Podcasts about Herbie Mann

Guitarist Sonny Sharrock was one of the most forward-thinking guitarists coming out of the '60s, and his music stayed on the cutting edge throughout his long career. His credits include Miles Davis' Jack Johnson and Herbie Mann—next to whom he performed in Questlove's 2021 documentary, Summer of Soul—and his tunes have been covered by Santana and the Messthetics. But it's as a bandleader and collaborator where Sharrock cut his wildest recordings. As groundbreaking as Sharrock's music could be, his distorted tone and melodic tunes helped bring rock listeners into the jazz tent. Our callers let us know how much Sharrock meant to them and why he's one of the “top guys of all time.” Episode sponsored by Focusrite: focusrite.comFollow Nick: https://www.instagram.com/nickmillevoiFollow Jason: https://www.instagram.com/jasonshadrickGet at us: 100guitarists@premierguitar.comCall/Text: 319-423-9734Podcast powered by Sweetwater. Get your podcast set up here! - https://sweetwater.sjv.io/75rE0dSubscribe to the podcast:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0aXdYIDOmS8KtZaZGNazVb?si=c63d98737a6146afApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/100-guitarists/id1746527331

durée : 00:59:49 - Good Things - par : Nathalie Piolé -

Listener suggestions are rated on the Yachtski Scale, with songs by Raffi, Herbie Mann, and Rose Royce.

durée : 00:59:17 - Banzzaï du jeudi 15 mai 2025 : Côté sombre - rediffusion - par : Nathalie Piolé - Ce soir, dans Banzzaï, des assassins, des doubles maléfiques.. et des anges, qui voient tout !

Playlist: Chico Mann, featuring Geoff Mann, Herbie Mann, Victor Axelrod - Memphis UndergroundFanfare Ciocarlia, Adrian Raso - Roma StompCombo Daguerre, featuring Meridian Brothers - Abel et Maribelle (Meridian Brothers Remix)Abelardo Carbono, featuring Quantic - La Piña Madura (VoilaaaRemix)Hyldon & Adrian Younge - Favela de Rio de JaneiroSacred Wolf Singers X Simon Walls - EchoesMontuno West - Viento - TormentaYu Cheng - Dragon BoatSonghoy Blues - ToukambelaMelón Jimenez & Lara Wong - Pardo perdíoAlsarah & The Nubatones - Fael Fi AldawamManika Kaur - Wakan Tanka (Radio Edit)Hot 8 Brass Band - Westlawn Dirge (Radio Edit)Various, featuring The Soul Stirrers - Be With Me JesusLeanne Lightfoot - MontanaMartyn Joseph - We Are Made of StarsTanika Charles - Don't Like You AnymoreAladean Kheroufi - All The SameVarious, featuring The Petch Phin Thong Band - Bump Lam Plearn

Episode 183: Remembering Marianne Faithfull, Jesse Colin Young And Roy Ayers, Jr. + More March 25, 2025 Welcome back to this hour that we call Tales Vinyl Tells.  It's your chance to hear some of the great album rock from the 60s and 70s mostly.  We've been doing these programs since late 2019 and have covered lots a ground.  You know and I know that we've just scratched the surface of recorded rock, so the new shows keep coming.  The reruns aren't bad either.  They can be heard on your favorite podcast app.  Just search for Tales Vinyl Tells. Today we're going to say thanks and farewell to Marianne Faithfull, Jesse Colin Young of the Youngbloods and vibraphonist Roy Ayers Jr. The music under me is Roy Ayres with Herbie Mann at the 1969 Harlem summer of soul extravaganza with a song cowritten by Isaac Hayes. Those three have entered the room next door, as Henry Diltz coined the phrase. You also get some of the blues with Boz Scaggs and Duane Allman, together. So these are the stories that songwriters and artists want to convey to you. These are the Tales Vinyl Tells. I want to say thank you to all the financial supporters of Tales Vinyl Tells. Whether a small amount monthly or a very generous donation, each of you listeners are very appreciated and if you can and do give monthly, my deepest gratitude goes to you. If you're not a supporter yet and want to know more about becoming a patron of this music program you can go Patron.podbean.com/talesvinyltellssupport. Thank you and rock on! And thanks for listening today.  My email is talesvinyltells@gmail.com.  If you want to hear a Tales Vinyl Tells when it streams live on RadioFreeNashville.org, we do that at 5 PM central time Wednesdays. The program can also be played and downloaded anytime at podbean.com, Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, player FM podcasts and many other podcast places. And of course you can count on hearing the Tales on studiomillswellness.com/tales-vinyl-tells anytime.

Hola! Another tasty morning glory starting strong with: Herbie Mann's Battle Hymm of The Republic featuring Roy Ayers on the congos followed by: Res, DOOPEES, Roy Haynes, some more Roy Ayers, Leao, and Emily Alice. Whakarongo! Thanks to The Tuning Fork

Hola! Another tasty morning glory starting strong with: Herbie Mann's Battle Hymm of The Republic featuring Roy Ayers on the congos followed by: Res, DOOPEES, Roy Haynes, some more Roy Ayers, Leao, and Emily Alice. Whakarongo! Thanks to The Tuning Fork

durée : 00:59:09 - Lune ou soleil ? - par : Nathalie Piolé -

  | Oscar Peterson  | Wave | Jimmy Forrest  | You Go to my head | Kurt Elling  | Winelight | Astud Gilberto  | Agua De Beber | Cesar Percio  | D'autres iles en soit | Visioneers  | Eyes don't lie | Grover Wahsington Jr  | Winelinght | Herbie Mann  | 

Edición de nuestro podcast dedicada al guitarrista Hugh McCracken: le escuchamos al lado de Steely Dan, Bob James, David Sanborn, Eumir Deodato, Kenny Loggins, Michael Franks, Roberta Flack, Stephen Bishop, Herbie Mann, Tom Scott y Donald Fagen. Hugh McCracken es un músico fallecido en 2013 que trabajó, de manera muy intensa, junto a estrellas como John Lennon, Paul McCartney, The Monkees, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, James Taylor, Van Morrison, BB King o Hall & Oates, entre muchos otros.

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! Un nuevo monográfico en nuestro podcast en el que repasamos algunas de las colaboraciones del vibrafonista Roy Ayers junto a otros artistas. Entre ellos Byron Miller, Jazz Crusaders, Alicia Keys, Terry Burrus, Masters At Work, Terry Wells, Jody Watley, Ray Gaskins, Herbie Mann y Toku. Es la segunda edición especial que dedicamos a Roy Ayers. La primera la puedes escuchar en el número 1298 de este podcast.Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de Cloud Jazz Smooth Jazz. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/27170

Gary began his professional career at the age of 16 as a singer/dancer/percussionist working with R&B acts in the K.C. area. During the next 30 years, Gary continued to work professionally, sometimes as a vocalist, but more often as a percussionist, backing some of the greatest names in Jazz and Entertainment. Working with the likes of Hank Crawford for 8 years, Eddie Cano (One of the fathers of Latin Jazz) for 4 years, and the award winning quartet Yoboso for 5 years whose CD "Off The Menu" Won 6 awards at the New Mexico Music Awards including Best Vocal Performance. Some greats Gary has performed with include Grover Washington Jr., Sonny Stitt, Percy Mayfield, Sammy Davis Jr., Ester Phillips, Herbie Mann, Les McCann, David "Fat Head" Newman, and many others.

CHARLIE PARKERV.O.A. BROADCAST “CARNEGIE HALL” Los Angeles, August 29, 1952New York, December 25, 1949OrnithologyRed Rodney (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Roy Haynes (d) STORYVILLE CLUB – 1953OrnithologyCharlie Parker Charlie Parker (as) Red Garland (p) Bernie Griggs (b) Roy Haynes (d) MILES DAVIS “SEXTET” New York, January 17, 1951Down, The blue room (bg,sr out)Miles Davis (tp) Bennie Green (tb) Sonny Rollins (ts) John Lewis (p) Percy Heath (b) Roy Haynes (d) SARAH VAUGHAN WITH CLIFFORD BROWN” New York, December 16, 1954Lullaby of BirdlandSarah Vaughan (vcl) acc by Clifford Brown (tp) Herbie Mann (fl) Paul Quinichette (ts) Jimmy Jones (p) Joe Benjamin (b) Roy Haynes (d) THELONIOUS MONK LIVE “FIVE SPOT CAFE” New York, September 11, 1958EpistrophyJohn Coltrane (ts) Thelonious Monk (p) Ahmed Abdul-Malik (b) Roy Haynes (d) ERIC DOLPHY “OUTWARD BOUND” New York, April 1, 1960G.W. Continue reading Puro Jazz 3 de diciembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

CHARLIE PARKERV.O.A. BROADCAST “CARNEGIE HALL” Los Angeles, August 29, 1952New York, December 25, 1949OrnithologyRed Rodney (tp) Charlie Parker (as) Al Haig (p) Tommy Potter (b) Roy Haynes (d) STORYVILLE CLUB – 1953OrnithologyCharlie Parker Charlie Parker (as) Red Garland (p) Bernie Griggs (b) Roy Haynes (d) MILES DAVIS “SEXTET” New York, January 17, 1951Down, The blue room (bg,sr out)Miles Davis (tp) Bennie Green (tb) Sonny Rollins (ts) John Lewis (p) Percy Heath (b) Roy Haynes (d) SARAH VAUGHAN WITH CLIFFORD BROWN” New York, December 16, 1954Lullaby of BirdlandSarah Vaughan (vcl) acc by Clifford Brown (tp) Herbie Mann (fl) Paul Quinichette (ts) Jimmy Jones (p) Joe Benjamin (b) Roy Haynes (d) THELONIOUS MONK LIVE “FIVE SPOT CAFE” New York, September 11, 1958EpistrophyJohn Coltrane (ts) Thelonious Monk (p) Ahmed Abdul-Malik (b) Roy Haynes (d) ERIC DOLPHY “OUTWARD BOUND” New York, April 1, 1960G.W. Continue reading Puro Jazz 3 de diciembre, 2024 at PuroJazz.

Stan Getz y Charlie Byrd ('Desafinado'), Herbie Mann ('Samba de uma nota só'), Cal Tjader y Clare Fischer ('Se é tarde me perdoa'), Lalo Schifrin ('Silvia', 'Lalo´s bossa nova'), Herbie Mann y Baden Powell ('Consolação'), Ike Quebec ('Loie'), Luiz Bonfá ('Lamento no morro'), Sergio Mendes ('Tristeza de nós dois', 'Disa'), George Shearing ('Pensativa'), Paul Winter Sextet ('Insensatez'), Coleman Hawkins ('Um abraço no Bonfá'), Zoot Sims ('Recado bossa nova part 1'), Dizzy Gillespie ('Desafinado') y Stan Getz y Charlie Byrd ('Samba triste).Escuchar audio

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He was one of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century… and he hailed from Seattle. Songwriter, composer, arranger and producer Quincy Jones, died yesterday at the age of 91.  The 28-time Grammy winner moved to the Pacific Northwest at the age of 10 and eventually graduated from Garfield High School. Jones credited Seattle's musical openness with shaping his style. He met Ray Charles here. In a typical night, they would play across the city, from the tony Seattle Tennis Club to hangouts on Jackson Street, which was in the city's red light district, playing classical, jazz, marches, and pop music.   Jones played jazz trumpet. Quincy Jones described his time in Seattle for PBS' “American Masters” in 2021: "We had to play everything with school. We played Sousa. And you play classical music and Debussy… on the jobs… Ray Charles, we, played Debussey on some of the jobs and we had to play Big Fat Butterfly parody, a parody on a poor butterfly. We had to play absolutely everything." That musical openness and genre defying attitude was a thread that he carried throughout his life.  In the 50's, Jones played with some of the jazz greats, including Herbie Mann, Zoot Sims, Hank Jones and Charles Mingus on Evening in Paris from his 1957 LP, “This Is How I Feel About Jazz." A few years later Jones played with Ray Charles on "One Mint Julep." But soon, Jones was branching out stylistically. He left an indelible mark on the music industry through his film scores... And while Soul Bossa Nova wasn't specifically WRITTEN for Austin Powers, it certainly became known as the theme song for the "International Man of Mystery..." He arranged songs for legends like Frank Sinatra. And in the 70's, when funk was EVERYWHERE, Jones turned it into gold, including the track "The Streetbeater," which became the theme song to Sanford & Sons... In the 80's Jones famously produced Michael Jackson's meteoric rise to stardom, with tracks like "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough." He butted heads with Jackson on the opening to Billie Jean... (He thought it was too long, Jackson disagreed.) And made the notorious phone call that got Eddie Van Halen in the studio to play guitar on "Beat It..." Quincy Jones, a giant of American music, is one of few producers to have number one records in three consecutive decades, the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s... Jones passed Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 91. Thank you to the supporters of KUOW, you help make this show possible! If you want to help out, go to kuow.org/donate/soundsidenotes Soundside is a production of KUOW in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR Network.  RELATED LINK:  Quincy Jones's Legacy in 14 Essential Songs - New York TimesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

This ReWind takes us all the way back to season 1 with a classic trio discussion on the great flutist Herbie Mann and his turn toward an electrifying fusion of jazz and soul.   If you like us support us at patreon.com/idbuythatpodcast to get exclusive content, or tell a friend about us.  Broke and have no friends?  Leave us a review, it helps more people find us, thanks!

Anexos al abecé de la música popular de Brasil en forma de compilaciones. Intervienen: Astrud Gilberto & George Michael, PM Dawn & Flora Purim, Crystal Waters, Maxwell, Cesária Évora & Caetano Veloso, Incognito & Omar & Anna Caram, Milton Nascimento, Antonio Carlos Jobim & Sting, David Byrne & Marisa Monte, Stereolab & Herbie Mann, Mad Professor y Chico Science & DJ Soul Slinger.Escuchar audio

El guitarrista brasileño Ricardo Silveira es el protagonista de este monográfico de nuestro podcast. Repasamos sus colaboraciones junto a artistas como Gregg Karukas, John Patitucci, El DeBarge, David Garfield, Yutaka Yokokura, Bobby Lyle, Kevyn Lettau, Justo Almario, Mario Biondi, Herbie Mann, Sylvia Vrethammar, Leo Gandelman y Matt Bianco.

"Guinnevere had golden hairLike yours, mi'lady, like yoursStreaming out when we'd rideThrough the warm wind down by the bayYesterdaySeagulls circle endlesslyI sing in silent harmonyWe shall be free"Please join Guinnivere and me on this morning's Red Eye Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us are Ben E. King, Joni Mitchell, America, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Hall & Oates, Jeff Buckley, Jean Luc Ponty, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Herbie Mann, Van Morrison, Chicago Transit Authority, Ray LaMontagne, Blood Sweat & Tears, Otis Redding, Grateful Dead, Cream, John Lennon, ELO, John Mayall, Stevie Wonder, Simon & Garfunkel, Led Zeppelin and Crosby Stills & Nash.

durée : 00:59:31 - Banzzaï du mercredi 05 juin 2024 - par : Nathalie Piolé -

"Ain't it foggy outside, all the planes have been groundedAin't the fire inside? Let's all go stand around itFunny, I've been there, and you've been hereAnd we ain't had no time to drink that beer"Please join me for that Beer or other beverage as we enjoy our 2 hour musical journey on the Red Eye Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us on this weeks journey are Dusty Springfield, Hall & Oates, Herbie Mann, Loggins & Messina, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lovin' Spoonful, Traffic, Jethro Tull, Blues Project, Bob Lind, Buffalo Springfield, Glen Campbell, Donovan, Bill Evans w Jim Hall, Crosby Stills & Nash, Badfinger, Led Zeppelin, Carole King, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell and America...

"Baby, sometimes I'm so carefreeWith a joy that's hard to hideAnd sometimes it seems that all I have to do is worryAnd then you're bound to see my other sideI'm just a soul whose intentions are goodOh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood"But you can join me on the Sunday Edition of Whole "Nuther Thing on Cinco De Mayo 2024 and we'll figure it out together. Joining  us are Santana, Chicago, Joe  Jackson, Herbie Mann, Youngbloods, Sly & The Family Stone, Stephen Stills, Wilson Pickett, Buffalo Springfield, Talking Heads, Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Los Lonely Boys, Pat Metheny, Malo, John Mayall,

durée : 00:59:30 - Banzzaï du mardi 02 avril 2024 - par : Nathalie Piolé -

"Well, I dreamed I saw the silver space ships flyingIn the yellow haze of the sun.There were children crying and colors flyingAll around the chosen ones.All in a dream, all in a dreamThe loading had begun.Flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun.Flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home."Please join me on today's journey with an extra hour of sun on hand. Joining us are Herbie Mann, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Jeff Buckley, Dar Williams, Counting Crows, Cat Stevens, Jefferson Airplane, Dobie Gray, George benson, Procol Harum, Grant Lee Buffalo, Hall & Oates, Bee Gees, Trevor Gordon Hall,  Christopher Cross, Elton John, Pat Metheny, Fleetwood Mac, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Loggins & Messina, Sarah McLachlan and Neil Young.

Cheryl Esposito welcomes Frederick Johnson, an accomplished vocalist & percussionist, recognized internationally as one of the world's greatest vocal jazz improvisers. He has recorded & toured with jazz legends Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea, Herbie Mann, Aretha Franklin, Patti La Belle, George Benson, BB King & others. Around the world, Fred teaches the power of creative expression as a tool for personal wellbeing & healing. He utilizes the arts to empower organizational leaders & teams to explore new ways of interacting. He leads global programs bringing people together from diverse spiritual & cultural backgrounds to create artistic forums for learning, sharing, reconciliation, vision & hope. His book, Quiet Callings, is a journey to inspire the soul & enliven the energy within. Does leadership have a sound? Can music inspire an organization? Join Cheryl Esposito and Frederick Johnson to hear the Quiet Callings of Sound Leadership.

Agradece a este podcast tantas horas de entretenimiento y disfruta de episodios exclusivos como éste. ¡Apóyale en iVoox! En esta edición os damos a conocer 'Brazilian Match', el disco que ha grabado el brasileño Luiz Millan junto a nombres como David Sanborn, Randy Brecker, The New York Voices, Eddie Daniels, Mike Mainieri, Ada Rovatti o John Tropea, entre muchos otros. Repasamos novedades de la música Smooth Jazz de Tom Reaves Jr., Kinga Glyk, Streetwize, Carlos Camilo y Kait Dunton. En nuestro bloque del recuerdo recuperamos dos álbumes de mediados de la década de los 70 del flautista Herbie Mann.Escucha este episodio completo y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo de Cloud Jazz Smooth Jazz. Descubre antes que nadie los nuevos episodios, y participa en la comunidad exclusiva de oyentes en https://go.ivoox.com/sq/27170

PropsAndPraise everybody as we bring you another edition Of A Cup Of J.O.E. with selections ranging from Herbie Mann to Horse Meat Disco featuring Amy Douglas & Dames Brown.Thank you so so much for joining us so ENJOY!!!! & BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER!!!!Tune into new broadcasts of A Cup of J.O.E., LIVE, Wednesdays from 9 AM - Noon EST / 2 - 5 PM GMT.For more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/a-cup-of-j-o-e///Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So many takes, so little time. That's why we have the FREESTYLE portion of each SURFACE NOISE production. This go-round we tackle some top-tier flute players (really), did Vinyl Me Please flub up the latest rock release for their members (sold out?), more QC messes in the hobby, and maybe even some talk of being mezmerized by Herbie Mann's luscious chest sweater. It's what your mama warned you about, the latest SURFACE NOISE + FREESTYLE! For more information on host Concert Buddie: https://www.youtube.com/@ConcertBuddie   For more information on David Bianco (Safe & Sound Texas Audio Excursion): https://www.youtube.com/@SafeAndSoundTXAudioExcursion   For more information on Jason Roxas: https://www.youtube.com/@JasonRoxas   For more information on Louie Golden: https://www.youtube.com/@louiegolden   For more information on Jazz Bum Felipe and Jazz Bum Chris (Jazz Bums): https://www.youtube.com/@JazzBums Jazz Bums Discord: discord.gg/yy4n2x8UnZ   For more information on Wyoming Dave: https://www.youtube.com/@Wyoming_Dave   For more information on Vinyl Community Podcasts: https://vinylcommunitypodcasts.com/

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

"A winter's day in a deep and dark December,  I am aloneGazing from my window to the streets belowOn a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snowI am a rock, I am an islandAnd a rock feels no painAnd an island never cries"Here in SoCal it doesn't feel like Winter and I'm not an Island or a Rock so we can all enjoy the music together. Joining us are Graham Parker, Lonnie Mack, Linda Ronstadt, Sandy Denny, Dave Mason, Dire Straits, Seals & Crofts, Frank Sinatra, Booker T & The MG's, Steve Miller Band, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, Jackson Browne w Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Billy Stewart, Billie Holiday, George Benson, The Four Tops, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, Chuck Berry, The McCoys, Joe Jackson, Herbie Mann, The Supremes, Everly Bothers and Simon & Garfunkel...

On tonight's show: Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson Trio & Gerry Mulligan with Bob Brookmeyer & Bill Evans, Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Nat King Cole, Gabor Szabo, Herbie Mann, Charlie Byrd & Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Billy Taylor & Gerry Mulligan, Shirley Horn, and Benny Carter.

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Astral Weeks", the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on "Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro. 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/ Errata At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus' classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on "Slim Slow Slider" when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track). Resources As usual, I've created Mixcloud playlists, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. As there are so many Van Morrison songs in this episode, the Mixcloud is split into three parts, one, two, and three. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used several biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word “hagiography” would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan, on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. Howard deWitt's Van Morrison: Astral Weeks to Stardom is over-thorough in the way some self-published books are, while Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence? is probably the best single volume on the artist. Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is about more than Astral Weeks, but does cover Morrison's period in and around Boston in more detail than anything else. The album Astral Weeks is worth hearing in its entirety. Not all of the music on The Authorized Bang Collection is as listenable, but it's the most complete collection available of everything Morrison recorded for Bang. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick warning -- this episode contains discussion of organised crime activity, and of sudden death. It also contains excerpts of songs which hint at attraction to underage girls and discuss terminal illness. If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of "Piece of My Heart". Bert Berns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on the lookout for new collaborators, and in 1967 he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer of Them. Towards the beginning of 1967 he had come up with a chorus, but no verse. He had the hook, "Take another little piece of my heart" -- Berns was writing a lot of songs with "heart" in the title at the time -- and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers, and so Berns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragavoy, and it was Ragavoy who added the verses to one of the biggest successes of Berns' career: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now, the story of Atlantic Records' sale to Warners, and the story of Bert Berns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who've been paying close attention to the earlier episodes, but as always I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Berns was a moderately successful songwriter, who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic Records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like LaVern Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Leiber and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early sixties, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit "Cry to Me": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] He was the producer and writer or co-writer of most of Burke's hits from that point forward, but at first he was still a freelance producer, and also produced records for Scepter Records, like the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout", another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers, so Leiber and Stoller produced a version of his song "Tell Him" for the Exciters on United Artists: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] Berns did freelance work for Leiber and Stoller as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when their former protege Phil Spector released his hit version of "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", they got Berns to come up with a knockoff arrangement of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?", released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, with a production credit "Produced by Leiber and Stoller, directed by Bert Berns": [Excerpt: Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?"] And when Leiber and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Berns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marv Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Berns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their "Cry Baby": [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, "Cry Baby"] Berns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Leiber and Stoller, and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for *someone*. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Wexler had supervised Phil Spector's production of Berns' "Twist and Shout" for the Top Notes, a record that Berns had thought had butchered the song. Berns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Berns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity -- almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms -- a love he shared with other people working in Brill Building R&B at the time, like Leiber and Stoller and Spector -- and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled "soul". Berns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable. He was an artist -- the records he made were powerfully expressive -- but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was *getting a hit*. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early sixties he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Bacharach and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point were Leiber and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Red Bird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri-Las. And anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Bert Berns up as a staff producer for Atlantic towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Berns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot One Hundred, of which the highest charting was "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] Even higher on the charts though was the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Berns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decca, a partnership we heard about in the episode on "Here Comes the Night". Berns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifters session for "Under the Boardwalk", a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Berns, recorded the day after the group's lead singer Rudy Lewis died of an overdose: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] Berns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964, and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers to buy out their other partners -- Ahmet Ertegun's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Bienstock, the ex-wife of their initial partner Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range publishing. Wexler and the Erteguns now owned the whole label. Berns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians, and in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on "Here Comes the Night", he produced several tracks for the group Them, including that track, written by Berns: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] But Berns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexler and the Erteguns had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler, they were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Leiber and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting, but they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label. Bert Berns had seen how successful Leiber and Stoller were with Red Bird, and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Erteguns didn't want to lose their one hit-maker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Berns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, WEB IV, named after the initials Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns, and the fact that there were four of them. Berns would own fifty percent of that, and the other three would own the other half. And they were going to start up a new label, with seventeen thousand dollars of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang -- for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, and Gerald -- and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Berns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic for now, but he'd have "his own" label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits. The first two records on Bang were "Shake and Jerk" by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Berns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein were Brill Building songwriters who had become known for writing "My Boyfriend's Back", a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"] With the British invasion, the three of them had decided to create their own foreign beat group. As they couldn't do British accents, they pretended to be Australian, and as the Strangeloves -- named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr  Strangelove -- they released one flop single. They cut another single, a version of "Bo Diddley", but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it. They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing "Bo Diddley". But Ahmet Ertegun suggested they bring the track to Bert Berns to see what he thought. Berns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a satirical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr Strangelove. Berns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number eleven: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Berns had two other songs on the hot one hundred when that charted, too -- Them's version of "Here Comes the Night", and the version of Van McCoy's song "Baby I'm Yours" he'd produced for Barbara Lewis. Three records on the charts on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records he'd had, he'd never had a number one, until the Strangeloves went on tour. Before the tour they'd cut a version of "My Girl Sloopy" for their album -- Berns always liked to reuse material -- and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein decided *they* might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strangeloves record -- their own record was still rising up the charts, and there's no reason to be your own competition -- they decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strangeloves album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strangeloves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of "My Girl Sloopy", retitled "Hang on Sloopy", came out, it was under the band name The McCoys: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry, and so for example Richard Gottehrer of the Strangeloves used to call Sonny Franzese of the Colombo crime family "Uncle John", they were so close. Franzese was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Berns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. indeed his best friend in the mid sixties was Tommy Eboli, a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the twenties, starting out working for "Lucky" Luciano. Berns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Leiber and Stoller, for example, ended up selling Red Bird Records to George Goldner for a single dollar in order to get away from the Mafiosi who were slowly muscling in on the label, Berns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic Records. Berns' final work for Atlantic was in June 1966, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Aretha"] The way Berns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexler, and the Erteguns -- he'd just decided to go his own way, and he said “I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting Bang started,” The way Berns' wife would later tell the story, Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Berns owning fifty percent of Web IV, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexler had then said that either Berns needed to buy the other three out, or quit and give them everything, and demanded Berns pay them three hundred thousand dollars. According to other people, Berns decided he wanted one hundred percent control of Web IV, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point. When Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle, Berns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexler's fourteen-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of Bang records, while Berns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Berns until the day he died, with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Berns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry, so when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Berns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white and Berns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more Black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on "River Deep, Mountain High", and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Red Bird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to Leiber and Stoller's company Trio Music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Tallyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond fifty percent of the company and keeping twenty-five percent each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Sunday and Me"] That record made the top twenty, and had established Diamond as a songwriter, but he was still not a major performer -- he'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Berns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang records, and Berns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio -- Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records according to Berns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, "Solitary Man", only made number fifty-five, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot One Hundred at all: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] The second single, though, was much more Bert Berns' sort of thing -- a three-chord song that sounded like it could have been written by Berns himself, especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Berns loved so much. Indeed according to some sources, Berns did make a songwriting suggestion -- Diamond's song had apparently been called "Money Money", and Berns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it "Cherry Cherry" instead: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] That became Diamond's first top ten hit. While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond's records  as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich, so for example the first number one he wrote, for the Monkees rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most Bang records, like Al Gorgoni on lead guitar and Russ Savakus on bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hit-maker, but he started rubbing up badly against Berns. Berns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release, "Shilo", was deeply personal to him: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Shilo"] But Bert Berns had other ideas. "Shilo" didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was "Kentucky Woman": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Kentucky Woman"] But Berns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point, five top twenty hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like "I'm a Believer" and "Red Red Wine". He told Diamond that he'd let "Shilo" come out as a single if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for other labels -- the word "exclusive" had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all any more. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for Diamond. When he played the Bitter End, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitter End's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and after his last business meeting with Berns was heard talking about how he needed to contact the District Attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though, the least disturbing was probably the threat Berns made to Diamond's career. Berns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway -- he already had someone he could replace Diamond with, another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] When we left Van Morrison, Them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his managers seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Berns -- something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Berns had produced for them, but Morrison's opinion of their second album, Them Again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did: [Excerpt: Them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"] Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whisky A-Go-Go with the Doors and Captain Beefheart as their support acts, but during the tour Van Morrison had decided that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money -- Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary, rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having ten thousand dollars that Solomon believed -- quite possibly correctly -- that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement -- they would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group were signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the Them tracks. This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for sixty or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success. Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later “I had a couple of other offers but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that spectacular, money-wise, I don't think. But it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with.” There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers -- he was already getting a reputation as someone who it was difficult to work with -- but he and Berns had a mutual respect, and on January the ninth, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but it was actually, *by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967*, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record twelve sides in the first year, with an option for up to fifty more that year, and options for up to four more years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the twelve sides a year, and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other clause which seems telling -- "Company agrees that Company will not make any reference to the name THEM on phonograph records, or in advertising copy in connection with the recording of Artist." Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Berns. The problems started with their first session: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl (takes 1-6)"] When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Berns, Berns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio to find the whole standard New York session crew there -- the same group of session players who were playing for everyone from the Monkees to Laura Nyro, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Las -- along with the Sweet Inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later "This fellow Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it... I'd write a song and bring it into the group and we'd sit there and bash it around and that's all it was -- they weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say 'OK, we got drums so let's put drums on it,' and they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting drums on it... But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down." The first song they cut was "Brown-Eyed Girl", a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled "Brown-skinned Girl", though he's differed in interviews as to whether Berns changed the lyric or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Berns turned "Brown-Eyed Girl" into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he's said that the backing vocal part by the Sweet Inspirations was added by Berns and he disliked it: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has been very dismissive of "Brown-Eyed Girl" over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman -- sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely -- in which he says that he often points to the line "behind the stadium with you" as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it actually happened, and that means you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said, over and over again, that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences, and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further, because "Brown-Eyed Girl" is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls -- in this case he remembers "making love in the green grass" in the distant past, while he also says "saw you just the other day, my how you have grown", and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is of course a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives, and that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, "T.B. Sheets": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets"] It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis, as the lover in the song does, and while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance (Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it), nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true though is that "T.B. Sheets" is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past - that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that "T.B. Sheets" -- a slow blues about terminal illness, that lasts nearly ten minutes -- was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a forty-five. It was also presumably at this time that Berns brought up the topic of "Piece of My Heart". When Berns signed Erma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with, by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it -- he'd already decided that he didn't play well with others -- but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler -- haven't you had enough from me already? -- but it's also notable how many songs Berns was writing with the word "heart" in the chorus, given that Berns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragavoy co-wrote "Piece of My Heart", they also co-wrote another song, "Heart Be Still", a flagrant lift from "Peace Be Still" by Aretha Franklin's old mentor Rev. James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison: [Excerpt: Lorraine Ellison, "Heart Be Still"] Berns' heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic, and he had started talking about maybe getting open-heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions, on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. He wrote to Janet Planet in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio -- she'd know if she heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] By August, "Brown-Eyed Girl" had become a substantial hit, making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the States. He was starting to get less happy with Berns though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blowin' Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychedelia of the title, liner notes, and cover was very inappropriate -- Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time -- side A, with "Brown-Eyed Girl", "He Ain't Give You None" and the extended "T.B. Sheets" tends to get far more love than side B, with five much lesser songs on it. Berns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well -- when the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine "Wassel" DeNoia, a mobster friend of Berns' who was Berns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Berns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. DeNoia was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Berns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all -- at one point DeNoia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head, and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Berns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to "Brown-Eyed Girl", but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Berns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another "Brown-Eyed Girl", but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Berns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto "Madame George", possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' Party! album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George (Bang version)"] In the end, Berns released one of the filler tracks from Blowin' Your Mind, "Ro Ro Rosey", as the next single, and it flopped. On December the twenty-ninth, Berns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison, which made Berns ill with stress. The next day, he died of a heart attack. Berns' widow Ilene, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Wexler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did -- he went to try to persuade Ilene to let him out of his contract now Berns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, "We were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died. We were just mortified, because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad, because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something... Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio... I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake... I think [Van] had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen." But Morrison has later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, saying in 1997 "I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company,  publishing, the whole lot -- which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now... Then the whole thing blew up. Bert Berns died and I was left broke." This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it, it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time.  But it was the experience with Berns specifically that traumatised Morrison enough that twenty-five years later he would still be writing songs about it, like "Big Time Operators": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Big Time Operators"] The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Berns' companies came on the ninth of January 1968, less than two weeks after Berns' death. After his death, Berns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison, who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Berns lived as long as he did given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison, and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go. And so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine DiNoia was determined to make more money off Morrison, and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shot up. But on the other side, Ilene Berns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Berns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly-married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band, which he called The Van Morrison Controversy, and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called the Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig: [Excerpt: The Hallucinations, "Messin' With the Kid"] The Hallucinations' lead singer was called Peter Wolf, and would much later go on to become well-known as the singer with the J. Geils Band. He and Morrison became acquaintances, and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection -- Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Woofa Goofa, and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the Hallucinations at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The Hallucinations had been performing "Gloria" since Them's single had come out, and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and ranted in cod-Japanese for thirty-five minutes, and tried to sing a different song while the band played "Gloria". The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them “Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song!” But in truth, Morrison was sick of "Gloria" and his earlier work, and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by Music From Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction. He started writing the song "Brand New Day", which would later appear on his album Moondance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison Controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berklee, and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968, including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank, but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music, and as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues. The band worked up the song that would become "Domino" based on Sheldon jamming on a Bo Diddley riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, "Lazy Afternoon": [Excerpt: Grant Green, "Lazy Afternoon"] Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song "Moondance": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Moondance"] No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace recordings at one point and cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the song-poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business -- companies would advertise you too could become a successful, rich, songwriter if you sent in your "song poems", because anyone who knew the term "lyric" could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record -- with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who were just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it. And thus were created such classics prized by collectors as "I Like Yellow Things", "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'", and "Listen Mister Hat". Obviously, for the most part these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin, but oddly even though Ace recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem -- one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence me going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode I noticed something about its co-owner, Milton Yakus', main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song "Old Cape Cod", and to quote that song's Wikipedia page "The nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston-area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favorite vacation spot. "Old Cape Cod" and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yakus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics." And while Yakus had written other songs, including songs for Patti Page who had the hit with "Old Cape Cod", apparently Page recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook "Old Cape Cod" started life as a song-poem -- and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Old Cape Cod"] The studio was not the classiest of places, even if you discount the song-poems. Its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing (and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful) and it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakus' son Shelly, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry -- and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer on Music From Big Pink. And there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason -- reports differ -- Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] A later Barbarians single, in early 1966, had featured Moulty telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-chord chorus that would have been at home on a Bert Berns single: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Moulty"] But while that record was credited to the Barbarians, Moulton was the only Barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Levon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions, the Van Morrison Controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager (who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster) ran out. Bebo went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song "Bittersweet" on Taylor's platinum-selling best-of, on which Sheldon also played guitar: [Excerpt: James Taylor, "Bittersweet"] Morrison and Kielbania continued for a while as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kielbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than The Band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before -- the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians: [Excerpt: King Pleasure, "Moody's Mood for Love"] Morrison and Kielbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing, they wanted another musician who could play solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy -- acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute -- kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audiences coming to see the man who'd had that "Brown-Eyed Girl" hit the year before would have expected -- even when they did "Brown-Eyed Girl", as the one live recording of that line-up, made by Peter Wolf, shows: [Excerpt: The Van Morrison Controversy, "Brown-Eyed Girl (live in Boston 1968)"] That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporising jazz flute and soulful vocals, would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner-Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warners had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records, and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would give artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiosyncratic artists with difficult reputations (deserved or otherwise), like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell, had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label, everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit. But Morrison was still under contract to Bang records and Web IV, and those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison, because a major label wanting to sign him would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead they got an independent production company to sign him, with a nod-and-wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwaid-Merenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwaid, who had previously worked in Warners' publishing department, and record producer Lewis Merenstein. Merenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Schwaid-Merenstein, just as he had with Bert Berns and before him Phil Solomon, for management, record production, and publishing. Schwaid-Merenstein were funded by Warners, and would license any recordings they made to Warners, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web IV, the publishing company owned by Ilene Berns. Schwaid negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions -- he had to make a substantial payment to Web IV, if he released a single within a year he had to give Web IV the publishing, any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web IV, and he had to give Web IV at least thirty-six new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all -- Warners had the money to buy the contract out, and Merenstein's plans for the first album didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web IV-published tracks on the album -- Morrison had written two songs, "Beside You" and "Madame George", that had already been published and that he was regularly including in his live sets. As for the thirty-six new songs... well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Ring Worm"] Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded thirty-one ostensible songs, most of them lasting one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke-sang whatever words came into his head -- for example one song, "Here Comes Dumb George", just consists of the words "Here Comes Dumb George" repeated over and over. Some of the 'songs', like "Twist and Shake" and "Hang on Groovy", are parodying Bert Berns' songwriting style; others, like "Waiting for My Royalty Check", "Blowin' Your Nose", and "Nose in Your Blow", are attacks on Bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like "Hold on George", "Here Comes Dumb George", "Dum Dum George", and "Goodbye George" are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And “Want a Danish” is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these "songs" sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all. Which is of course the point -- just to show utter contempt to Ilene Berns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story "A friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on Ninth Avenue in New York. I walked up there with twenty thousand-dollar bills -- and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting -- a big wide guy and  a tall, thin guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said 'I'm here with the money. You got the contract?' I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor, and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers." But the problem was solved, and Lewis Merenstein could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kielbania and Payne were not suitable for the kind of recording he wanted -- though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kielbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Merenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player -- who sadly died two months ago as I write this -- would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] Kielbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish -- Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kielbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr, the vibraphone player, had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus' classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus: "Mode D - Trio and Group Dancers, Mode F - Single Solos & Group Dance"] There was also a flute player whose name nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians -- Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringles potato chips -- they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple -- surprisingly so when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do", for example, are both basically twelve-bar blueses -- neither is *exactly* a standard twelve-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kielbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all -- Jay Berliner said “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks, he stayed in there." While Richard Davis later said “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.” The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is not the sound of a single auteur, as one might expect given its reputation, it's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Merenstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web IV -- "Beside You" and "Madame George", two songs that Bert Berns had produced, now in radically different versions: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George"] The third song, "Cyprus Avenue", is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl". Whatever the cause though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"] That song would be his standard set-closer for live performances for much of the seventies. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, "Astral Weeks", a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood, and also one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality,  something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work, as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's which suggested to him the concept of astral travel: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing, coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from "Madame George", "childhood visions". The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately namecheck one of his idols, something else he would do often in future, when he talks about "talking to Huddie Leadbelly". "Astral Weeks" was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kielbania he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Or at least that's how the story is usually told -- Payne is usually credited for playing on "Madame George" too, even though everyone agrees that "Astral Weeks" was the last song of the night, but people's memories can fade over time. Either way, Payne's interplay with Jay Berliner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back -- Payne was going to be the woodwind player for the rest of the album: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kielbania went to get initiated into Scientology -- a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later -- though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses they'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Kornfeld, a folkie who played with people like Dave Van Ronk, was brought in to replace him. Kornfeld was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section, with the idea of recording some of the songs which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was "The Way Young Lovers Do", by far the most conventional song on the album, a three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz twelve-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "The Way Young Lovers Do"] It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of Jay Berliner on guitar. The session started with "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina", two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order.  They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, "Royalty", and "Going Around With Jesse James", before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, "Slim Slow Slider". The whole band ran through the song once, but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne (on soprano sax rather than on flute), and Warren Smith Jr: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider"] That track was the only one where, after the recording, Merenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead – Payne said “Maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it.” It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album, because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else -- and it's definitely a more negative track than the oth

Salty Dog's BIRD Podcast, November 2023 After a European tour and working with Blues Music Victoria getting the Hall of Fame ready, we are finally back on the pod! Great bunch of tracks,including some fabulous new tracks from downunder! Dig it! Ttacks from Checkerboard Lounge, Sue Foley, Tarbox Ramblers, Rolling Stones, Judith Hill, Rod Paine, Nathan Beretta, The Blow Out, Dayna Kurtz, Perry Keyes, John Gorka, Bruce Cockburn, David Santos, Shane Pacey, Buddy Guy, Dustin Arbuckle, Phil Coyne, Gov't Mule, Peter Karp, Herbie Mann N Duane Allman, The Jorgensens. ARTIST / TRACK / ALBUM ** Australia 1. ** Checkerboard Lounge / You Got A Way On You / Single Release 2. Sue Foley / High Roller / Live In Austin Vol 1 3. Third Jinx Blues / Tarbox Ramblers / Tarbox Ramblers 4. The Rolling Stones / Bite My Head Off / Hackney Diamonds 5. The Rolling Stones / Under My Thumb / Aftermath 6. Judith Hill / Jammin' In The Basement / Back In Time 7. ** Rod Paine N The Full Time Lovers / I Wish You Would / Dirt On Velvet 8. ** Nathan Beretta / Had Enough / Single Release 9. ** The Blow Out / That Ain't Lovin' Me / Version of You 10. Dayna Kurtz / Last Good Taste / Postcards From Downtown 11. ** Perry Keyes / Down On My Street / Down On My Street 12. John Gorka / Can't Get Over It / So Dark You See 13. Bruce Cockburn / Postcards From Cambodia / You've Never Seen Everything 14. David Santos /The Chair / David Santos and the Soul Experience 15. ** Shane Pacey / Failed Hipster Blues / Who Made You King 16. Buddy Guy / Whiskey, Beer N Wine / Born To Play Guitar 17. Dustin Arbuckle N The Damnations / Across The Desert / Live At The Shamrock Lounge 18. ** Phil Coyne N the Wayward Aces / Brother / Sound and Fury 19. Gov't Mule / Gone Too Long / Peace ... Like A River 20. Peter Karp / Alabama Town / Alabama Town 21. Herbie Mann w. Duane Allman / Push Push / Push Push 22. The Jorgensens / Old Black Crow / Americana Soul

Tonight's show: Eubie Blake, Charlie Christian, Glenn Miller, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Louise Tobin with Peanuts Hucko, Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Claude Bolling, Allen Toussaint, Dianne Reeves, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

Quinta entrega de este coleccionable dedicado a las compilaciones “The Mod jazz Series” (Ace Records). Estos recopilatorios compilaron diferentes sonidos del jazz, o cercanos al jazz, favoritos entre los mods británicos de los años 50 y 60. Playlist; (sintonía) FREDDIE McCOY “Collard greens” RAY CHARLES “Get on the right track baby” GENE LUDWIG “Sticks and stones (part 1)” BILLIE POOLE and JUNIOR MANCE TRIO “Them blues” RAY BRYANT COMBO “Sack o Woe” ESTHER PHILLIPS “Fever” LAVERN BAKER and JIMMY RICKS “You’re the boss” MODERN JAZZ QUARTET with LAURINDO ALMEIDA “One note samba” BYRON LEE and THE SKA KINGS “Watermelon man” HERBIE MANN “It's a funky thing-right on (part 1)” TOMMY RIDGLEY “Jam up twist” GENE McDANIELS “Sweet lover no more” JOE SWIFTS INTERNATIONALS “Bell bottoms” KENNY RICE and LEO’S FIVE “Hold it” TIMMY THOMAS “Have some boogaloo” MARK III TRIO “Tres lobos” HANK JACOBS “East side” MOSE ALLISON “The foolkiller” EDDIE HARRIS “When a man loves a woman” Escuchar audio

Cuarta entrega dedicada a picotear en la colección “The Mod Jazz Series” (Ace Records).(Foto del podcast; Johnny Griffin)Playlist;(sintonía) FREDDIE McCOY “Collard greens”KING CURTIS “Memphis soul stew”MEL TORME “Right now”RAY CHARLES “Heartbreaker”JOHNNY GRIFFIN and MATTHEW GEE and THE SOUL GROOVERS “Twist City”KAREN HERNANDEZ “I heard it through the grapevine”BILLY STEWART “Secret love”TRINI LOPEZ “Unchain my heart”ANDY WILLIAMS “House of bamboo”GOOGIE RENÉ and ORCHESTRA “Caesar’s pad”TAMIKO JONES and HERBIE MANN “The sidewinder”JEAN DUSHON “Feeling good”EDDIE JEFFERSON “Psychedelic Sally”FRANK FROST “My back scratcher”LES MCCANN “Burnin’ coal”MOSE ALLISON “Wild man on the loose”DAVE PIKE “Jet set”LEE JONES and THE UNFORGOTTEN TWO “I got to see my baby (part 2)”JACKIE IVORY “Do it to death”Escuchar audio

Albums discussed are 100 Gecs' '10,000 Gecs' (8:40) and Herbie Mann's ‘Memphis Underground' (34:10). We also discuss Madison McFerrin's new song ‘Please Don't Leave Me Now' (57:30). To get tickets for the Make The World Better Foundation concert tailgate, go to: https://mtwb.ticketleap.com/make-the-world-better-benefit-concert-tailgate/ To suggest an album for CLRC do any of the following: * Leave a review on Apple Podcasts with the artist and title (five stars always helps). * Use the Spotify form right underneath the podcast in your app. * Visit ⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/thecarl⁠⁠⁠ The intro music is "I Should Let You Know" by Marian Hill. For playlists and podcasts, visit us on the web at ⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/thecar⁠l⁠⁠ and on Twitter at @CLRCPod. This is Carl Landry Record Club episode #120. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/brett-eskin/message

Satoshi Takeishi is another old friend, who I'm happy to have here! Satoshi is a great drummer, percussionist, and composer. He has played, toured and recorded with lots of great musicians, including Ray Barretto, Carlos ‘Patato' Valdes, Eliane Elias, Marc Johnson, Eddie Gomez, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Anthony Braxton, Mark Murphy, Herbie Mann, Paul Winter Consort, Rabih Abu Khalil, Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band. Currently, he is working on several interesting projects, which we talk about in the interview, including working with his wife, Shoko, who is a fine pianist and composer. Satoshi and I met at Berklee in 1982. It's interesting that we're still having the same conversation all these years later. Come and join the conversation. Satoshi TakeishiI am available for online or in person study. Reach out to me at: keith@keithdavismusic.com Keith Davis Music

We all know about fusion - the (sometime unholy) union of jazz and rock that tried to find a new audience for instrumentalists in the 1970s.  But there have always been, well, odder experiments with electricity in jazz, more like intrusions of the rock world than integrations, and we look at four rather varied examples in this here podcast.  Running the gamut from harmolodic blues-slinger to fusion axe-hero to . . . Herbie Mann? - these artists let the guitar off da hook and, possibly, into your hearts.  Herbie Mann - MEMPHIS UNDERGROUND ; James Blood Ulmer – BLACK ROCK;  Alan Holdsworth – NONE TOO SOON; Jay Hoggard - RIVERSIDE DANCE.

Tonight's show has lots of rhythm, spanning 1926 to 1999: Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton & His Red Hot Peppers, Dizzy Gillespie with Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Red Norvo, Hank Jones. Also Machito with Cannonball Adderley, Milt Jackson, Dave Brubeck with Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Ron Carter with Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron, Ray Bryant, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Herbie Mann, The Crusaders, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Wynton Marsalis.

Episode 135 of Pudding On The Wrist finds your host, Frozen Lazuras, spinning choice cuts from Miracle Legion, Edith Frost, Herbie Mann, The Time, Turkish Delight, Electric Blood, The Shapiros, and many more.

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: songs from 1927 to 1969. Fats Waller, Count Basie & His Orchestra, Dinah Shore & Buddy Clark, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington And His Famous Orchestra with Johnny Hodges, Roland Kirk, Nat King Cole, Al Hirt, Miles Davis, Bud Powell Trio (Kenny Clark drum solo), Johnny Hodges, Herbie Mann, and then Ella Fitzgerald with the Ernie Heckscher Big Band & Tommy Flanagan.

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: vocals by Louis Armstrong, then cool jazz, soul jazz, and lots of rhythm.  Instrumentals by Gerry Mulligan & Paul Desmond, Chico Hamilton, Erroll Garner, Herbie Mann, Ray Barretto, Ramsey Lewis, Billy Butler, and the Jonny Lewis Quartet.

Tonight on Jazz After Dark: vocals by Louis Armstrong, then cool jazz, soul jazz, and lots of rhythm. Instrumentals by Gerry Mulligan & Paul Desmond, Chico Hamilton, Erroll Garner, Herbie Mann, Ray Barretto, Ramsey Lewis, Billy Butler, and the Jonny Lewis Quartet.

This is a vinyl assortment of some of the Jazz-Soul-Funk-Disco period of the mid to late 70s. These gems are prized pieces of the “collection” featured on DJ Rhythm Dee's BMS Podcast. So puff up that fro and lace up the platforms for the hippest trip this side of a Friday night.Features, Donald Byrd, B.T. Express, Brass Construction, Mass Production, Archie Bell & The Drells, Herbie Mann, Instant Funk, Foxy, GQ, The Sweat Band, and many more of my favorites.Remember when music was Music!PLAYLIST 1. Rock Creek Park/ Donald Byrd2. Running Away/ Roy Ayres3. Love Is The Message/MFSB4. In The Pocket/ Chuck Brown5. Peace Pipe/ BT Express6. Changing//Brass Construction7. Celebrate/Brass Construction8. Welcome To Our World (Of Merry Music)/ Mass Production9. Walk the Rockaway/ Rufus10. Do You Wanna Get Funky Me/ Peter Brown11. Let's Groove/ Archie Bell & the Drells12. Devil's Gun/CJ & Company13. Sing, Sing/Gaz14. Superman/ Herbie Mann15. Love in C Minor/ Cerrone16. Searching For Love/ Crown Heights Affair17. Crying/ Instant Funk18. Push In the Bush/ Musique19. Get off/Foxy20. Disco Nights/G.Q.21. Get On Up/Round Tree22. Splash Down/ Breakwater23. Freakin's Fine/ Mandre24. I Like Funky Music/ Uncle Louis25. We Do it All Day Long/ Sweat Band26. Hop Scotch/ Sly & Robbie featuring Gwen McCrea