The Greatest Albums of 1961

Check out what makes the cut in another year before the era of the rock album. Also, I talk about record engineering a bunch, which I’m definitely not qualified to do, so check that out too, I guess?

Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1991.  Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover.  While I can’t promise to leave no stone un-turned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before.  Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish?  Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before.  Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time.  Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments.  So without further ado, here is #24 in the series.  As usual, I will disconnect my random number generator to focus on the music of 2019 in my next post.

Check out my previous entries here.

The Greatest Albums of 1961

It’s no shock that these years from the early sixties are going to be dominated by jazz records. Just look at my honorable mention section to get a sense of which single genre was producing credible album-length music at the time. We’ll start seeing early Beatles and Bob Dylan in ’63-’64, but I imagine things don’t really balance out until the second half of the decade. Beyond just a lack of competition from emerging or not-yet-extant styles of music, this era truly does represent an artistic peak for jazz as an art-form. Prior decades featured plenty of musicians cross-pollinating, either in famous partnerships like Diz and Bird, or in the more common mentor/mentee relationships where budding band leaders like Lester Young would earn their stripes with established artists like Count Basie. Yet the period of the late fifties and early sixties was a different animal altogether. It feels like there was a collective of twenty-odd like-minded masters releasing incredible albums over and over again, featuring different configurations of the individual players. Aside from the huge names like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, you had Bill Evans, Art Blakey, Paul Chambers, Wynton Kelley, Cannonball Adderley, Joe Henderson, Hank Mobley, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, and so on. It’s one thing for a couple of great artists to come together for an album or two, as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington did to solid but unexceptional results in ’61, but it’s something else entirely for this pool of musicians to form a rapport with each other over the course of dozens of albums in a four or five year span. The odds of producing something magical increase exponentially when you have that kind of shared history of performing together.

Otherwise, there is a fair peppering of soul and blues in my top ten, but even one of those albums features music that was recorded thirty years prior. Yet the music of greats like Nina Simone and Ray Charles sits very comfortably next to their jazz brethren, which bodes well for the listening value of my 1961 playlist and made for a pleasantly harmonious research period ahead of sampling the vast array of splintered genres and sub-genres in preparation for my post on 2019.

1. Forbidden Fruit – Nina Simone

Nina Simone might be my favorite piano player. That she is among my favorite singers goes without saying, but have you ever really focused on her playing? It is bafflingly unique, almost Monk-like in the esoteric choices she makes as she grapples with applying her classical training to the blues and jazz songs she is performing. She creates a bit of an off-kilter rhythm and adds really unexpected flourishes. What makes it so captivating, outside of its unpredictability, is that it reads as she if she is channeling the same soul and swagger and vulnerability through her instrument as she does through her voice. That ends up creating a multi-dimensional onslaught of everything that makes her such a powerful artist, and that is particularly true on this album. You could make the case that Forbidden Fruit’s production is somewhat poor, with its prominent echo and slightly muted instrument tone. It sounds like it was recorded in an empty cathedral. Yet, that haunting sound perfectly complements the tone of Nina’s voice and piano.  The songs, none of them Simone originals, are suited to this sonic environment. My favorite of the tunes definitely originated with singer Oscar Brown Jr., although I’m not sure if I prefer “The Work Song” or “Rags and Old Iron” (the title track is also Brown’s.) The former describes the life of a petty thief turned accidental murderer, breaking rocks on a chain gang. The song’s subject longs for a quiet afternoon with her love but is mostly just resigned to years of pointless labor under the hot sun. On the latter, Nina wrings as much pathos as possible out of a simple metaphor: Even the peddler who settles for collecting scraps of fabric and metal to sell has no use for the remnants of the protagonist’s broken relationship. The rag man’s refrain of “Rags, old iron!” takes on a chilling quality when contrasted against the desperate, heart-broken verse. Both parts, of course, are sung by Simone in an enthralling performance. She is not the most technical singer, which is probably why she is frequently compared to Billie Holliday instead of virtuosos like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan. Yet, I find that obviously precise and technique-driven performances can sometimes distract from the emotional connection to a song, whether its singing or instrumentation. That is never a threat when listening to Nina Simone, not because she isn’t capable of impressive vocal feats, but simply because she is able to so fully inhabit the emotional space that is called for in her material.

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1. Explorations – Bill Evans Trio

Evans’ piano technique is, not the polar opposite of Simone since they are both adventurous and inimitable, but much more nimble and measured – cosmopolitan if you will. While its title might suggest an avant garde roller coaster ride, what Explorations delivers is something much more serene and cerebral. It’s the perfect tonic for ending a long, stressful day – it’s cool and mellow and swings, and it has enough going on to gently engage your frontal lobe without overwhelming you. I can feel my blood pressure going down every time I listen to it, which is maybe the most middle-aged thing a music reviewer can say (particularly when other entries include inductions for Machine Head and Pusha T). The album kicks off with “Israel”, the great Miles Davis track from Birth of the Cool, and I find it fascinating to hear the iconic trumpet melody replaced with piano. Evans’ small combo, just piano bass and drums, impressively fills the space without relying on instruments that carry a bigger sound. That is really Evans’ biggest contribution to music – making the traditional jazz rhythm section a viable band in its own right. He’s far from the first to try it, but to my ears he achieved the greatest success on that front. When I listen to a lot of piano combos, I tend to get bored quickly. Even the indisputable masters like Art Tatum or Bud Powell fail to capture my interest for an entire album, regardless of how ground-breaking their styles are. With Bill Evans, every note and arrangement is so thoughtful that I find myself losing track of time while he plays. At 51 minutes, Explorations is relatively long for the era. Yet, I can’t help but wish for more once the final notes of “The Boy Next Door” resolve in the album’s stirring conclusion.

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1. My Favorite Things – John Coltrane

It’s not uncommon to read or hear the assertion that Eddie Van Halen has the fingers of God, so inspired by his playing are the makers of those comments*. “Clapton is God” graffiti used to pop up all over London and New York in the mid-sixties, even before Cream was formed. If you’re my age, then “Lemmy is God” is even a reference you may be familiar with. The fact is, you don’t have to imagine what God would sound like if He were a musician, because John Coltrane channeled Him so consistently in his early sixties work. Coltrane embodies the idea of being a vessel for some higher power, whether you think of that as a Judeo-Christian Messiah, or the spirit of the muse, or anything else. His playing is often rapturous, and his rare turn at soprano sax on “My Favorite Things” is one of my favorite examples of that. Yes, what he’s doing is thrilling and unpredictable, but it isn’t perfect. Listen to the squeak at just over a minute in, as he wobbles a bit while kicking his solo into gear. That take would not make it on many jazz musicians’ albums, but Coltrane isn’t interested in crafting a flawless tune, he’s about letting the music flow through him and if he can’t physically keep up, screw it. That’s the reason that the title track and “Summertime”, two standards that have been well-worn in the intervening years, have never sounded as vibrant as they do on this album.

Since this post is seemingly turning into “Piano Talk”, I feel like I must bring up another top five favorite of mine:  McCoy Tyner. It takes a rare talent to keep up with his bandleader, but Tyner never fails to impress with his punchy contributions to rhythm and his thick, jubilant solos. He and Coltrane drive the album with reckless abandon while Elvin Jones and Steve Davis keep it on the rails. Each of the four songs is roughly ten minutes in length, which allows ample time to expand on the central melodies and cover all sorts of interesting ground. Coltrane was on a tear at this time in his career, starting with 1958’s Blue Train and ending whenever his increasingly formless and avant garde mid-60’s experiments became a bridge too far for your personal tastes. My Favorite Things is another example of his brilliant flame that inevitably burnt out too fast.

* I may not get the chance to discuss Eddie in these posts since Van Halen’s 1978 debut was their best chance to get mentioned, and that failed to make my list in my post for that year. We’ll see how 1984 fares, I suppose. My take is that he is exceptionally talented, but not in such an obviously differentiated way that I have ever been able to square the nearly universal reverence he receives. I’m not a guitar player, so I’m speaking as a listener only, but I can’t fathom how Eddie Van Halen is so many people’s favorite guitarist, while someone like Kirk Hammett isn’t really anybody’s. Maybe there’s daylight between those two, but I can’t see it. I recognize that many younger people feel that way about Hendrix, so this all obviously comes down to personal taste, but it remains one of life’s great mysteries in my eyes.

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1. The Genius Sings the Blues – Ray Charles

Ray Charles is such an imposing figure in the history of American music, I’ve always been a little bummed that I never really connected with his music in the same way that I have some of his successors. I appreciate him on an intellectual level, and I’m never disappointed to be listening to him, but I don’t really play his songs unless it’s one of the handful of random tracks that have matriculated through my playlists over the years. With The Genius Sings the Blues, I finally have a bit of a foothold. The ironic thing is, the album is quintessential Ray Charles. So how did I overcome my respectful apathy to Ray Charles music with the most Ray Charles sounding album? It’s largely on the strength of these songs, which are simply undeniable. I must have checked three different sources to make sure I wasn’t violating my unstated rule of “no greatest hits albums” when I was considering this list. “Hard Times”, “(Night Time) Is the Right Time”, “I Believe to My Soul”, “I’m Movin’ On”, “Some Day Baby” – You may not recognize all the names, but you’ve probably heard all of the songs before. They are ubiquitous, despite being sixty years old, because they are pretty much perfect. This incarnation of Charles, with the bouncy Hammond organ sound and the tough cadre of female backing singers, is both iconic and peerless. What’s great is that he is able to produce a variety of distinct styles within those basic parameters. This is all blues, and it all sounds like it belongs together on an album, but it never repeats itself. By contrast, look at a Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley record, and you begin to see how apt that genius moniker is. While I have always understood how special an artist Charles is based on his well-documented influence in popular music, The Genius Sings the Blues has helped me internalize it in a way that I never had before.

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1. Two Steps from the Blues – Bobby “Blue” Bland

Some music just gets the sensory neurons firing. Well, all music gets the aural ones firing, but sometimes the reach is more immersive. Two Steps from the Blues conjures up dim lights and cigarette smoke for me. I immediately feel transported to some small club a half-century ago, where Bobby Bland is belting out these tales of heartache and woe. I don’t know what it is about this particular recording that sparks that feeling, but it never fails no matter how many times I return to it. Perhaps it has to do with the engineering. Similar to Forbidden Fruit, the acoustics suggest a sense of space, like you are at some slight remove from the musicians. It could also have to do with Bland’s singing, which has an immediacy that sucks you in and makes his pain tactile in a way that most artists never achieve. Either way, it’s an aesthetic that’s nice to be able to tap into, so I probably listen to this one more frequently than the rest of the albums of 1961. Bland is an interesting figure, a Rock and Roll hall-of-famer who never really broke into the mainstream, but earned his acclaim largely on the back of this album. His singing has an amazing duality to it. He is a smooth crooner on the surface, but a gutbucket growler underneath. The moments where the former gives way to the latter, such as the chorus of “Little Boy Blue”, are incredibly moving, but his more refined style makes his songs easier to listen to back-to-back than an artist with less versatility. That’s important, because these songs do not largely differentiate themselves from one another the way that Ray Charles’ tracks do. At thirty minutes, though, Bland never comes close to relinquishing your interest. It’s the type of gem that is rightly revered among certain circles, but largely unheralded compared to the music of  his contemporaries like Charles and James Brown. So fire it up at your next cocktail party or poker game for a great listen that comes with some extra cache.

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1. King of the Delta Blues Singers – Robert Johnson

My three favorite guitarists of all time are Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman, and Robert Johnson. With Hendrix and Allman, they are certainly distinctive, but given the desire I imagine that each one could reasonably approximate the other. Certainly, legions of guitar players have made their career on imitating the two of them, especially Hendrix. I don’t believe there is anyone, past, present or future, who could play like Robert Johnson. Listen to the many covers of tracks like “Crossroads” or “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and compare them to Johnson’s originals. You can hear the foundation, but it is so primal and elemental that the artists tackling them had no choice but to squeeze the songs into a more conventional rock/blues structure. On this, a collection Johnson’s essential works from 1936-37, he performs by himself, voice and guitar in continuous conversation. Everything he does is utterly captivating, from the way he starts each song like its being painfully birthed into the world, to the nearly supernatural tenor of his vocal performance. His guitar technique manages to keep the rhythm of the song in the absence of any other instrumentation, yet at times feels completely unmoored from tempo or syncopation. Again, nobody sounds like this. That singularity is surely responsible for the mythology around the man, particularly that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for an unearthly ability to play guitar. Even his own songs seem to address that mythology (or perhaps were mined for details after the fact). “Me and the Devil Blues”, “Hellhound on My Trail”, and of course, “Crossroads” all hint at the supposed Faustian bargain. In reality, though, he’s just a blues man. The ur-blues man in many ways, but a blues man nonetheless. Clock this selection of lyrics from “32.20 Blues”:

If I send for my baby, man, and she don’t come All the doctors in Hot Springs sure can’t help her none; And if she gets unruly, thinks she don’t wan’ do Take my 32.20, now, and cut her half in two

That’s just the coldest shit right there. For the next century or so, blues artists would strive to achieve the bravado, the meanness, the haunting beauty of Robert Johnson. Maybe in the next century, someone will finally come close.

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1. Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! – Ella Fitzgerald

I have never really given Ella Fitzgerald serious consideration before. Don’t get me wrong, I knew of her and her place in the pantheon of jazz singers, but the only music of hers that I had purposefully listened to were a Christmas album and a late-career collaboration with Louis Armstrong. With that backdrop, its hard to say if Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie is a top tier Ella recording. The best I can say is that it’s my favorite her 1960-1961 output, but I can promise you that if it isn’t a particularly strong entry into her catalog, then I can’t wait to explore her best work. The presentation here is basic swing, uncluttered by unnecessary adornment. It is meant to place the emphasis where it belongs, on Fitzgerald’s pristine voice. As a singer, she is technically flawless but never showy. In fact, despite incredible competition, she is probably the best singer represented in this top 10. That begs the question why she isn’t higher in the count-down*, I suppose, which has to do with how I connect with her singing. On the song “My Reverie”, she tackles this lyric: “My dreams are as worthless as tin to me; Without you, life will never begin to be”. She sings it beautifully, because she sings everything beautifully, but I don’t really hear the desperation that the lyric calls for. Contrast Nina Simone’s “Rags and Old Iron”, which has very similar lyrical content, and I’m not thinking about how great the singing is because Nina bypasses my brain and goes straight for my gut. So while Ella outclasses Nina in phrasing, dynamics, tone, etc., its almost like all of those things get in between her and a deeper connection to the song. To use an acting metaphor, Fitzgerald is Humphry Bogart, who performs the mechanics of acting as well as anyone who has done it. I love watching Bogart. Casablanca is great. I just prefer a method actor like Robert Duvall, because I believe every aspect of his performance. Yet, don’t get it twisted, this is a stellar collection of tunes with a captivating vocal by Fitzgerald. I’m not sure that I can think of a singer who is more enthralling from a purely technical perspective (maybe Dimi Mint Abba?). Like I said, I am excited to finally start my Ella Fitzgerald journey in earnest.

* Although its really a count-up, isn’t it? I don’t know, I do these weird.

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1. The Blues and the Abstract Truth – Oliver Nelson

If you dig into enough jazz from this era, you are bound to come across Rudy Van Gelder at some point. A prominent recording engineer at the time, his name can be found emblazoned on the covers of several Blue Note albums. Depending on your perspective, he is either a rightly-revered genius, or simply a solid hand that benefited from Blue Note’s hero-making campaign. On one hand, he engineered some of the most beloved jazz recordings of all time, such as Go and Saxophone Colossus. One the other, Charles Mingus refused to record with him, citing that he had an overbearing impact on the sound of the instruments. I have never recorded an album, so I couldn’t tell you the specific responsibilities of a recording engineer versus a producer, and who the hell am I to contradict Mingus, but I tend to believe Van Gelder’s positive reputation is warranted. The Blues and the Abstract Truth exhibits the same qualities that I associate with most Van Gelder recordings: Immediacy, crispness, and clarity. Each instrument seems occupy its own space, rather than blending together, so it feels like you are sitting in on the session. As usual for this label, the group is made up of a murderer’s row of talented musicians such as Paul Chambers and Eric Dolphy (and Bill Evans… and Freddie Hubbard…), and they are performing a solid batch of original compositions. “Stolen Moments”, which opens the album, is probably the best cut, with its laid back swing and smoothly harmonized melody. It even features a dope flute solo, which pre-dates Jethro Tull by a good decade at the least. Each of the six tracks has something to offer, however. “Cascades” continues the jazz tradition of naming songs for what they sound like, and the bounding saxophone loop-de-loops in the chorus do conjure up the sensation of tumbling downwards. “Yearnin'” features some moments of deft coordination among the instruments, but still sprawls out to let everything breathe and not feel too intense. The sound of the album in general is very inviting, which is probably the result of using three saxophones in addition to the piano, horn and rhythm section. That gives the music a thick, warm sound, like a cozy blanket for your eardrums. I continue to be impressed by the magic that this label, and more specifically the Van Gelder studio, was able to generate on such a consistent basis. It feels like the well will never run dry when it comes to discovering great Blue Note records from the fifties and sixties.

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1. Someday My Prince Will Come – Miles Davis

How cool is Miles Davis? Cool enough to title an album for the cover of a tune from Disney’s Snow White that appears on it, and still be considered the coolest motherfucker of all time. Seriously, you think J. Cole is cool? Let him release an album called Hakuna Matata next week and tell me what you think then. Miles has always achieved the saddest, most vulnerable trumpet sound in jazz, and it always made the solos of frequent collaborator Cannonball Adderley pop in comparison because of Adderley’s warm tone. Adderley is gone, but Davis has found a suitable replacement in Hank Mobley, who shares the same general feel as his predecessor. Despite the pedigree of the horn section*, Wynton Kelley is the MVP of this recording. While Bill Evans was generally simpatico with Miles’ melancholy vibe, Kelley’s bright, energetic playing receives the same benefit of juxtaposition as Mobley, and the prominence of his solos shows that Miles felt the same way. Piano is clearly the lead instrument on “Pfrancing”, and he pretty much steals the title track out from under Davis, Mobley and John Coltrane.

Miles himself actually sounds a touch out of place on the first side of the album, given the peppy sound created by the rest of the band. It isn’t until the low-tempo original “Drad Dog” that he takes command, trading achingly lovely solos with Kelley. The rest of side B plays to his strengths as well, making this a bit of a bipolar listen. All of the individual tracks and musicians are excellent, but that slight lack of cohesion keeps it from the upper echelon of the Miles Davis canon. Of course, B+ Miles Davis is still outstanding in the scheme of things, so it should be no surprise to find this album on my top ten.

* Saxophones are technically woodwinds, but we all consider them part of the horn section, right?

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1. Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane – Thelonious Monk

This album represents an interesting confluence of the commercial with the artistic. Culled from a number of recordings made in 1957, you have two men who are obviously jazz titans bringing their distinct styles together for the first time. The resultant six songs earned universal critical praise, and the performance was deemed important enough to garner the album entry into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Yet, in ’57, Coltrane was not seen as a titan, but as a talented and highly sought-after side man. In fact, if he hadn’t blown up in the subsequent four years with a string of classic recordings as a bandleader, this music would have never seen the light of day. So, the question becomes, is this a rightly revered work of art, or simply a mercenary cash grab by the record label? As it turns out, it’s a little of column A, a little of column B. To be clear, this is not music that was originally recorded to be released together as an album. The remaining band members (including two more historically great bandleaders, Art Blakey and Coleman Hawkins) are different depending on which of the three sessions the tracks were pulled from, and the final song, “Functional”, is a Thelonious Monk solo effort. The selections of songs are not new, all of them having been recorded for previous Monk albums in the forties and fifties. Yet, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the creation of this music, there is a lot of merit to its release. This is not a situation like when a drunken Jim Morrison crashed a poorly recorded Hendrix performance one night and that got packaged and sold as some sort of super-collaboration. These cats sound great together. Jazz, above any other musical genre, is about chemistry over composition. It’s the reason that jazz artists were allowed to be so prolific during this time-frame, because recording old songs with new arrangements and different combinations of performers yields worthwhile results. Hearing John Coltrane spar with Monk is a kind of magical joy, regardless of how familiar the songs may be. There is no discord, but they also don’t mesh perfectly, and that tension generates much of the album’s drive. I would argue that if they had actually set out to record an album in ’61, it might have been a disaster. Monk is one of the most idiosyncratic musicians of all time, and Coltrane’s bold style had flowered so much over the previous couple of years that it might have created an insurmountable clash of personality. The ’57 version of Coltrane, a hungry side man on the come up, is malleable enough to bend his playing to fit the tone set by Monk, while still maintaining his distinct voice. They create a crackling atmosphere that sounds great enough to justify its own existence, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

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Honorable Mentions

Jazz:  Time Further Out – Dave Brubek Quartet; Whistle Stop – Kenny Dorham; Roll Call – Hank Mobley; African Waltz – Cannonball Adderley; Ring-a-Ding-Ding! – Frank Sinatra; More Soul – Hank Crawford; Lush Life – John Coltrane; Africa/Brass – John Coltrane; An Electrifying Evening with the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet – Dizzy Gillespie; The Great Summit – Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington

Bluegrass:  Foggy Mountain Banjo – Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs

#RobertJohnson #TheloniousMonk #OliverNelson #BillEvans #MilesDavis #BobbyBland #EllaFitzgerald #FoundorForgotten #JohnColtrane #greatestalbums #RayCharles #NinaSimone