valença ('Sausalito', 'Silk stop', 'Um abraço no Bonfá') y Sergio Mendes & Brasil '65 ('Aquarius', 'She´s a carioca'). Además, 'If I should lose you', 'Ontem à noite', 'Sambinha', 'Caminho de casa', 'Samba do avião' y 'Elizete'. Escuchar audio
Tonight on Jazz After Dark: Sidney Bechet, Benny Goodman, The Mills Brothers, Erroll Garner, Gene Krupa, Oscar Peterson, Etta Jones, Jean-Pierre Sasson, Wes Montgomery, Herbie Mann, Freddie Hubbard, Trudy Desmond, Bud Shank, and Christian Mcbride
Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire" by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode and the shorter spoken-word tracks. Information on Dick Bock, World Pacific, and Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger have all released autobiographies. Densmore's is out of print, but I referred to Manzarek's and Krieger's here. Of the two Krieger's is vastly more reliable. I also used Mick Wall's book on the Doors and Stephen Davis' biography of Jim Morrison. Information about Elektra Records came from Follow the Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, which is available as a free PDF download on Elektra's website. Biographical information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes from this book, written by one of his followers. The Doors' complete studio albums can be bought as MP3s for £14. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are two big problems that arise for anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history, and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast -- things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on a subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragons of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal -- we know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other, related, problem, is deliberate disinformation. This comes up especially for people dealing with military history -- during conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are, and after a war has concluded the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine -- depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars, and on all sides. Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting, since assuming the Presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F Kennedy, to get further into the war, but had needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident provided him with that excuse. On August the second, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters -- they used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time -- President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second "attack", however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and use that as justification to get Congress to authorise him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam, and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then-Captain, later Rear Admiral, Steve Morrison: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the forties, fifties, and early sixties -- there was a lot of back and forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of these genres, and so we've looked at swing, bebop, and modal jazz before now. But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the fifties, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at Cool Jazz. Cool Jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed, that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of "jazz" as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular fifties jazz musician, are very much in the "cool jazz" mode: [Excerpt: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"] And we have mentioned on several occasions the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were cited as influences by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the Modern Folk Quartet: [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Regret?"] We have also occasionally mentioned people like Mose Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode. But we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of bop and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his bop and modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette, who performed together for a couple of weeks in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different lineup, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gil Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Konitz, had all been working for the big band Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, a band which along with the conventional swing instruments also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music: [Excerpt: Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, "To Each His Own"] The Davis Nonette also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody, rather than call-and response riffing: [Excerpt: The Miles Davis Nonette, "Venus De Milo"] Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled "Birth of the Cool", by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a bandleader himself, and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"] While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called the Haig, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big-band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio, with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlowe, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Red Norvo, "This Can't Be Love"] By 1952 Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue, which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide -- the idea of a group with a rhythm section that *didn't* have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual, style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group were the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock. Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes -- a taste for hashish, and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock *loved* the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Harte, a notable jazz drummer, he raised three hundred and fifty dollars to record the first album by Mulligan's new group: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Aren't You Glad You're You?"] Pacific Jazz, the label Bock and Harte founded, soon became *the* dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound. The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name, as by Chet Baker, or as "Lee Konitz and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet" when Mulligan's old bandmate Konitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz. But both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953 Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star. Not only was Baker a great jazz trumpet player, he was also very good looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song "My Funny Valentine" one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "My Funny Valentine"] But when Baker recorded a vocal version, for his album Chet Baker Sings, it made Baker famous: [Excerpt: Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine"] When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker, but Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazines, and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early fifties. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had *two* of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bock loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956 he was invited by his friend George Avakian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician he was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music -- they were putting it out as a speciality release rather than something that would appeal to the general public -- and so they were happy for Bock to sign Shankar to his own label. Bock renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases, and he produced Shankar's next album, India's Master Musician: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Charu Keshi"] Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bock, and Bock would also try to find ways to combine Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians including Bud Shank (who we'll hear about again in a future episode) on flute: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken-word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Willy the Shake"] But they also put out spoken-word albums that appealed to Bock's interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Heard. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chet Baker Sings!, but as well as being a jazz fan Heard was very connected in the world of the arts -- he was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley -- and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality. He practiced yoga, and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism: [Excerpt: Gerald Heard, "Paraphrased from the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu"] We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", when Ralph Mentzner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions" -- Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the mescaline trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic drug use, though Heard was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement -- though he always advised Leary and his associates not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle rather than risk the wrath of the establishment -- and he's cited by almost everyone in Leary's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him advocating LSD use. It was Heard's books that made Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religions and associate of Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Heard was one of the people who gave Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Bock also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964 he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on The Psychedelic Experience, which Shankar did as a favour for his friend even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation as its ideas were too controversial: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience (film)] And Heard introduced Bock to other ideas around philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bock became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959 teaching a new style of meditation which he called Transcendental Meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even his birth name -- both "Maharishi" and "Yogi" are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as "the Maharishi". What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu, and only have a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather getting a proper understanding requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language, so my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them as they pertain to mid-sixties psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable, and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school as I understand them seem to centre around an idea of non-separation -- that God is in all things, and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase "I am that, thou art that, all this is that", which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "All This is That"] The other phrase they're singing there, "Jai Guru Dev" is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati -- it means "all hail the divine teacher" or "glory to the heavenly one", and "guru dev" or "guru deva" was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death, as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in "Across the Universe" as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor, and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither -- the rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dev, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claim that the system he taught was Guru Dev's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the monastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught -- but of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism (as best I understand this) is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate -- you should go off and become a monk and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life -- the student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi, or renunciate, but that you could skip straight from being a student to being a Sanyasi and spend your life as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said: "Obviously enough there are two ways of life: the way of the Sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A Sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realises, through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life." What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial, or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions, while there are other people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh -- and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings you could get *more* of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching. There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent seventy years living in a cave and eating only rice -- and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bock became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures: [Excerpt: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Deep Meditation"] Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures, in 1961. In the early sixties, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded, but Bock remained in charge of the label, and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. Aura was much less successful than the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl-group record, "Shooby Dooby", by the Lewis Sisters, two jazz-singing white schoolteachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown: [Excerpt: The Lewis Sisters, "Shooby Dooby"] The most successful act that Aura ever had was Sonny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top twenty hit in 1956 with "Confidential", a song he'd recorded on Specialty Records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Dorinda Morgan: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "Confidential"] But Knight's biggest hit on Aura, "If You Want This Love", only made number seventy-one on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "If You Want This Love"] Knight would later go on to write a novel, The Day the Music Died, which Greil Marcus described as "the bitterest book ever written about how rock'n'roll came to be and what it turned into". Marcus said it was about "how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself: as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts; as white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men". Given that Knight was the artist who did the *best* out of Aura Records, that says a great deal about the label. But one of the bands that Aura signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screamin' Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audiences wanted and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing. They put out two singles on Aura, "Henrietta": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Henrietta"] and "Soul Train": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Soul Train"] Ray Daniels was a stage name -- his birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name -- and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band, and music wasn't really his ideal career. Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrence did, he'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brothers' band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was OK. What he really liked, though, was jazz -- he was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner, and so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Aura Records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still legal, and been fascinated by its effects, but worried that he couldn't control them -- he couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bock, Bock told him that the best method he knew for doing that was transcendental meditation. Bock gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums, and told him to go to a lecture on transcendental meditation, run by the head of the Maharishi's west-coast organisation, as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robby Krieger, and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had -- they'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusioned with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation, while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA -- though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in "not joining the Army". UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bock California had become the centre of American interest in music from India -- so much so that in 1967 Ravi Shankar would open up a branch of his own Kinnara Music School there. (And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies I've used for the Doors says that Krieger heard about the Maharishi while studying at the Kinnara school. As the only branch of the Kinnara school that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a *really* long commute he wasn't studying there at this point.) Densmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz -- just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens' drummer, who had started missing rehearsals -- he'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brothers, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarek's from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later accounts, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry and European art film, but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid -- he'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of "practical jokes" which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead -- lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy (or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret) and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robby Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, "as if it was common knowledge". His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of rootlessness -- he never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with friends or girlfriends -- and a lack of sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly, but would always disrupt the shows -- he was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive boor when drunk -- by shouting out for them to play "Louie Louie", a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had -- the first time he'd ever performed live -- and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate ways, with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach -- Morrison had decided to stay in LA, and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time, and had lost a great deal of weight, and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs -- this was summer 1965, and the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and the Stones' "Satisfaction" had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than "Louie Louie". Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing, and as Manzarek later put it "he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice". The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Densmore, "Moonlight Drive": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Moonlight Drive"] Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure, for Morrison, though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos, were under Rick and the Ravens' name, and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seem to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty Records, which now owned Aura, and who saw no commercial potential in them, even in one that later became a number one hit when rerecorded a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Hello I Love You"] Although to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks, and stuck new words to it: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"] But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry, and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals but who they otherwise knew as a loud annoying drunk in the audience would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone they were signed by Columbia Records, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a Byrds album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the Byrds themselves, later writing "The Byrds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all. They couldn't play jazz. Hell, they probably didn't even know anything about jazz. They were folk-rock, for cri-sake. Country music. For whites only." (Ray Manzarek was white). They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment -- Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the Animals and the Dave Clark Five used. But they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmore, and that his thoughts had been "Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head." But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school -- Bill Wolff and Robby Krieger. Wolff and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school -- they had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school -- and had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencos by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino: [Excerpt: Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino, "Caracolés"] And they'd decided they were going to become the new Dos Flamencos. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk-revivalists like Spider John Koerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Krieger and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school, and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz musicians. At this time Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a Damascene conversion -- the next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustic for a red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolff, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band. Krieger had the advantage over Wolff for two reasons -- one of which was actually partly Wolff's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography: "A critic once said I had 'the worst hair in rock 'n' roll'. It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky, Jewfro, so one day my friend Bill Wolff and I experimented with Ultra Sheen, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to Black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolff, as we all called him, said 'You're starting to look like that jerk Bryan MacLean'". According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him better looking than Wolff, at least until the straightener wore off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolff, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord, and then use a resonant tube -- these days usually a specially-made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for older blues musicians often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down -- to slide across the strings. Slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues, especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"] But while the members of the group all claimed to be blues fans -- Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club in the South Side of Chicago where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience -- none of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was, and Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottle necks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band -- Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likeable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions, but Manzarek soon grew to resent Densmore, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, about the divorce of heaven and hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the twenty-second of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died). Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea -- Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception instead. Initially the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man", originally recorded by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] And a version of "Alabama Song", a song written by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, from the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with English language lyrics by Elisabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lotte Lenya, and it was her version that the group based their version on, at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend: [Excerpt: Lotte Lenya, "Alabama Song"] Though it's likely given their tastes in jazz that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dolphy and John Lewis: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy and John Lewis, "Alabama Song"] But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one, but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called "Light My Fire", and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying "we're not a folk-rock band" and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the Mamas and the Papas, but the other band members liked it -- but it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much but which seems to me to be very likely to have at least been a subconscious influence -- "She's Not There" by the Zombies: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Now, there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record. First, like the Doors, the Zombies were a keyboard-driven band. Second, there's the dynamics of the songs -- both have soft, slightly jazzy verses and then a more straight-ahead rock chorus. And finally there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for "She's Not There" goes from Am to D repeatedly: [demonstrates] While the verse for "Light My Fire" goes from Am to F sharp minor -- and for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp, and A, while the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A, and C sharp -- they're very similar chords. So "She's Not There" is: [demonstrates] While "Light My Fire" is: [demonstrates] At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asus2 chord rather than an A minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A minor and played that instead. Now again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge "She's Not There" as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was. But either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released, and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semitone too slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos -- and apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you, that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pyres, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song, in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus -- in Krieger's original version, he'd sung "Come on baby, light my fire" three times, but Morrison changed the last line to "try to set the night on fire", which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of "My Favorite Things": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] But Manzarek in his autobiography says it was inspired by Ole, the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Ole"] Both are of course similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the “Light My Fire” instrumental section, though none of the Doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group (and of course "Light My Fire" is in four-four rather than three-four): [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over. Both Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro, but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when, and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it, and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger, though, the story is rather different, and the evidence seems to be weighted in Krieger's favour. In early live performances of the song, they started the song with the Am-F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (live at the Matrix)"] But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts with a change from G to D, then from D to F, before going into a circle of fifths -- not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like "Hey Joe", but a descending one, the same sequence as in "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" or "I Will Survive", ending on an A flat: [demonstrates] To get from the A flat to the A minor or Asus2 chord on which the verse starts, he simply then shifted up a semitone from A flat to A major for two bars: [demonstrates] Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line which was inspired by one of Bach's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779"] Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by other than that it was one of the two-part inventions, and to be honest none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears, and I think more than anything he was just going for a generalised baroque style rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque -- the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothchild, the producer who we will talk about more later, came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just general noodling it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's staff producers wanted to work with them and so they were dropped -- though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards. And others say that they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal, and without any proper gigs, though they started picking up the odd private party here and there -- Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well -- Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next -- they tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the Animals or the Rolling Stones than a group with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the Vox organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano. Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play basslines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group -- though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour -- and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands. Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music – though on records they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group were still trying to get a record deal, they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was *the* place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there like the Whisky A-Go-Go, but those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular, club on the strip called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers. At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Krieger later said "It's rarely talked about, but Ray was a natural born showman, and his knack for stirring drama would serve the Doors' legacy well in later years" But Morrison soon gained enough confidence to sing by himself. But they weren't bringing in any customers, and the London Fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped -- and the club itself shut not long after. But luckily for the group, just before the end of their booking, the booker for the Whisky A-Go-Go, Ronnie Haran walked in with a genuine pop star, Peter Asher, who as half of Peter & Gordon had had a hit with "A World Without Love", written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Haran was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act -- that would always be a group that had records out -- but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed -- after Morrison first tried to play it cool and told Haran they would have to consider it, to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the Whisky would be Them, Van Morrison's group -- one of the cover versions they had been playing had been Them's "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] They supported Them for two weeks at the Whisky, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities according to the other members of the Doors, and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night Them played the venue, Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of “Gloria” which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residencies at the Whisky, and over the summer of 1966 the Doors were the support act for the Mothers of Invention, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Strip was the centre of Californian musical life, before that centre moved to San Francisco, and the Doors were right at the heart of it. Though it wasn't all great -- this was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip, as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song, by the Standells: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned. That Standells song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love. And it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the Doors -- just like when they'd been picked up by the Whisky A Go-Go just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog, so they got signed to a record deal just as they were about to lose their job at the Whisky. They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. "The End" had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it in to one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band, and Morrison had added lyrics to it. Lyrics that were partly inspired by his own fraught relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Oedipal payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whisky A Go Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra Records. Elektra had for a long time been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music, first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robby Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whisky A Go Go, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jac Holzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Holzman saw them he was unimpressed -- they sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands -- but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgement and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of "Alabama Song", and everything clicked into place for Holzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled -- Elektra wasn't a major label like Columbia, but they were a label that nurtured artists and wouldn't just toss them aside. They were even happier when soon after they signed to Elektra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R -- Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jac Holzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothchild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] They were Robby Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothchild on that level. And while Rothchild had mostly worked in New York, he was in LA that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the Doors were part of -- other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in the Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundi, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison, though Buckley had a much larger range: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] There was one problem, though -- Rothchild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman, instead. But Holzman persuaded him because Rothchild owed him a favour -- Rothchild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside Holzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income, and Holzman also did all the paperwork with Rothchild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance Rothchild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session though. The first day, they'd tried recording a version of "The End", but it hadn't worked, so on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of "The End" had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about, and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game -- which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished and it still worked fine. But Morrison had taken a *lot* of acid, and on the way home after the session he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire. He got his girlfriend to turn the car back around, drove back to the studio, climbed over the fence, saw the glowing red lightbulbs in the studio, became convinced that they were fires, and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher, before leaving convinced he had saved the band's equipment -- and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally went well, and the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album, "Break on Through", didn't make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Break on Through"] But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album, and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing "Light My Fire" -- at this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music. Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record, too, if it was the length of a normal single, and so Rothchild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven-and-a-half-minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing microsurgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length, but they were horrified when Rothchild actually played it for them. As far as the group were concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothchild and Botnick cut that section down to just this: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (single edit)"] The group were mortified -- what had been done to their song? That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, it was just... a pop song. Rothchild explained that that was the point -- to get the song played on AM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked them
WETF Show . .More Further Definitions - Benny Carter-led and arranged sax ensembles with Coleman Hawkins, Phil Woods, Charlie Rouse, Bill Hood, Bud Shank, Teddy Edwards, Bill Perkins, Jimmy Heath, Herb Geller, Frank Wess and Joe Temperley . . great arrangements and playing by the leader --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support
Hey, it's Matt Herrmann welcome back to another Tunesful Tuesday! Thank you for joining us as we take a trip (or rather in today's case, an excursion) to the vaults and showcase a work inspired by the genius of Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot. Today's track is from Bobby Bryant's the Jazz Excursion into HAiR. Produced by Richard Bock, Arranged and Conducted by Shorty Rogers and Engineered by Lanky Linstrot. Featuring Bobby Bryant with Buddy Childers, Paul Hubinon, Renauld Jones, Freddy Hill, Bill Peterson, Joe Sample, Bobby Brookmeyer, Charles Lopez, Mike Wimberly, Bud Shank, Ernie Watts, Freddy Robinson, Wilton Felder and Paul Humphrey. We also get an update on our December production at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, produced by original broadway producer Michael Butler, myself, John and Jeanne Culter and supervising producer Conwell Worthington with musical direction by Christian Nesmith, original broadway choreographer Julie Arenal and directed by Michael Arabian. As always, if you have a request, comment or story, we'd love to hear it. Email us at podcast@hair-live.com Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you Thursday for another episode of HAIR: the american tribal love-rock podcast.
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Bossa nova con Bud Shank Escuchar audio
This week's Jazz Northwest includes music by composer arranger Milt Kleeb, as well as trombonist Ian McDougall, Rebecca Kilgore, Bud Shank and Shorty Rogers' Lighthouse All-stars, pianist Randy Halberstadt and others. The Lighthouse All Stars play Shorty Rogers' great arrangement of "America The Beautiful." Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by host Jim Wilke and airs Sundays at 2 p.m. Listeners may also subscribe to the podcast at KNKX, NPR, Apple, or Google.
I had the honor of talking with musician, educator, & drummer, Gary Hobbs. What a blast
A principios del siglo XX en Brasil el jazz era considerado una música de baile que se concretaba a través de las big bands y que estaba centrado mayoritariamente en los grande núcleos de población como Rio do Janeiro, Bahia o Sao Paulo. Eso seguiría así hasta la década de los 30s momento en el cual el jazz comenzó a diseminarse por todo el país. Pero sería a partir de la segunda mitad de los años 40s cuando los géneros extranjeros comenzaron realmente a interactuar de forma evidente con la música local, especialmente el bolero, la rumba, el cha cha cha y el cool jazz. El programa de radio The Voice of America, transmitido a partir de 1942, llegó prácticamente a todo el mundo. En Brasil, la radio era el único medio masivo para escuchar el jazz, y durante ese periodo aparecieron en algunas capitales brasileñas, clubes y espacios para shows, al estilo de los clubes norteamericanos, cosa que elevó considerablemente el número de músicos brasileños influenciados y, por tanto, dedicados a ese estilo. Ya en los 50s el jazz fue reconocido por el gobierno norteamericano como un agente de propaganda del american way of life durante la Guerra Fría, usándolo para penetrar la barrera Este-Oeste, divulgando el estilo y enviando músicos de proyección al exterior como embajadores culturales siendo dichos músicos financiados directamente por el departamento de estado norteamericano. Hasta ese momento era el jazz la música que había influenciado a las corrientes musicales locales de Brasil pero eso empezaría a cambiar hacía el año 58 coincidiendo con el enorme estallido de la bossanova. La bossa se introdujo intensamente en la cultura norteamericana y toda una generación de instrumentistas influenciados por el jazz se involucró con este género en Brasil. Uno de los preludios de esta fusión ocurrió en Los Angeles en 1953, cuando Laurindo de Almeida (guitarra) y Bud Shank (saxofón) grabaron el álbum Brazilliance. El disco sembró la semilla de lo que sería el samba-jazz. El impacto de aquel larga duración fue extraordinario y el solito fue capaz de abrir las puertas a un estilo hasta entonces inimaginable. Braziliance fue editado en Brasil y conquistó inmediatamente a una nueva generación de músicos que serían a la postre las figuras relevantes de la bossa nova. Todo lo comentado comenzó a concretarse en noviembre de 1962, después del concierto inaugural de la bossanova en el Carnegie Hall en Nueva York. Ese mismo año Joao Gilberto grabaría junto a Stan Getz y Tom Jobim una auténtica obra maestra que se llamó Getz/Gilberto que consiguió un éxito enorme a nivel planetario y fue capaz de desplazar a los Beatles del primer puesto de las listas de ventas. A partir de entonces músicos como Luiz Bonfá, João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Sérgio Mendes, Carlos Lyra, João Donato, Eumir Deodato, Moacyr Santos, Don Salvador, Marcos Valle, Oscar Castro Neves, Baden Powell, Sivuca y Raul de Souza y algo más tarde Flora Purim, Hermeto Pascoal, Egberto Gismonti, Airto Moreira, Eliane Elias, Joyce, Milton Nascimento, Ivan Lins o Djavan comenzaron a ser invitados habituales en conciertos celebrados en locales de todos los rincones de Europa, Japón y Norteamérica, con grupos liderados por ellos o como parte integrante de bandas de bossanova, jazz latino o del recién creado jazz fusion que se acababa de cocinar en ciudades como Los Ángeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco o Philadelphia, Hoy os vamos a hablar de todo lo que sucedió a partir de ese momento. Y para demostrar la excepcional mescolanza que se produjo entre el jazz y la música de Brasil hemos decidido iniciar el programa de hoy con una prueba incontestable.
durée : 00:58:35 - Et les anges chantent - par : Nathalie Piolé - La playlist jazz de Nathalie Piolé. - réalisé par : Fabien Fleurat
STANDARS SEMANAL.-St. James Infirmary.-JAZZANIVERSARIO.-bud shank & lou levy - jazz in hollywood-1954 -.-JAZZACTUALIDAD.-JAZZY LOLA´MUSICA Y QUIMICA.- ALBA CARETA GROUP-Alades
Grabaciones de los años sesenta de Quincy Jones Big Band ('Soul bossa nova', 'Lalo's bossa nova'), Lalo Schifrin ('Lalo's bossa nova', 'Bossa cha cha'), Coleman Hawkins ('Stumpy bossa nova'), Zoot Sims ('Recado bossa nova part I', 'Recado bossa nova part II'), Dizzy Gillespie ('In a shanty in old shanty town', 'One note samba'), Ike Quebec ('Me ´n´ you', 'Loie'), Bud Shank & Clare Fischer ('Pensativa'), Stan Kenton Orchestra ('Eager beaver'), Dave Brubeck Quartet ('Bossa USA') y Joe Henderson ('Blue bossa'). Escuchar audio
Uscito nel 1961, This Time of Year di June Christy è uno degli album natalizi di area jazzistica di maggiore originalità e pregio: non si basa infatti sulla riproposizione in chiave più o meno jazzistica di brani del repertorio natalizio, ma è costituito interamente di materiale originale, creato per l'occasione. June Christy è stata una delle migliori e più popolari cantanti di jazz della generazione emersa negli anni cinquanta. Classe 1925, la Christy nel '45 entra nell'orchestra di Stan Kenton, patrocinata da Anita O'Day, la straordinaria cantante che l'aveva preceduta nella formazione del grande bandleader. Di grande successo il suo album personale di debutto, Something Cool, del '53, arrangiato da Pete Rugolo, che aveva anche lui lavorato con Kenton. Di Rugolo sono anche gli arrangiamenti e la direzione orchestrale di This time of Year: nella ampia compagine impegnata nell'album troviamo jazzisti di vaglia, fra cui al sax tenore, al clarinetto basso e all'boe Bob Cooper, marito della Christy, al sax alto e al flauto Bud Shank, alla batteria Shelly Manne.
The iconic jazz clubs in our countries history stretch from coast to coast. There was The Both/And and Jazz Workshop in SF. The London House in Chicago, Lennie's on the Turnpike in Boston and Smalls Paradise in Harlem. These clubs captured the essence of swing music, the lighting, the intimacy- that visceral feeling of collective unison between bandmates and their devoted patrons. Slowly though in the age of rock palaces and the switch from acoustic to electric instruments these clubs faded away. One though did not. It was in Southern California but not LA. You needed to drive out to the sandstone of Hermosa Beach to frequent this club and so many of the musicians from Henry the Skipper Franklin to Gene Perla to Kenny Burrell played at this venue. Cats like Buster Williams recorded with The Crusaders at this club - so did Elvin Jones and Grant Green and Joe Henderson. Others like Ramon Banda would come as a veritable kid to watch Mongo Santamaria. This club was the link from be-bop to post-bop. From Chet Baker to Sonny Rollins to Chico Hamilton. Loyalists, smack addicts playing three sets a night that left the audiences ears ringing as they headed out into the salty air of the Pacific. My guest today was the artistic director of the Lighthouse All-Stars. It Started with Teddy Edwards and Hampton Hawes, passed on to Shelly Manne and Shorty Rogers and continued with Bud Shank and Max Roach. The fusing of these groups coincided with Lester Koenigs Contemporary Record Label which gave identities to those who played melodic invention before the digital age. When improvisational swing began to fade in the early 1970s my guest took over Concerts by the Sea in Redondo Beach which carried on the traditions of the Lighthouse featuring Cal Tjader and Jim Horn, Woody Herman and Dizzy Gillespie. My guest was born in 1917, is an accomplished pianist in his own right playing on albums with the aforementioned Baker, Stan Kenton and Miles Davis. He has seen, heard, felt and contributed to our countries cultural heritage by giving opportunities to those who wanted to further the connection between the known and the unknown. Howard Rumsey, welcome to the JFS --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support
Jazz Northwest is celebrating Canada and US national holidays this first weekend of July. We have a brand-new rendition of "O Canada" in a virtual performance from all ten provinces played by the O Canada Jazz Orchestra arranged and conducted by Daniel Hersog for an opener. Then, an extended performance of "America the Beautiful" by the Lighthouse All Stars at Centrum's Jazz Port Townsend in 1991. The group includes some of the best L.A. musicians from the heyday of "West Coast Jazz" co-led by Shorty Rogers and Bud Shank. Shank was artistic director at Jazz Port Townsend at the time of this appearance. Other bits of Americana on this week's show include the folk song "Shenandoah" given a unique treatment by Bill Frisell at Yoshi's in Oakland, and Frisell also teams with Jovino Santos Neto for some Brazilian music. There's also a song by Kelly Eisenhour, The Ramsay/ Kleeb band plays a "Summer Serenade" and Woody Herman's Thundering Herd plays an "American Medley." Jazz Northwest is
Playlist: Miles Davis - Fran DanceCannonball Adderley - JubilationWes Montgomery - Blue 'N BoogieBud Shank, Frank Morgan - Quiet FireJohn Coltrane - NaimaMiles Davis - NeoJimmy Cobb - Stranger In Paradise
Bud Shank With Five Of His Albums Spanning 1956 To 1966. Please Go To Website To See What You're Listening Too And Take A Look At Previous Episodes ( Just For You )
Bill Goodwin began his professional career at the age of seventeen with saxophonist Charles Lloyd. During the 1960s, he worked with Art Pepper, Bud Shank, George Shearing, and many other jazz luminaries. In 1969, Bill moved east to work with Gary Burton and settled in the Pocono Mountains. In 1974, he became a founding member of the Phil Woods Quartet, remaining with Woods for some forty years as a drummer and record producer, and winning three Grammys. Crossing genres, he’s also worked with Tom Waits's and Jefferson Airplane. He’s been teaching at William Paterson University in New Jersey since 1970.
Bill Goodwin began his professional career at the age of seventeen with saxophonist Charles Lloyd. During the 1960s, he worked with Art Pepper, Bud Shank, George Shearing, and many other jazz luminaries. In 1969, Bill moved east to work with Gary Burton and settled in the Pocono Mountains. In 1974, he became a founding member of the Phil Woods Quartet, remaining with Woods for some forty years as a drummer and record producer, and winning three Grammys. Crossing genres, he’s also worked with Tom Waits's and Jefferson Airplane. He’s been teaching at William Paterson University in New Jersey since 1970. Website Newsletter Become a Patron
Bill Goodwin began his professional career at the age of seventeen with saxophonist Charles Lloyd. During the 1960s, he worked with Art Pepper, Bud Shank, George Shearing, and many other jazz luminaries. In 1969, Bill moved east to work with Gary Burton and settled in the Pocono Mountains. In 1974, he became a founding member of the Phil Woods Quartet, remaining with Woods for some forty years as a drummer and record producer, and winning three Grammys. Crossing genres, he’s also worked with Tom Waits's and Jefferson Airplane. He’s been teaching at William Paterson University in New Jersey since 1970. Website Newsletter Become a Patron
Een nieuwe aflevering van Time in a Bottle vol met herinneringen voor de vuist weg, serie- en boekentips en uit de oude en nieuwe doos zaken van hoofd en hart. Met uit de platenkast van Mouna en Francis muziek van: Frankie Valli, Crowded House, Roel van Dalen, Billy Joel, Ben Webster, Joe Pass and Bud Shank, Billy Swan, Talk Talk.
In this episode, we feature saxophonist Al Cohn, guitarist Barney Kessel, and saxophonist Bud Shank.
Inspired by "Head Full of Hair, Heart of Full of Song", Pyeng Threadgill's investigation in music about the role of hair in her life, family, community and throughout the African diaspora, this episode of Mondo Jazz builds a narrative about hair, because -- whether it’s a braided bun or flowing tendrils -- hair has always mirrored the cultural (and musical) zeitgeist. An interview with Pyeng Threadgill and a preview of her recent album together with music ranging from the Lounge Lizards to Laurindo Almeida. The playlist includes The Lounge Lizards, Slow Poke, Garage a Trois, Chico Hamilton, Nels Cline, Bobby Previte, Pyeng Threadgill, Nina Simone, Riccardo Tesi & Banditaliana, Laurindo Almeida & Bud Shank, Gil Evans & Laurent Cugny, Alain Goraguer, Carlo Nardozza, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Either/Orchestra, Eric Dolphy. The detailed playlist is available at https://spinitron.com/radio/playlist.php?station=rfb&month=Jul&year=2018&playlist=7218#here
Gary Hobbs is a native of the Pacific Northwest and lives in Vancouver, WA. He has played professionally for over 4 decades and appears on over 60 recordings. Gary played with The Stan Kenton Orchestra from 75 through 77. Gary has performed with Randy Brecker, Bud Shank, Anita O'Day, Terry Gibbs, The New York Voices, The Woody Herman Orchestra and many others. He's played Carnegie Hall, Royal Festival Hall, Wolf Trap and the Kennedy Center, as well as festivals and clubs all over the world. Gary is very active in Jazz Education, teaching at The University Of Oregon and doing clinics, concerts and jazz camps. http://www.garyhobbs.net/ Website Newsletter Become a Patron
Porpoise Crispy Podcast Volume #5 Episode #8 Theft Of Geronimo’s Skull Curated by Jace Winston July 8, 2015 1. Shiver Me Timbers Zoogz Rift Island Of Living Puke 2. Nixon's Binoculars Eat It's Not The Eat, It's The Humidity Jeb Bush’s Brother Created ISIS (Imagine That) I Don't Want to Hear Politics on Podcast 3. Circle Sky The Monkees Head 4. Breakfast In The Ruins Boxcar Satan Trouble All Its Own 5. Casa Del Sol Grahame Rhodes Jazz Improv Vol. 6 No. 1 She Was Too Stoned To Know What I Was Talking About 6. Pay No Mind Beck + F.Lips Beck + Flaming Lips Live 10-14-02 7. A Real Mother For Ya Johnny Guitar Watson A Real Mother For Ya 8. I Lost On Jeopardy Weird Al Yankovic In 3-D 9. Below The Bassline Ernest Ranglin Music From The Coffee Lands 10. Boffin' In The Coffin Candy Van Trippin' At Drac's Last Week’s Hump Day (Of The Year) Podcast In A Nutshell 11. Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) Kenny Rogers & The First Edition The First Edition 12. Genius of Love Tom Tom Club Tom Tom Club 13. Light Dear Japanther Beets, Limes, And Rice 14. Speak Slow Bud Shank Battle Of Saxes Vol. 2 15. Dick On A Case Carter Burwell Big Lebowski OST Lost Again On The Island Of Living Puke
8e émission de la 27e session... Cette semaine l'animateur est au concert de Sun Rooms, alors playlist réjouissante de 2h, avec du vieux cool-jazz, du post-bop, free-bop et free jazz ! En musique: Bud Shank sur l'album Live At The Haig (Choice Records, 1985, enr.1956); Jack DeJohnette sur l'album Special Edition (ECM, 1980); Mike Pride & From Bacteria To Boys sur l'album Birthing Days (AUM Fidelity, 2013); Connie Crothers Quartet sur l'album Deep Friendship (New Artists Records, 2014); Giuseppi Logan sur l'album Giuseppi Logan Quartet (ESP-Disk, 1964)...
8e émission de la 27e session... Cette semaine l'animateur est au concert de Sun Rooms, alors playlist réjouissante de 2h, avec du vieux cool-jazz, du post-bop, free-bop et free jazz ! En musique: Bud Shank sur l'album Live At The Haig (Choice Records, 1985, enr.1956); Jack DeJohnette sur l'album Special Edition (ECM, 1980); Mike Pride & From Bacteria To Boys sur l'album Birthing Days (AUM Fidelity, 2013); Connie Crothers Quartet sur l'album Deep Friendship (New Artists Records, 2014); Giuseppi Logan sur l'album Giuseppi Logan Quartet (ESP-Disk, 1964)...
La pianista italiana Stefania Tallini (con quien charlamos en 2010 en el programa) presenta nuevo trabajo bajo el título de Viceversa. En él se entremezclan sus pasiones clásicas, brasileñas y jazzísticas con la complicidad del guitarrista y vocalista brasileño Guinga y del clarinetista Corrado Giuffredi. El acordeonista austriaco Klaus Paier y la chelista croata Asja Valcic repiten fórmula en Silk Road. Ella es cofundadora del cuarteto de cuerdas radio.string.quartet.vienna con el que el acordeonista colaboró en el proyecto Radiotree. desde mi cadiera Jesús Moreno sigue ofreciéndonos la cosecha del reciente Festival de Uzeste (Francia) con la música del quinteto Papanosh que forman Quentin Ghomari (trompeta), Raphael Quenehen (saxo), Sebastien Palis (piano), Thibault Cellier (contrabajo) y Jeremie Piazza (batería). En los Ritmos Latinos de Anxo, la música del grupo cubano afincado en Estados Unidos Los Jimaguas. Un grupo que en los 60 y 70 lideraban dos percusionistas hermanos gemelos, los Nieto. Escuchamos su trabajo Igualitos y con sabor de 1973. En el Tren Azul de Luis Díaz García suena el trompetista Thad Jones con Frank Foster (saxo tenor), Jimmy Jones (piano), Doug Watkins (contrabajo) y Jo Jones (batería) en grabaciones de 1956. El Jazz Porteño de Alberto Varela recupera una grabación de 1953 del guitarrista brasileño Laurindo Almeida junto al saxofonista estadounidense Bud Shank que dio lugar a dos volúmenes de la serie Brazilliance. Toda la información y derechos: http://www.elclubdejazz.com
La pianista italiana Stefania Tallini (con quien charlamos en 2010 en el programa) presenta nuevo trabajo bajo el título de Viceversa. En él se entremezclan sus pasiones clásicas, brasileñas y jazzísticas con la complicidad del guitarrista y vocalista brasileño Guinga y del clarinetista Corrado Giuffredi. El acordeonista austriaco Klaus Paier y la chelista croata Asja Valcic repiten fórmula en Silk Road. Ella es cofundadora del cuarteto de cuerdas radio.string.quartet.vienna con el que el acordeonista colaboró en el proyecto Radiotree. desde mi cadiera Jesús Moreno sigue ofreciéndonos la cosecha del reciente Festival de Uzeste (Francia) con la música del quinteto Papanosh que forman Quentin Ghomari (trompeta), Raphael Quenehen (saxo), Sebastien Palis (piano), Thibault Cellier (contrabajo) y Jeremie Piazza (batería). En los Ritmos Latinos de Anxo, la música del grupo cubano afincado en Estados Unidos Los Jimaguas. Un grupo que en los 60 y 70 lideraban dos percusionistas hermanos gemelos, los Nieto. Escuchamos su trabajo Igualitos y con sabor de 1973. En el Tren Azul de Luis Díaz García suena el trompetista Thad Jones con Frank Foster (saxo tenor), Jimmy Jones (piano), Doug Watkins (contrabajo) y Jo Jones (batería) en grabaciones de 1956. El Jazz Porteño de Alberto Varela recupera una grabación de 1953 del guitarrista brasileño Laurindo Almeida junto al saxofonista estadounidense Bud Shank que dio lugar a dos volúmenes de la serie Brazilliance. Toda la información y derechos: http://www.elclubdejazz.com
QUIET AUTHORITYBest known as a contributing member of the bebop jazz movement and a member of the Oscar Peterson Trio, jazz bassist Ray Brown performed with jazz giants from Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to his wife Ella Fitzgerald. Despite Fitzgerald’s short-lived marriage to Brown (1947-1953), she remained a lifelong friend and musical associate. A disciple of the 1940s Oscar Pettiford school of jazz bass, Brown developed an individual style renown for its tastefully executed rhythmic lines within the context of ensemble accompaniment. His talent reflects such breadth and diversity that he was the most cited musician in the first edition of the Penguin Guide to Recorded Jazz (1992). Unlike many of the founders of bebop bass, Brown still performed and earned a successful living as a studio musician, record producer, and nightclub owner. Raymond Matthews Brown was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 13, 1926. He took piano lessons at age eight and gained knowledge of the keyboard through memorizing the recordings of Fats Waller. A member of the high school orchestra, he soon found himself overwhelmed by the number of pianists among his classmates. "There must have been 14 piano players in it. And 12 of them were chicks who could read anything on sight," explained Brown in Jazz Masters of the Forties. In the book Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing, Brown revealed the main reason for ending his study of piano: "I just couldn’t find my way on it. It just didn’t give me what I wanted." Soon afterward, Brown, unable to afford a trombone, switched to bass, an instrument provided by the school’s music department.Brown’s new musical role model emerged in Duke Ellington’s innovative bassist, Jimmy Blanton. As he told Jack Tracey in Down Beat, "I just began digging into Blanton because I saw he had it covered—there was nobody else. There he was, right in the middle of all those fabulous records the Ellington band was making at the time, and I didn’t see any need to listen to anybody else." As a teenager Brown played local engagements. Despite offers by bandleaders, he followed his mother’s advice and finished high school before performing on the road with regional territory bands. After graduating in 1944, he performed an eight-month stint in Jimmy Hinsley’s band. Around this time, Brown fell under the influence of bassists Leroy "Slam" Stewart and Oscar Pettiford, a prime mover of a modern jazz bass approach. He next joined the territory band of Snookum Russell. Eight months later, while on the road with Russell, Brown followed the suggestion of fellow band members and moved to New York City.In 1945 Brown arrived in New York City, and during his first night visited Fifty-Second Street—"Swing Street," a mob-controlled thoroughfare lined with various jazz clubs. That evening he encountered pianist Hank Jones, a musical associate, who introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie. That same evening, Gillespie, prompted by Jones’ recommendation, hired Brown without an audition. Attending the band’s rehearsal the next day, Brown—a 19-year-old musician still largely unfamiliar with many of bebop’s innovators—discovered that his fellow band members were Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. "If I had known those guys any better I would have probably never gone to the rehearsal," admitted Brown in Jazz Journal International. "The only guy I knew something about was Dizzy because some of his records had filtered down through the south where I’d been playing with a territory band." The group’s leader, however, immediately recognized the talent of his young bassist. As Gillespie commented, in his memoir To Be or Not to Bop, "Ray Brown, on bass, played the strongest, most fluid and imaginative bass lines in modern jazz at the time, with the exception of Oscar Pettiford." Shortly afterward, Gillespie added Detroit-born vibraphonist Milt Jackson. In Jazz Masters of the Forties, Brown recounted his early years with Jackson: "We were inseparable. They called us twins."In 1945 Brown appeared with Gillepsie at Billy Berg’s night club in Hollywood, California, an engagement which, with the exception of a small coterie of bebop followers, failed to generate a favorable response from west coast listeners. In Gillespie’s memoir To Be or Not to Bop, Brown summarized the band’s Hollywood stint: "The music wasn’t received well at all. They didn’t know what we were playing; they didn’t understand it." During the winter of 1946, Gillespie returned to New York and opened at Clark Monroe’s Spotlite on 52nd Street with a band consisting of Brown, Milt Jackson, Stan Levey, Al Haig, and alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt. In To Be or Not to Bop, Brown modestly described his role in the sextet, "I was the least competent guy in the group. And they made something out of me." In May of 1946, the sextet recorded for the Musicraft label, cutting the sides such as "One Bass Hit"—featuring Brown’s bass talents—and "Oop Bop Sh’ Bam,’ and "That’s Earl Brother." On Feb 5, 1946, Brown took part in one of Charlie Parker’s sessions for the Dial label, recording such numbers as "Diggin’ Diz."In 1946 Gillespie formed his second big band, using the same six-member line-up. On February 22, 1946, Brown appeared with Gillespie’s big band for a RCA/Victor session organized by pianist and jazz critic Leonard Feather. As Feather wrote in his work Inside Jazz, "Victor wanted an all-star group featuring some of the Esquire winners, so we used J.C. Heard on drums and Don Byas on tenor, along with Dizzy’s own men—Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, and Al Haig—and the new guitarist from Cleveland, Bill de Arango." The date produced the numbers "52nd Street Theme," "Night in Tunisia," "OI’Man Rebop," and "Anthropology." Between May and July of 1946, Brown appeared on such Gillespie recordings as "Our Delight," "Things to Come," and "Rays Idea" (co-written with Gil Fuller). In November of the same year, he cut the classic Gillespie side "Emanon."In 1947 Gillespie assembled a smaller group inside his big band which included Brown, Milt Jackson, pianist John Lewis and drummer Kenny Clarke. As Jackson told Whitney Baillett, in American Musicians II, "We’d play and let the band have a rest. I guess it was Dizzy’s idea." Attending an August 1947 Gillespie big band session Brown’s bass is heard on such numbers as "Ow!," "Oop-Pop-A-Da," and John Lewis’ "Two Bass Hit" which Brown’s bass is heard driving the band and, at the composition’s close, soloing with force and a controlled sense of melody. On December 10, 1947, Brown married vocalist Ella Fitzgerald in Ohio and moved into a residence on Ditmars Boulevard in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, New York. Soon afterward, the couple adopted a son, Ray Jr.After leaving Gillespie’s band in 1947, Brown and performed with Fitzgerald on Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tours and various record dates. "When I left Dizzy," commented Brown in Ella Fitzgerald, "the band was getting ready to go to Europe, and I couldn’t. I’d just gotten married to Ella Fitzgerald. At that time I was in a bit of a curl between her and wanting to be with her as well. She wanted me to travel with her trio; she had Hank Jones playing piano. So I finally decided I was going to stay in New York." During a concert series in September 1949, Brown performed when Canadian-born pianist Oscar Peterson made his debut with the tour (according to Brown, he had already performed with Peterson at informal Canadian jam sessions). In 1950 Brown and Peterson performed as a duo, and for the next several years, were also billed on various tours.In 1950 Brown recorded with Charlie Parker and, between 1950 and 1952, appeared with the Milt Jackson Quartet. The quartet’s pianist John Lewis recounted in The Great Jazz Pianists, "We were all friends and would play together when Dizzy’s band wasn’t working." At another Parker session in August 1951, Brown found himself in the company of such sidemen as trumpeter Red Rodney, John Lewis, and drummer Kenny Clarke. Together they backed Parker on sides which included "Swedish Schnapps," "Si Si," "Back Home Blues," and "Lover Man." A few months later, Brown appeared with the Milt Jackson Quartet, and on March 25, 1952 Brown attended a Charlie Parker big band recording session in Hollywood, California.In 1952 Brown and guitarist Irving Ashby became the founding members of the Oscar Peterson Trio. Ashby’s replacement, Barney Kessel, performed with the trio a year before Peterson recruited guitarist Herb Ellis who, along with Brown on bass, formed one of the most famed jazz trios of the 1950s. "Herb and I rehearsed all the time," stated Brown in Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing. "For a trio that didn’t have any drums, we had it all. Herb and I roomed together and we played everyday. Not just the gig. We played golf in the morning and guitar and bass in the afternoon, and then we would shower, take a nap, go to dinner, and go to the gig. We had it all." Under Peterson’s leadership, Brown and Ellis underwent a challenging musical regimen. In Jazz Journal International, Brown revealed his admiration for Peterson’s reputation as a difficult task master: "If you are not intimidated by absolute professionalism, then you have no problem. Sure he’ll throw you a curve from time to time by calling unscheduled numbers or unexpectedly doubling the tempos, but if you’re not good enough to handle that, you shouldn’t be with Oscar anyway."By 1953 Brown and Fitzgerald ended their marriage. As Stuart Nicholson noted his book Ella Fitzgerald, "Ray remained adamant that he would pursue his career with Oscar Peterson, and the couple had begun to see less and less of each other. Finally, they decided to bring their marriage to and end and filed for a ‘quickie’ divorce." The divorce was finalized on August 28, 1953 in Juarez, Mexico. Fitzgerald maintained custody of Ray Jr., yet she and Brown remained friends. In November 1953 they, along with Oscar Peterson, appeared at a concert in Japan.In 1958 Peterson replaced Ellis with drummer Gene Gammage, who stayed with the trio a few months until Peterson recruited drummer Edmund Thigpen. Fortunately, Brown was able to stay with the trio and earn a comfortable living. However, by the early 1960s, the group also proved demanding in its performance schedule. As Brown explained in Jazz Journal International, "Some of the tours were really punishing—we’d come to Europe and do 62 one-nighters in 65 days." After his 15-year membership in the Oscar Peterson Trio, Brown left the group in 1965, and settled in Hollywood, where he worked in the areas of publishing, management, and record production. In 1974 he co-founded the L.A. Four with saxophonist Bud Shank, Brazilian guitarist Luarindo Almeida, and drummer Shelly Manne (later replaced by Jeff Hamilton). One of Brown’s exemplary studio dates emerged in the 1974 album Dizzy Gillespie Big 4.By 1976 Brown appeared four days a week on the Merv Griffin Show. A year later, after two decades of appearing as a sideman on the Contemporary label, Brown recorded the solo effort Something for Lester, placing him in the company of pianist Cedar Walton and drummer Elvin Jones. In Down Beat Zan Stewart gave the album the magazine’s highest rating (five stars), and commented, "Walton and Jones are apropos partnersin sound for the superlative bassist… Ray’s imparts the line to ‘Georgia’—what glorious tone he possesses! It continually overwhelms the listener, as does his superb intonation, for Brown is always at the center of each note."In a 1980 Jazz Journal International interview, Brown told Mike Hennessey, "I’m very fortunate. I’m still able to travel and play various countries and still be liked by the public. I’m able to play what I like to play and as long as people want to listen, that’s fine with me." During the 1980s, Brown recorded solo albums for the Concord label as well as releases by the L.A. Four, and numerous guest sessions with pianist Gene Harris. Since his first appearance on Telarc Records in 1989, his albums for the company include the 1994 trio LP (with pianist Benny Green and drummer Jeff Hamilton) Bass Face, Live at Kuumbwa, the 1995 work Seven Steps to Heaven (with Green and drummer Greg Hutchinson), and the 1997 release Super Bass. Brown still performs both as a leader and accompanist at festivals and concert dates. "During the past decades Brown’s sound and skill have remained undimmed, "wrote Thomas Owens, in his 1995 book Bebop: The Music and Its Players. "He is an agile, inventive, and often humorous soloist. His arco [bow] technique is excellent, though he seldom reveals it. But he shines most brilliantly as an accompanist. Examples of his beautiful lines are legion." Interviewed in The Guitar Player Book, Herb Ellis also lauded the talents of his former music partner: "[Ray Brown] is in a class all by himself. There is no other bassist in the world for me, and a lot of players feel the same way. On most instruments, when you get to the top echelon it breaks down to personal taste, but I tell you, there are a lot of guys on his tail, but Ray has it all locked up."
Ficha del episodio Equipo Dirección: Álex García Locución: Inma Blaya y Álex García Técnicos de sonido: Emilio Martínez y Borja Antón Contenidos Como te decía, contamos con Esther Cidoncha, pero antes de ello podrás escuchar la sección Jazz y Cine, donde Inma nos habla un poco sobre la buena serie Mad Men, y escuchamos algunas canciones de su banda sonora, con artistas como Astrud Gilberto, Miles Davis con un tema de su grandioso Kind of Blue y Ella Fitzgerald cantando a Manhattan, el escenario de la serie. Y después entra Esther y charlamos cordialmente con ella. Como sabes, Esther Cidoncha es una de las mejores fotógrafas de jazz; a los de JazzTK Revista digital de jazz nos encanta, ya le hicimos una de las primeras entrevistas de la sección Conversajazz (entrevista a Esther Cidoncha) y en algunos de nuestros artículos usamos sus fotografías que ella muy amablemente nos permite usar (entrevista a Ramón López, concierto de Jerry González). Si por un casual no la conoces, es obligatorio que visites su página web http://ecidonchafotosdejazz.blogspot.com.es/. Y si la conoces visítala también y suscríbete, así no te perderás las novedades. En la conversación hablamos sobre fotografía, sobre jazz, sus inicios, sus años en Valencia, la escena hispana de jazz,… Una charla de lo más entretenida. Y acompañada por un tema de Lennie Tristano y otro de Nat Adderley. Un programa en el que, una vez más, nos lo pasamos genial y disfrutamos como nanos. Esperamos que tú también lo disfrutes tanto como nosotros. Canciones Las canciones escuchadas en el programa son: * Agua de Beber (Astrud Gilberto, This is Astrud Gilberto) * Blue in Green (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, James Cobb, Kind of blue) * Manhattan (Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Bregman, Vincent DeRosa, Ted Nash, Willie Schwartz, Bud Shank, Paul Smith, Barney Kessel, Joe Mondragon, Alvin Stoller, The Rodgers and Hart Song Book) * Turkish Mambo (Lennie Tristano, Peter Ind, Jeff Morton, Lennie Tristano) * Sack of Woe (Nat Adderley, Wes Montgomery, Bobby Timmons, Sam Jones, Percy Heath, Louis Hayes, Work Song)
Ficha del episodio Equipo Dirección: Álex García Locución: Inma Blaya y Álex García Técnicos de sonido: Emilio Martínez y Borja Antón Contenidos Como te decía, contamos con Esther Cidoncha, pero antes de ello podrás escuchar la sección Jazz y Cine, donde Inma nos habla un poco sobre la buena serie Mad Men, y escuchamos algunas canciones de su banda sonora, con artistas como Astrud Gilberto, Miles Davis con un tema de su grandioso Kind of Blue y Ella Fitzgerald cantando a Manhattan, el escenario de la serie. Y después entra Esther y charlamos cordialmente con ella. Como sabes, Esther Cidoncha es una de las mejores fotógrafas de jazz; a los de JazzTK Revista digital de jazz nos encanta, ya le hicimos una de las primeras entrevistas de la sección Conversajazz (entrevista a Esther Cidoncha) y en algunos de nuestros artículos usamos sus fotografías que ella muy amablemente nos permite usar (entrevista a Ramón López, concierto de Jerry González). Si por un casual no la conoces, es obligatorio que visites su página web http://ecidonchafotosdejazz.blogspot.com.es/. Y si la conoces visítala también y suscríbete, así no te perderás las novedades. En la conversación hablamos sobre fotografía, sobre jazz, sus inicios, sus años en Valencia, la escena hispana de jazz,… Una charla de lo más entretenida. Y acompañada por un tema de Lennie Tristano y otro de Nat Adderley. Un programa en el que, una vez más, nos lo pasamos genial y disfrutamos como nanos. Esperamos que tú también lo disfrutes tanto como nosotros. Canciones Las canciones escuchadas en el programa son: * Agua de Beber (Astrud Gilberto, This is Astrud Gilberto) * Blue in Green (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, James Cobb, Kind of blue) * Manhattan (Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Bregman, Vincent DeRosa, Ted Nash, Willie Schwartz, Bud Shank, Paul Smith, Barney Kessel, Joe Mondragon, Alvin Stoller, The Rodgers and Hart Song Book) * Turkish Mambo (Lennie Tristano, Peter Ind, Jeff Morton, Lennie Tristano) * Sack of Woe (Nat Adderley, Wes Montgomery, Bobby Timmons, Sam Jones, Percy Heath, Louis Hayes, Work Song)
El austriaco Christof Kurzmann dedica a la escritora argentina Alejandra Pizarnik su apasionante proyecto "El infierno musical" en el que le acompañan Ken Vandermark, Eva Reiter, Clayton Thomas y Martin Brandlmayr. En esta edición de "Club de Jazz" del 22 de febrero de 2012 descubrimos además "Big Gurl (Smell my dream)" del trío del saxofonista Darius Jones. También "There", directo del baterista canadiense Ernesto Cervini. Roberto Barahona sigue clásico en el "PuroJazz" con el saxofonista y flautista Bud Shank en grabación de 1956. Los "Ritmos Latinos" de Anxo indagan en las voces de Mima y José Alejandro Delgado. En "desde mi cadiera" con Jesús Moreno, "Streets", último trabajo del saxofonista Charles Gayle. En el tiempo de "Jazz Porteño" Alberto Varelo hace sonar el piano de Helen Sung y su "Helenistique". Toda la información y derechos: http://www.elclubdejazz.com
El austriaco Christof Kurzmann dedica a la escritora argentina Alejandra Pizarnik su apasionante proyecto "El infierno musical" en el que le acompañan Ken Vandermark, Eva Reiter, Clayton Thomas y Martin Brandlmayr. En esta edición de "Club de Jazz" del 22 de febrero de 2012 descubrimos además "Big Gurl (Smell my dream)" del trío del saxofonista Darius Jones. También "There", directo del baterista canadiense Ernesto Cervini. Roberto Barahona sigue clásico en el "PuroJazz" con el saxofonista y flautista Bud Shank en grabación de 1956. Los "Ritmos Latinos" de Anxo indagan en las voces de Mima y José Alejandro Delgado. En "desde mi cadiera" con Jesús Moreno, "Streets", último trabajo del saxofonista Charles Gayle. En el tiempo de "Jazz Porteño" Alberto Varelo hace sonar el piano de Helen Sung y su "Helenistique". Toda la información y derechos: http://www.elclubdejazz.com
Jason Crane interviews jazz journalist Marc Myers about saxophonist Bud Shank's early influence on bossa nova. Although largely forgotten by modern bossa nova fans, Bud Shank's band with guitarist Laurindo Almeida was at the forefront of the Brazillian-folk-jazz movement. Their early records ended up in Rio de Janeiro, where Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto and others listened to them and turned them into bossa nova. Find out more at Marc Myers' excellent site, jazzwax.com. If you'd like to buy this album, you can help support The Jazz Session by buying it via the link below:
Jason Crane interviews jazz journalist Marc Myers about saxophonist Bud Shank’s early influence on bossa...
Bud Shank was one of the major figures in West Coast Jazz before his death in April 2009. To commemorate Bud and his music, Alyn Shipton selects Shank's key recordings, with the help of a 1992 archive interview with the man himself, covering his work with Stan Kenton, Shorty Rogers, the LA Four and many of his own groups.
Douzième de la onzième session... Cette semaine l'on surf et l'on groove ! En ouverture, incursion dans le style surf des années 60 avec des pièces instrumentales de la compilation It Came from the Beach (ACE, 2008). Par la suite, petite pensée pour le saxophoniste Bud Shank décédé récemment avec deux pièces de l'album Sunshine Express (Concord Jazz, 1976). Suivra une bonne dose d'énergie avec des pièces inédites du Five Peace Band qui sera à Montréal le 28 avril prochain ! Puis, l'Inde et Miles Davis nous inspirent avec deux pièces de l'album concept Miles from India (Times Squares, 2008). Et l'on termine avec un peu de bop/soul jazz avec quelques pièces de l'album Movin' Right Along (Prestige, 1960) du saxophoniste Arnett Cobb.
Douzième de la onzième session... Cette semaine l'on surf et l'on groove ! En ouverture, incursion dans le style surf des années 60 avec des pièces instrumentales de la compilation It Came from the Beach (ACE, 2008). Par la suite, petite pensée pour le saxophoniste Bud Shank décédé récemment avec deux pièces de l'album Sunshine Express (Concord Jazz, 1976). Suivra une bonne dose d'énergie avec des pièces inédites du Five Peace Band qui sera à Montréal le 28 avril prochain ! Puis, l'Inde et Miles Davis nous inspirent avec deux pièces de l'album concept Miles from India (Times Squares, 2008). Et l'on termine avec un peu de bop/soul jazz avec quelques pièces de l'album Movin' Right Along (Prestige, 1960) du saxophoniste Arnett Cobb.
Jazz innovator Bud Shank passed away April 2, 2009 at the age of 82. Shank carved out a fascinating career as a jazz saxophonist and flutist. He came of age musically in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, helping develop the West Coast Jazz style. He also helped popularize the fusion of Brazilian music with jazz. JazzCorner.com's Jazz Perspectives producer and host Reese Erlich interviewed Shank about his life and music in 2000 when Shank was still living in Seattle. He passed away from natural causes at his home in Tucson.
This week’s episode features an interview with and music from jazz bassist Lynn Seaton. Lynn teaches at theUniversity of North Texas, and he maintains an active performing career. He was a member of the Woody Herman Band and Count Basie Orchestra, and he played extended tours with Tony Bennett and George Shearing, as well a wide array of many other jazz luminaries. We also feature music from the Lynn Seaton Trio with Bill Mays on piano and Tim Froncek on drums. Learn more about Lynn at his website lynnseaton.com, and learn more about the UNT jazz program at jazz.unt.edu. You can also find Lynn's Facebook fan page here. About Lynn Seaton: Lynn Seaton has had a stellar career as a jazz bassist. Born in Oklahoma in 1957, he started playing the bass at age 9. By the late 70’s he was performing around the state. From 1980 until 1984 he was the house bassist at the Blue Wisp Jazz Club in Cincinnati, accompanying big name guest soloists every week. In 1984, he joined Woody Herman and in 1985 he played with the Count Basie Orchestra. After a two-year engagement with the Basie Band, he did extended tours with Tony Bennett and George Shearing. Most of 1991 and 1992 was spent touring with Monty Alexander. Lynn spent a lot of time on the road as a member of the Jeff Hamilton Trio from 1995-1999. Since 1993, Lynn has also had a busy career free-lancing with many of the great jazz musicians from many generations, including: Toshiko Akiyoshi, Monty Alexander, Ernestine Anderson, Buck Clayton, Al Cohn, Kenny Drew Jr., Blossom Dearie, Bob Dorough, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Herb Ellis, John Fedchock, Frank Foster, Freddy Green, Tim Hagans, Jeff Hamilton, Scott Hamilton, Wynard Harper, Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Marian McPartland, Jay McShann, Mark Murphy, Ken Peplowski, Bucky Pizzarelli, Jimmy Raney, Emily Remler, Diane Schuur, Maria Schneider, Bud Shank, Carol Sloane, Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Maxine Sullivan, Mel Torme, Frank Wess, Joe Williams, Nancy Wilson, Steve Wilson, Mark Vinci, and Teddy Wilson. He lived in NY from 1986 until 1998. That year, he accepted an offer to teach at the world famous University of North Texas, home to one of the largest jazz programs in the world. He has performed at festivals world wide including Bern, Concord, JVC, Kool, Kyoto, Newport, North Sea, Perugia and Pori. Lynn has performed in 49 of the 50 United States and 35 foreign countries. He has performed on over 100 recordings, including the Grammy winning “Diane Schuur and the Count Basie Orchestra”, and two Grammy nominees, John Fedchock “No Nonsense” and Woody Herman “50th Anniversary”. He has three recordings as a leader, “Bassman’s Basement”, “Solo Flights”, and “Puttin’ on the Ritz”. Musical Selections: Strike Up the Band The Patrician Commission
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