The early sixties always offer a nice palette cleanser of mostly new music to explore. Check out the latest crop from the “pre-album” era.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. 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 #36 in the series. My random number generator tells me that our next year to explore is 2008.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 1964
1964 is perhaps the last year of the pre-album era. What do I mean by that? Obviously there had to be at least ten albums that came out in 1964 or this is going to be a very short post. The album, or LP (long-play record), has been around since the forties, in fact. I’m more referencing what an artist chooses to do with all of the space now afforded them by advancements in the medium. An LP can consist of a collection of songs, often centered around a couple of singles that are aiming for chart success, and have no greater ambitions than to fill out the run time. An album, in the sense that I am using the term, has some unifying factor, be it sonic or thematic or in the way that it is sequenced, that elevates the entire package as a work of art. It’s a question of intentionality, really. To further pick apart my opening assertion, there were many albums that meet the latter definition released prior to and during 1964. Classical music recordings, for example, almost always operate as albums. I can think of countless jazz recordings of the era that clearly fit the description, as well. R&B and country music were frequently just collections of songs by a single artist at this stage, but there are exceptions where true album-craft was occurring. So, I guess I’m really talking about rock and roll, aren’t I? There is a widely held understanding that the Beatles 1965 record, Rubber Soul, inspired the Beach Boys to create Pet Sounds, which in turn inspired the Beatles to push their craft forward with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I am always wary of boomer music mythologizing, particularly as it relates to the Beatles, but the evidence is kind of hard to ignore. The Beatles released two albums in ‘64, and alongside material from the Beach Boys, the Animals, the Rolling Stones and other nascent rock acts, none of them are really “albums” albums. I haven’t covered 1965 yet, but I have listened to Rubber Soul many times, and it is definitely an “album” album. And I think if you really look at the evolution of rock, and ultimately soul and country, too, from the vantage point of someone who is listening to all this music from these different time periods, that truly does feel like an inflection point. Probably a topic better explored when I do get around to 1965, I suppose, along with how the album era might be ending when you consider how people my children’s age consume music, but I point it out here to say that the musical landscape at this time was still dominated by artists putting out collections of songs. Some of them are excellent collections, mind you, but I find it fascinating, and one of the great joys of this project, to re-live this sense of evolution. It provides fresh perspective on how mind-blowing something like Abbey Road, or Odyssey & Oracle, or Electric Ladyland would be just a few years after this if you were living it in real time.
Crescent – John Coltrane
One of the most celebrated partnerships in jazz is the collaboration between band leader Miles Davis and band member John Coltrane. Though it was a short engagement, on and off through the mid-to-late fifties, it produced such enduring works as Milestones, Cookin’ w/ the Miles Davis Quintet, and perhaps the most popular jazz recording of all time, and my personal favorite album, Kind of Blue.* Their work together is special largely because of their divergent philosophies on instrumentation. Coltrane is a restless seeker, seemingly always on a journey during his solos and throughout his career. Miles, on the other hand, prefers to settle into a particular mood and sit in it, wringing every emotion he can out of a particular track. John would go on to refine his “sheets of sound” approach and delve more and more into the avant garde throughout the sixties, but he always carried a piece of his time with Miles along with him. It would typically pop up on the odd track or two with each record, serving as a reprieve from his more rambunctious flights of fancy. With Crescent, however, Coltrane truly occupies both personas for an entire album, and it makes for one of his most emotionally tuned-in bodies of work.
The opening title track exhibits the dichotomy perfectly. The tone from the start is somber and reflective, eventually kicking into a mid-tempo groove and setting Coltrane loose to solo over the simmering rhythm section. The emotional palette of the track never really strays from that foundation, but Trane’s saxophone quickly starts bristling against the constraints of the structure he has crafted. I often visualize his solos as an unbridled force crashing against a boundary, repeatedly hitting the same spot with slight variation until it can find a way to break through. A John Coltrane solo is the musical equivalent of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, systematically testing their enclosure for a weakness. It’s actually a testament to his restraint that he is able to so thoroughly explore the imaginary space of a particular song without ever crossing into an area that feels abrasive or at odds with what he is trying to accomplish. “Wise One” takes that same blueprint and repeats it with a whisper of Latin flavor for variation. It is worth mentioning that Crescent features the quintessential Coltrane quartet – pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones on drums. It is no small trick to support the passionate playing of a titan like Coltrane without pushing too hard or getting lost in the shuffle, but these three deliver the perfect accompaniment throughout the album, providing their band leader a stable home base for his wanderings. He rewards them with a solo opportunity, each in turn, across the final three tracks of the record. Each man is more than capable on that front as well. When an album only has four instruments to rely on for the entirety of its sound, it can’t afford a weak link, and thankfully there is none to be found here. Garrison and Tyner play in lockstep, paralleling each other even across their improvisations. Jones – for my money, the most emotionally resonant jazz drummer of all time – anchors the entire sound with his fluid and nimble playing. He has a crazy knack for controlling the momentum of the music with his propulsive drumming, and he supercharges the dynamism of each track while most of his contemporaries see their assignment as simply keeping things steady for the rest of the instrumentalists to explore. If you listen to the stunning denouement of “Lonnie’s Lament”, for example, his cymbal work sounds like waves gently cresting against the shore. It lends the song serenity and beauty that would have been completely lost with a more conventional approach.
Crescent is such a lovely, contemplative, autumnal album. It is not, perhaps, the best effort from this quartet, but it is pretty much without flaws. To me, this is what jazz is meant to be about – eliciting emotion through improvisation. All four men are capable of dazzling displays of technique, and there is some of that here, but that isn’t enough to get me to return to a work over and over again. The thing that makes this album a staple of my rotation is the ability to nearly instantly lock me into a certain feeling. On that front, there are few recordings of any genre that rival Crescent.
* It is such a cliche to cite Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme as the best jazz albums that the dedicated thread to the genre on Rate Your Music is titled “There is so much more to jazz than Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme”, or at least it was fifteen years ago when I was a frequent visitor to the site. At the risk of seeming a basic bitch to the mecca of music snobbery that is RYM, they are unequivocally my two favorite jazz albums, and both top five of all time regardless of genre to me.
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The Voice of Africa – Miriam Makeba
By virtue of where I grew up, music from North America and Europe is by far the music that I listen to the most. I enjoy music from South America, although it is not a significant part of my musical consumption. I am largely ignorant of, and traditionally uninterested in, music that originates in Asia or Australia. The most impactful music to me on a gut level, however, is African music. Often, when I visit the music of Africa, it is the hypnotic, polyrhythmic funk of afrobeat. Yet, regardless of whether it is juju, or afrofuturism, or afropop, I find myself drawn to it at a higher rate than other music across the globe. To be clear, I’m not suggesting all of the music across the vast continent is particularly similar. Miriam Makeba is no more akin to Fela Kuti than Willie Nelson is to Nas, but when I spin her music I do find myself equally as entranced. The Voice of Africa leverages the talents of jazz legend Hugh Masekela to arrange and conduct a variety of instruments and background singers, but every musical element is deployed in a way to showcase the album’s greatest asset: Makeba’s voice. Across all tracks, regardless of tempo, it is her singing that demands our attention, and everyone involved seems to understand the assignment in that regard. Her performances are uniformly pristine, whether she is singing in English on a ballad like “Lovely Lies” or in her native Xhosa on the faster, more passionate “Uyadela” and “Mamoriri”. The restrained, percussive backdrop provided by Masekela and the other musicians cedes center stage to Makeba, but it’s far from wallpaper. Subtle and tasteful as it may be, there is a current of technical yet fluid instrumentation that takes some of the pressure off of the star singer to carry the entire album. If I had to describe the tone of this music, I suppose soulful folk would be an apt descriptor, adorned by the drum-forward style of most African music. It is no surprise that Makeba would eventually find a kindred spirit in Harry Belafonte when she came to America, because the music I’m reminded of the most is his excellent 1959 recording, A Night at Carnegie Hall. The examples I cited above are from the second half of the record, and I do feel like it picks up momentum as it goes. My favorite two tracks, in fact, are the final two. “La Fleuve” finds Makeba flexing her polyglot bona fides yet again with a playful, stripped-down French number that has a soaring earworm chorus. The album closer, “Come to Glory”, is a bluesy gospel song that features some transfixing counter-melodies by the background singers, and it builds and builds for two and half minutes to send the album off in tremendous fashion. Makeba never overstays her welcome, polishing off twelve tunes in less than thirty minutes. The abbreviated run time, combined with the expert flow and pacing make this the rare album I’m liable to spin again for back-to-back listens.
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A Hard Day’ Night – The Beatles
I’ve spent pretty much my whole life confounded by the predominant cultural sentiment towards the Beatles. When I was younger, they were considered the de facto “greatest musical artist of all time”, pretty much without exception. Sure, some publication might pose the question of the Beatles vs Elvis, and another might suggest the Beatles vs the Rolling Stones, for example, but it’s telling that you never heard the argument between Elvis and the Stones for musical supremacy. The Beatles were always in the conversation, and nine times out of ten, the ultimate victor. Once I fell in love with the group’s music in college, I couldn’t necessarily dispute the praise that they got, but it still seemed overstated relative to other massively influential artists. It was not, and still isn’t, obvious to me why the Beatles would soak up the vast majority of GOAT talk compared to James Brown or Hank Williams or even Black Sabbath. Yet, some time in the past couple of decades, that sentiment has shifted. As is the natural order of things, time marches on and the band is less and less regarded for their very real brilliance and impact. It’s not something to be upset over, the same thing will happen to Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar and every other musician that has an incredibly significant impact on the culture. That said, as is so often the case, this blog series provides important perspective on the band’s particular merits. Much of the Beatles’ music is great on its face, but when you consider the context in which it was released, you start to understand the near-universal assertions of their peerlessness that followed in their wake for more than twenty or thirty years. If you want to get a sense for it without investing your time listening to ~100 albums for each of the past 60 years, I can recommend two videos: Music reaction Youtuber*, Brad Taste in Music, has recently put out reactions to videos that play a brief snippet of every Billboard #1 song and every Billboard #1 album over the past several decades. It is fascinating to watch someone who is, first, much younger than me, and also clearly a bit of a Beatles skeptic to come to three simultaneous realizations over the course of those two videos:
The Beatles’ music is so much more vibrant and interesting than most of the other popular music of the early sixties;
That vibrance incited a massive shift in how popular music would sound going forward;
They released an incredible volume of music that evolved remarkably quickly in a very short period of time (all of their recorded material occurred between 1963 and 1970)
Which brings me to A Hard Day’s Night. As intimated in the introduction, this is not the fully developed, horizon expanding late-sixties Beatles that would help usher in the album-oriented rock era. Yet, it is the pinnacle of the song-oriented rock to come out in 1964. The thing that stands out immediately is a period-best production quality and crispness to the tracks. Shout out to George Martin, as each instrument is recorded and mixed with perfect clarity. I’ve long been partial to Harrison’s cerebral guitar work, but I’m becoming more and more enamored with Paul’s fluid and punchy bass lines. The second thing is their uncanny sense of melody. The title track, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “And I Love Her”, “Tell Me Why”, “You Can’t Do That”… its a non-stop cavalcade of expertly written and performed tracks, none of which breach the 3-minute mark. The band was not yet capable of a “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “A Day in the Life” or even a “Ticket to Ride”, but their compositions are still the cream of 1964 crop. That’s the final thing that stands out, at least if you are aware of it. This is the first Beatles album that features strictly their own songs. The limp blues covers that drag down an album like Beatles for Sale, released earlier in the year, are completely absent, and that is the thing that most effectively presages their unmatchable run of genius album-craft. Once they realized that they didn’t need to rely on the songs of their heroes to get by, they were unshackled from the past and free to drag everyone along into a future where a collection of original songs can coalesce into something much more than the sum of its parts.
* Music reaction Youtube is largely a wasteland of pandering idiots garnering attention by validating their audience’s long-held beliefs about the music they grew up with, often with an uncomfortable racial component. There are exceptions, though, and good music reaction channels can be a true joy. Here are a few to try:
Lost in Vegas are the GOATs. They are the opposite of everything that is pointless about most reaction channels. They listen to everything, which means that they provide insight into hip hop and R&B, music which they are intimately familiar with, but also deliver a fresh perspective on rock and metal and country, genres that they are developing an understanding of over time. They are unapologetic about their opinions, which means they don’t like everything regardless of how much it would boost their numbers if they did. Most importantly, they offer real analysis, something that is sorely missing from most reaction channels, and they are simply the best at it. I’m a life-long fan.
Bob the Poppop is sort of the inverse of LIV: A white rock/metal enthusiast who is going on a journey to discover hip hop and R&B. His genuine evolution through discovery is a pleasure to witness, and he strikes a fine balance between offering his unfiltered opinion but being humble enough to know that he approaches this music as an outsider.
The Charismatic Voice is perhaps a little more artificially positive than the other channels I’ve listed, but as a trained vocal coach, her insights to different types of singers and vocal approaches are very interesting, and her infectious enthusiasm and bright personality make her videos fun to watch.
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Ain’t That Good News – Sam Cooke
If you were looking to build the perfect male vocalist, combining the technical purity and impeccable phrasing of Frank Sinatra with the grit and emotional vulnerability of Otis Redding, you would get someone who closely resembles Sam Cooke. Cooke is not on my personal Mount Rushmore of soul artists for a couple of reasons – his backing instrumentation is fairly old-fashioned and doesn’t add much to his presentation the way that the Stax house band did for Otis; he didn’t participate in the creative renaissance that soul musicians experienced in the 70’s – but from a pure vocal level, he is certainly Rushmore-worthy (i.e. in the conversation for top four all time.) All of that preamble is conveniently on display on Ain’t That Good News. The production and accompaniment is good, but nothing special. There are strong songs, but they don’t hang together in a way that suggests they are presented together for any reason other than they were the most recent twelve songs that Cooke recorded. Yet, Sam is such a talented professional that the floor for something like this is still highly enjoyable. And the ceiling is “A Change Is Gonna Come”, the best track of 1964 and probably the best of the sixties to that point. Cooke would be fatally shot at the end of the year in a controversial “justifiable homicide”, and the song would go on to be the pinnacle of his legacy, as well as an anthem for the burgeoning civil rights movement. The song builds beautifully, balancing drama and restraint, a great exception to the non-descript production I’ve already mentioned. As far as Cooke’s vocal performance, it is unequivocally the best of his career. Tackling the racism that was a part of the fabric of his daily life, Cooke’s typically suave and relaxed delivery is replaced by heartfelt emotion and yearning for something better. It is a showstopping, era-defining effort, but it is not the only reason this album is in my top five. “Good News” kicks us off in rousing fashion and finds Sam accessing the gravel in his voice to sell the carnal joy he experiences anticipating a reunion with his lady. Tracks like “Another Saturday Night”, “Meet Me at Mary’s Place” and “Good Times” highlight the singer’s gift for upscaling breezy pop tunes about dating and parties so that they feel appropriate for the teenagers of the time to spin at their sock hops and make-out parties*, yet sophisticated enough for their parents to listen to as they unwind from work with a cocktail. The album is rounded out with standards and traditional folk music, and all of it is handled with the same assured excellence that Cooke demonstrated throughout his all-too-brief career.
* As a child, I distinctly remember watching an episode of Mr. Belvidere where the teenage son was hosting a “make-out party”, which was presented like a very specific and official type of party where teenage pairs occupied the various furniture of the living room and simply locked lips in each others’ presence. It was quite odd and intimidating, and I became relieved as I grew older and realized that it was not a culturally mandated rite of passage to stiffly French kiss a girl in a brightly lit room filled with my peers for 2-3 hours. Please don’t tell me if this actually is a long-observed American tradition and I was simply never invited to one.
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Black Christ of the Andes – Mary Lou Williams
Black Christ of the Andes is the type of album I always hope to discover when I travel back to explore the music of the past. Not because it is my favorite, as helpfully indicated by its ranking, but because it does something completely unexpected. Mary Lou Williams had pretty much stopped recording new music in the back half of the fifties following her conversion to Catholicism, until she was inspired to make an album of “sacred jazz” as an expression of her faith. The result is an assortment of jazz, hymns, blues and choral music that clings together thematically, but shifts dramatically from track to track. In many ways, Williams has successfully mimicked a church service, where you might start with a hymn, then transition to a choral number before a time of reflection, the sermon, and finally a more modern praise song. The specifics don’t map precisely, but it does evoke the feeling of a structured progression of disparate elements that are strung together to a similar purpose. Songs like “St. Martin De Porres” and “The Devil”, with their group vocals, minimalistic song structure, and absent backing instrumentation, are incongruous with anything else that I listen to, and honestly unlike anything I would hear at my own church. They are also unlikely to be songs that I play outside of the context of the surrounding record, but I appreciate the purpose that they serve within that context. Tracks like “Anima Christi” and “Praise the Lord” bridge the sacred half of “sacred jazz” with the jazz portions, again creating something generally unique but with more of the hallmarks of popular music at the time. The rest of the album is largely straight-forward jazz and blues, with the intellectual and somber piano playing of Mary Lou at its center. That focus on Williams pays off, because her Bill Evans-meets-Nina Simone technique is the highlight of the album. I could see a universe where Williams took the route of blending the various elements of Black Christ of the Andes on the individual songs, perhaps achieving something in tone similar to Donald Byrd’s A New Perspective, but I appreciate the way this album is constructed. It is a unicorn, something surprising during a year that held very few surprises for me. It also achieves its goal remarkably well – even the more traditional jazz elements read as spiritual on the back of Williams’ reverent playing.
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Stay Awhile/I Only Want to Be With You – Dusty Springfield
Dusty Springfield is not the same caliber of singer as Mariam Makeba or Sam Cooke, but she is very good. Her husky voice is smooth and sonorous, a sonic hot toddy where the rich, throaty whisky is tempered by a little honey. She stands apart from other pop singers from her era in a similar way that Fiona Apple or Amy Winehouse do compared to their contemporaries. What catapults this (uncreatively titled) album so high on the list, though, is the expert song selection. It is simply banger after banger after banger. This supposes, of course, that you can jive with early sixties pop music in general, and I suppose that may be a challenge for a younger audience. I wasn’t alive to experience any of this music in real time, but I’m only a generation removed and it was common for me to be exposed to this sort of thing by my parents or even the content aimed at my parent’s demographic as I grew up. To be real with you, though, I don’t think pop music has ever been better. That isn’t to say that you won’t encounter an ostensibly “pop” album that provides more artistic value than what was on offer in this era (Thriller, Honky Chateau, Cowboy Carter, etc.), but it turns out that the studio hit factories actually excelled at doing their jobs. There is a knee-jerk dismissal of that approach in more modern times, especially following the huge “authenticity” push in the early nineties, but there are advantages to the process. Perhaps Dusty Springfield and her peers did not have the creative freedom to express themselves as openly as others eventually would, but there is a successful formula in cherry-picking the most choice songs available and then selecting the combo of session musicians that best cater to your featured artist’s strengths. The opening salvo of “I Only Want to Be With You”, “Stay Awhile” and “24 Hours from Tulsa” did not immediately trigger my nostalgia synapses when I read the titles, but as I listened to them I did find myself recognizing them and, more importantly, realizing they are terrific. I don’t know if I’ve heard her version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” before, or any version for that matter, but it feels like I have because the original, Dionne Warwick version was sampled prominently on Mos Def’s “Know That”. It’s a funny trick how becoming familiar with the sample-using track first can incept a sense of familiarity with the sampled track, like you dreamt it a hundred times before you actually heard it.* I will admit that I find “Wishin’ and Hopin’” and especially “Mockingbird” a little cutesy, but they are undeniably catchy and well-crafted regardless. Just when you are starting to question if the album can sustain its greatest-hits-adjacent run of winners, it nails you with the two best and most iconic songs it has to offer – “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “You Don’t Own Me”. The latter is a female-empowerment anthem with an ominous sound in the verse contrasting a dramatic chorus that features a great key change in the middle. The former is legitimately one of my favorite songs of all time, beautifully written by Carol King and plainly articulating a question that nearly every woman has asked at some point, even if they haven’t always given voice to that ask. Stay Awhile/I Only Want to Be With You does not feature the most famous versions of most of these excellent songs, and you wouldn’t be crazy to just create a playlist of Warwick and Leslie Gore and The Shirelles et al. I like Dusty’s singing, though, and I like the consistency of hearing all of these hits presented by the same artist. She would go on to carve out her own lane in a few years with Dusty In Memphis and “Son of a Preacher Man”, but having a good voice and good taste is enough for Dusty Springfield to rate in 1964.
* Two more prominent examples of this: Kanye West’s “Spaceship” and Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover”, and Mos again with “Ms. Phat Booty” and Aretha’s “One Step Ahead”. The latter even wrapped back around again a couple of years ago on J.I.D.’s excellent “Surround Sound”.
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It Might as Well Be Swing – Frank Sinatra & Count Basie
Frank Sinatra was nothing if not prolific. He produced at least sixty studio albums across his multi-decade career, mostly concentrated in the 1950’s and 60’s. That makes him an outstanding artist for compilations or playlists that can curate the very best and most popular of his tunes, leaving the inevitable chaff from his albums on the cutting room floor. So while it would be a tall order for anyone to actually listen to all of Frank’s discography, there are a few notable exceptions that make it imprudent to relegate him to a “greatest hits only” category. Watertown for example, his 1970 song cycle about an estranged marriage, is an absolutely stunning work, and one that would lose a ton of its emotional resonance if you plucked out just a song or two.* Another way that his work can be differentiated is through his collaborators. It Might as Well Be Swing has roughly the same ratio of classic tunes as the rest of his albums, but the crisp instrumentation of Count Basie and his orchestra and the expert conducting and arranging by Quincy Jones make those classics really sing (and swing, natch). Even more crucially, they make the lesser known tracks vastly more enjoyable than a more generic presentation would be capable of. In the classic category you have a Sinatra top-fiver kicking things off in “Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)”. Honestly, if you set aside “My Way” and “Strangers in the Night”, this might be the most iconic of Frank’s performances. His relaxed vocal delivery obfuscates the skill he is using to hit each note with perfection and make every verse unique and memorable from a phrasing perspective, which is basically the template for his success and rightful placement in the upper echelons of popular American singers. The way the music is arranged and recorded amplifies Sinatra’s strengths, providing the perfect groove and moments of punctuation for his verses. “The Best Is Yet to Come” is another highlight, and again, each instrument sounds distinct yet balanced with the whole, serving as the ideal backdrop for the singer. “I Can’t Stop Loving You” is perhaps a lesser known number, but a rare selection from the country music songbook that sounds remarkably at home next to the surrounding jazz and pop standards. As I mentioned earlier, really every track sounds excellent, although there are a couple that might get excised from my collection eventually: “Hello, Dolly!” is another hugely popular standard (albeit one more associated with Carol Channing and Louis Armstrong) but I have never had an affinity for it in any of its myriad versions, and the Burt Bacharach penned “Wives and Lovers” is simply so dated from a lyrical perspective that it sounds like a parody of Dear Abby advice columns to modern ears. As a package, though, It Might As Well Be Swing delivers consistently for anyone who appreciates the enormous talent of Sinatra, Basie and Jones.
* That’s how great 1970 was, by the way. Watertown narrowly missed out on my top ten despite my genuine love and appreciation for the album. By way of comparison, that record, my number eleven or twelve album from 1970, would be in competition for the number one spot in 1983, 2003, 2015 and yes, 1964.
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Wish Someone Would Care – Irma Thomas
If I had chosen a different format for this blog series, greatest songs maybe, or a more general look back at what the musical landscape was during a particular year, I would be writing about The Supremes and The Rolling Stones and The Ronnettes and Chuck Berry before I ever considered bringing up Irma Thomas. Nothing on Wish Someone Would Care has the iconic impact of “Come See About Me”, or “Time Is On My Side”, or “Be My Baby”, or “You Never Can Tell”. Yet, none of those artists were able to surround their classic 1964 tracks with material that you would have much interest in listening to more than once, and Irma crafted a whole collection of songs that I’m happy to listen to at any point in time. I’ve already talked about what an “album” is or should be ad nauseum, but some of this is by design. If an act is capable of putting together, say, six really good songs in a year, the people that stand to make money off of those songs have to decide how to maximize them. Across the history of recorded music, that has pretty much been the record labels, and especially back in the early sixties they supposed the best way to maximize five or six hits would be to spread them out across three albums and force people to buy all three (until they repackaged them in slightly different permutations over the next several years to bleed the music-listening public even more dry.) I’m not trying to say that Irma or her label held themselves to some unimpeachable artistic standard, or even that this album is anything more than thirty minutes of good soul tunes, but it is possible that her relative lack of commercial viability compared to those previously referenced heavy hitters afforded her more freedom in terms of song selection and album composition. Who knows? Not me! Maybe I should talk about the actual music instead.
Irma Thomas is a soul singer out of New Orleans who is very much in the Etta James mold. She is not quite as distinct or powerful as James or Aretha Franklin, another contemporary of hers, but that just puts her in good company with 99.9% of the professional singers who have ever existed on the planet. For the most part, the material presented on Wish Someone Would Care is comprised of straightforward love songs that are mellifluous and authentic. If I’m honest, despite listening to this album at least ten times at this point, I find it difficult to differentiate between most of the songs. The exception is “Break-A-Way”, a propulsive, up-tempo tune that closes the album on a high note. That one is not as widely recognized, but deserves to be on the list of iconic singles that I listed above. For the rest, though, they flow gently from one to another with similar vibes and at the same strong level of song-craft, which makes the whole affair easy to listen to but not as memorable as the others on the list. Let’s not pretend, though, that crafting a whole album of music with no skippable tracks is an easy thing to do. One of my favorite acts from this era is the Impressions, which features the incredible vocal dynamic of Curtis Mayfield’s lilting tenor and Jerry Butler’s gutbucket baritone, not to mention Mayfield’s world class songwriting, and their 1964 album, Keep on Pushing, missed the list because I only really like about half the songs on it. I will listen to the entirety of Wish Someone Would Care dozens of more times in my life, and I’ll be perfectly content every time one of the songs pops up on my soul playlist or my 1964 playlist, and I’ll be banging “Break-A-Way” with gusto for the foreseeable future as well. Not too shabby for an artist that wasn’t really on my radar at all just a few months ago.
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In Europe – Miles Davis
Allow me to present my ranking of how likely a live album is going to be worth a damn, by genre, from least to most. A list within a list, huzzah!
Hip Hop – Simply doesn’t exist. Technically, the batting average is amazing because of The Roots Come Alive and a couple of solid MTV Unplugged recordings, but this is generally not a thing that is done.
Heavy Metal – Metal, on the other hand, has oodles of live albums. Among the most of any type of music, in fact, and I can’t think of a single one I’d care to listen to. This is a genre that typically accentuates the technical crispness of the musicians, and also a genre where the singers tend to need quite a bit of studio assistance, and neither of those things are helped in a live setting. Love a good metal concert, but only in the moment it is happening.
Rock N’ Roll – Another genre with a ton of live music on offer. There are highlights, for sure, but I typically find live recordings of rock music to be the epitome of inessential. Jimi Hendrix excepted.
Country – There are some choice examples in the country sphere, like the Johnny Cash prison concerts, and the live setting helps dispel some of the over-production that can plague the genre. One thing I look for in recorded live music, however, is improvisation and deviation from the studio tracks, and that is not typically the type of thing that happens here.
Soul/Funk/R&B – We’re starting to hit upon a genre with a load of great live albums. Aretha at the Fillmore West, Parliament at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, James Brown at the Apollo, the list goes on and on. The live recordings don’t have the same ceiling as the most well-crafted studio albums, but there are a lot of gems in this category.
Jazz – Ok, let’s talk about it…
In very broad strokes, artists in most genres seek to approximate their studio work in a live setting, but in jazz, the artists generally seek to approximate a live performance in the studio. In Europe captures a full concert in Antibes, France, with Miles and an all star lineup* cruising through a terrific selection of songs. The first thing that separates this recording from several live albums (even some that I’ve placed in previous top tens) is that it represents a mostly unadulterated copy of the show as it sounded at the time. It’s true that the original LP had to trim a couple of solos in order to fit onto vinyl, but the CD reissue (and widely available digital version) restores the extra 20 minutes of excised material. It is no sin to craft your live album from bits and pieces from multiple performances, but there is something magical about the time capsule aspect of a perfectly preserved performance. Another thing that stands out is sound fidelity. This is not quite studio-grade, but it is immaculately recorded and engineered to retain enough feel of a live show but still present the music as cleanly as possible. The biggest reason that this album succeeds, which speaks to the success of live jazz recordings in general, is that the live setting fosters improvisation, and jazz is all about improvisation. Miles and gang serve up only six tracks (excluding the introductions) but take 80 minutes to do so, letting each performer loose to do their thing on every one. So while I already have four versions of “Autumn Leaves” to listen to, hearing a new take on the tune, one of my favorites, is always welcome.** That is, admittedly, also the thing that keeps this from landing higher on the list. Scarcity is a factor, and I already have most of these tracks covered on other albums, but also heaps of Miles Davis to pick from. In a vacuum, this is probably a top five album in 1964, but if it didn’t exist there would be plenty of substitutes to take its place.
* Rhythm section of Ron Carter and Tony Williams – exceptional. Herbie Hancock on keys – obviously a genius. George Coleman is very good as well, but perhaps not as expressive as the rest of Davis’ world class tenor saxophone menagerie over the years.
** This made me curious about which song I have the most versions of in my collection. I don’t know what iTunes wizardry would tell me that definitively, but I did look up a few that immediately jumped to mind. I was surprised to see I only had three versions of “Afro Blue”, though the five versions of “Mood Indigo” sounded right. The winner, as far as I can tell, is “Summertime” with a whopping eight (the Gershwin version, not DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince – there’s only one of those, and blessed we are to have it).
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Coltrane’s Sound – John Coltrane
How great is John Coltrane? So great, that a handful of his cast aside recordings from several years prior could be packaged together by his former record label as a cash grab, and still make my top ten. Twice. See 1961‘s Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane for one example, and read on for another. Coltrane’s Sound was culled from the My Favorite Things sessions of 1960, and, similarly to Crescent, represents a more mellow side of Trane. Yes, there are ballads (“Central Park West”, “Body and Soul”), but I mean more that he doesn’t seem to be pushing at boundaries or putting his exploratory side in overdrive during his playing. That restraint is what demarcates this album from Coltrane’s greatest achievements, and likely played a role in keeping these songs unreleased for a handful of years, but it is also the very thing that makes this one of his most listenable albums to a casual audience. For as much as I love the blazing passion and continuous invention of Coltrane in exploratory mode, it demands your undivided attention and can be exhausting to fully absorb. Here, on tracks like “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” and “Equinox”, his playing is lively and thoughtful for sure, he’s not capable of less, but also more conversational and spritely. Frequent collaborators, Jones and Tyner, follow his lead, and the looser vibe is one that fits the group well (Jimmy Garrison, the final member of the classic quartet, was not a part of these sessions, but bassist Steve Davis is solid in his contributions.) Finally, Coltrane’s Sound provides an interesting challenge to the definition of an album that I outlined just a few thousand words ago in the introduction to this post. I just learned today about the origin of this record, and there is clearly a lack of artist intent in this case. Yet, absent that knowledge I would have continued to assume that this was a fully formed statement from one of my absolute favorite musicians, a capital-A “Album” in every way. As I feel my way through this project and attempt to articulate my ever evolving thoughts on the artform, perhaps that is one that I’ll have to take back for refinement. Maybe I’ll figure it out over the next 24 entries. I hope you stick around to find out. See you in a couple of months for a deep dive into 2008.
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Honorable Mentions
Jazz: The Body and the Soul – Freddy Hubbard; Tonight at Noon – Charles Mingus; Cannonball in Europe – Cannonball Adderley Quintet; More Blues and the Abstract Truth – Oliver Nelson; Fantabulous – Oliver Nelson; In Concert – Nina Simone; Live at Birdland – John Coltrane; Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus – Charles Mingus; Mingus Plays Piano – Charles Mingus; Oscar Peterson Trio + One – Oscar Peterson Trio; Una Mas – Kenny Dorham; Out to Lunch – Eric Dolphy; The Cat – Jimmy Smith
Soul: Unforgettable – Aretha Franklin; Pain in My Heart – Otis Redding; Keep on Pushing – The Impressions; Rock ‘N Soul – Solomon Burke
Blues/Rock/Pop: Folk Singer – Muddy Waters; The Times They Are a-Changin’ – Bob Dylan; Beatles for Sale – The Beatles; Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes – The Ronettes
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