Buffalo Springfield - Buffalo Springfield Again

Released - October 1967

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - Ahmet Artegun; Richie Furay; Jim Messina; Jack Nitzche; Stephen Stills & Neil Young

Selected Personnel - Stephen Stills (Guitar/Organ/Piano/Keyboard/Vocals); Neil Young (Guitar/Vocals); Richie Furay (Guitar/Vocals); Dewey Martin (Drums/Vocals); Bruce Palmer (Bass); Hal Blaine (Drums); James Burton (Dobro/Guitar); David Crosby (Vocals); Jim Fielder (Bass); Jim Gordon (Drums); Carol Kaye (Bass); Jack Nitzche (Piano); Russ Titelman (Guitar)

Standout Track - Mr. Soul

The general consensus on Buffalo Springfield seems to be that they were a truly great band in a live context and never quite managed to make a record that was a fitting testament to how good they were capable of being, but that their second effort, the aptly titled Buffalo Springfield Again, is the closest they ever got. Certainly, it's an uneven and frustrating album, one that never coheres into a sense that you're really listening to a great band, but it has sporadic highlights. For me, given the fairly hit-and-miss legacy they've left behind them, getting into Buffalo Springfield was never a massive priority for me, but as a big Neil Young fan (increasingly so over the last couple of years), I was keen to listen to some of what he did before going solo. Based on this album, they were clearly a talented group, but never quite managed to establish themselves as something I'm sorry to have never heard more of.

That "they're great live" statistic seems very relevant here to the thing that I feel is their main failing - in a live setting, it's very easy for a band to put aside ego or preciousness about their own individual role within the group and just jam together to create an exhilarating live experience, so I could easily imagine that in that context the band were able to combat the major problem on this record, which is simply that there are too many people trying to pull it in different directions. The band boasts no fewer than three singer-songwriters in the form of Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay, who had simply played guitar and sung on their first album but now insisted on sharing songwriting duties and contributed three of the album's songs. Having multiple singer-songwriters in the band isn't necessarily a bad thing - Supertramp are a good example, if I'm allowed to default to one of my all-time favourite bands. Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson each wrote about half of every album's songs, with none of them ever emerging from true band collaboration or jam sessions or anything of the like. But Supertramp's output never sounded like two solo projects jammed together, as the songs were carefully crafted to provide showcases for the rest of the band to make their identities felt, while the songwriters themselves had very different sensibilities and styles that complimented one another well - Hodgson's brighter pop songs sitting alongside the moodier, blues-tinged songs of Rick Davies. You could also recognise the instrumental contributions each of them made to one another's songs, and there's a true sense of a band all working together to bring the best out of a song written by one particular member.

On Buffalo Springfield Again, it's very difficult for it to feel like much other than three solo artists vying for attention, and occasionally failing. Two of Young's compositions were basically solo works which the rest of the band didn't even contribute to, while the songs by Stills and Furay honestly sound interchangeable to me - I really feel like the two of them struggle to contribute any of their own personality or style here, and it just feels like everybody but Young is fighting a losing battle to actually make anything that sounds distinguishable from so much other country-folk-rock of the time. It's a similar problem I have with a lot of the subsequent work of Crosby, Stills & Nash, so I feel it's a genuine failing of much of the genre stalwarts of the time, be it Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, or whoever. Perhaps that's just me speaking as a big fan of Young's solo stuff that his style of guitar playing and songwriting (not to mention that unmistakeable voice) is immediately recognisable to me, but I really do feel that he offers something unique and recognisably himself here in a way that Stills and Furay don't quite manage. I find it difficult to pick out many moments that I can recognise as one or the other of them, and the mood of all their songs blurs into a generic, soft-focus, country-rock vibe too often for my tastes.

Still, it's perhaps to be expected that the album doesn't really cohere together given the tumultuous circumstances of its recording. Initially, Buffalo Springfield had been a huge passion project for those involved, and Stills and Young had spent months trying to track each other down to work together having hit it off the first time they met in the mid-60s. As mentioned above, however, their first album had failed to capture the exciting live sound they had become well-known for on the West Coast scene, and fractures began to appear as they tried to record a follow-up. Furay's enthusiasm to upgrade himself to co-songwriter suggests a kind of jealousy to the increased creative control Stills and Young had had over the first record, while bassist Bruce Palmer was soon arrested for drug possession, and his repeated arrests and detainments meant he was frequently absent from rehearsals and recording sessions and needed to be replaced by session musicians. Young began to distance himself more and more from the group, Palmer being one of the very first musicians he had started working with after trying to make it in music, and his absence therefore hitting him harder than the others. Young was also perhaps increasingly aware that his talents far outstripped the other band members, and he no longer required the comfort blanket of being part of a band as much as he once did (Young has often said that he needed to be part of a band initially as he had very little confidence in his singing voice and was too afraid of this to go solo, but once Buffalo Springfield had helped to give him the confidence to sing in front of people, there was little he needed to gain from the band any more).

I'll deal with Young's compositions first - "Mr. Soul" is quite simply one of the finest hard-rocking songs he ever wrote, and easily the stand-out of the whole album. Its fearsome guitar riff immediately grabs the attention and won't let go, shaking the listener into submission, while the strange, alien reediness of Young's voice set to such a blistering guitar riff creates a genuinely unnerving effect. The other two Young songs really convey how little interest he had in the group dynamic, as both of them are orchestral experiments recorded only with assistance from Jack Nitzche, an arranger who had worked with Phil Spector and would go on to be one of Neil Young's frequent collaborators. "Expecting To Fly" is a ghostly and ethereal song, which utilises Nitzche's string arrangements not to create a full, bombastic warmth as orchestral accompaniment was so often used at the time, but instead to lend a fragility and strageness to the song. The strings are thin and sparse, and create a ghostly atmosphere. "Broken Arrow," meanwhile, is downright weird, and, to the best of my knowledge, totally unique within the Neil Young canon is that it's barely a song and more a sound collage, switching from fragments of one recognisable tune to other random bursts of circus-esque music and all sorts of strange oddities, including a very brief extract from a live performance of "Mr. Soul" featuring somebody else (presumably Stills, but I still can't tell who's who) on vocals. It's perhaps not the most listenable thing on the album, but really marks out Young as the one member of the band interested in doing something new.

The rest of the album, as I've said, struggles to ever really escape a fairly generic folk-rock vibe, but that's not to say it doesn't have its highlights. "Everydays" has a sort of interesting spookiness to it (and, interestingly, was covered by Yes a couple of years later on their 1970 album Time And A Word - Yes seemed to have an odd remit on their first two albums to cover songs by West Coast folk-rock bands as their self-titled debut album featured a cover of the Byrds' "I See You,") and "Hung Upside-Down" has an amusing sense of fun and bombast to its choruses (though Stills' faintly embarrassing grunts of "Ooh! Yeah!" over the song's closing moments descend into self-parody). "Bluebird" is a fun, sprightly folk rock song whose highlight is its frenetic acoustic guitar solo, but its status as being the "peak" of Buffalo Springfield's recorded output is highly suspicious to me considering it doesn't even hold a candle to "Mr. Soul." I also quite like some of "Rock & Roll Woman," whose "ba-ba-ba" backing vocals and quick-fingered acoustic guitar work make it sound like an inferior prototype of "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills & Nash a couple of years later. Furay's compositions, meanwhile, are the truly forgettable ones, with only "Good Time Boy" doing anything to linger in the memory, and even then only thanks to a fun turn by guest vocalist Dewey Martin.

Altogether, then, just as its legacy suggests, Buffalo Springfield Again is a piecemeal affair, something that strikes occasional highs but really struggles to find much of an identity as a piece of work in its own right. Too much of it just relies on the same tropes and sounds long-established by countless West Coast country-rock groups of the time, with only Neil Young willing to do something that sounded original or heartfelt. A shame, as all the musicians involved are obviously very talented - Stills' songs really do provide a showcase for his guitar abilities, and in places there's a gutsy rawness to his vocals that remind me of the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty. But the band just never manages to really listen to one another and try to make the best of each other's individual talents and make it more than just a collection of soloists trying to outdo one another.

In the wake of Buffalo Springfield Again's critical success, hopes were high for the band, but the continued drug charges levelled at Bruce Palmer, and Young's continued disinterest in the group, meant that it wasn't long before they disbanded barely two years after they formed. Furay and Palmer, by and large, faded into obscurity, but Stills went on to found Crosby, Stills & Nash with the Byrds' David Crosby and the Hollies' Graham Nash. The supergroup would achieve great success, while Young quickly rose to become one of the most successful singer-songwriters in folk rock. Occasionally, when he felt the inclination, Young would drop into Crosby, Stills & Nash recording sessions to contribute material, such as the brilliant "Ohio," a song about a school shooting and one of his very best. Young's attitude to the supergroup has long amused me - he only agreed to join it at Stills' insistence, as apparently there was great fan demand for him to be involved, and Young agreed to sporadically join the band, but only on the insistence that he be given equal billing and they be renamed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. That he managed to get away with this and still only occasionally drop into recording sessions to lay down something effortlessly great before disappearing and letting the other three get on with whatever else they wanted to do was perhaps Young's final joke at the expense of Stephen Stills and the band he no longer felt he needed.

Track Listing:

1. Mr. Soul (Neil Young)

2. A Child's Claim To Fame (Richie Furay)

3. Everydays (Stephen Stills)

4. Expecting To Fly (Neil Young)

5. Bluebird (Stephen Stills)

6. Hung Upside Down (Stephen Stills)

7. Sad Memory (Richie Furay)

8. Good Time Boy (Richie Furay)

9. Rock & Roll Woman (Stephen Stills)

10. Broken Arrow (Neil Young)

Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You

Released - March 1967

Genre - Soul

Producer - Jerry Wexler

Selected Personnel - Aretha Franklin (Vocals/Piano); King Curtis (Saxophone); Charles Chalmers (Saxophone); Gene Chrisman (Drums); Tommy Cogbill (Bass); Jimmy Johnson (Guitar); Chips Moman (Guitar); Dewey Oldham (Keyboards)

Standout Track - Respect

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog (I think most specifically on my review of Etta James' 1963 sort-of-compilation-sort-of-album Top Ten) my difficulty taking a lot of records from the 50s and early 60s that seriously due to their nature as commercial products rather than true works of creative independence in their own right. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, particularly in genres like jazz and folk, where the assertion of the artist's independence was prioritized early on - albums like Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue or Bob Dylan's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan blazed a trail for innovative artists to concentrate on their own pioneering spirit rather than on what a label believed would sell well. But elsewhere, particularly in the pop and soul genres, the majority of what was put out was the result of a series of creative decisions made by corporate labels and management agencies, fronted by some young singer, and it wasn't until the mid-60s, with the likes of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, that the idea of an artist crafting an album as a piece of work in its own right rather than as a collection of pop hits, began to achieve dominance, and labels began to grant more independence to their artists.

The institutionalised sexism of the 60s creative industries rears its head here too, as male artists were granted such independence far earlier than female singer-songwriters - male soul singers like Otis Redding or Sam Cooke were writing their own material for much of the decade while people like Etta James had to fight to get the odd co-writing credit on certain songs. That all changed with Aretha Franklin. Her first massive breakthrough album, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, quickly established her as one of the hugest sensations in soul music, but she was hardly new to the scene. She had been struggling away for over a decade, but it was only when Atlantic Records granted her her creative freedom that she finally fulfilled her potential and became a star.

Franklin had been singing with touring gospel groups since the mid-50s and had eventually signed with Columbia Records, who had helped her put out a few successful singles, but had kept things very much focused on the pop market, not really allowing her to indulge in her more exultant gospel roots and struggling to really reach a huge market. In 1967, dissatisfied with her lack of progress with Columbia, Franklin chose not to renew her contract and signed with Atlantic, who promptly gave her what Columbia had withheld for years - the freedom to have creative input on the album itself. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You features four songs co-written by Franklin, a huge step forward from the general status of the situation at the time, and she also plays piano herself, providing the core instrumental accompaniment for her singing, fleshed out with the able support of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the legendary group of session musicians who were resident at the Muscle Shoals studio where the album was recorded, a studio that was the birthplace of much of the classic recordings of the 60s soul and R&B scene.

It's a real testament to Franklin's brilliant songwriting, and the short-sightedness of the execs at Columbia, that her own compositions are among the very best on the album. "Don't Let Me Lose This Dream" is a restless, joyous little pop songs with an infectiously uplifting chorus, whose flittings of Latin-styled guitar are the perfect compliment to Aretha's hugely celebratory vocal. "Baby, Baby, Baby" is a gorgeously sweet love song, and "Dr. Feelgood (Love Is A Serious Business)," thanks to her incredibly passionate and bluesy vocals, oozes with a sensuality that helps it to escape the faintly generic R&B trappings of its melody and arrangement. Then there's the brilliant "Save Me," whose sparse guitar and rhythm arrangement lends it a bluesy dirtiness that makes it one of the rawest performances on the record. Over the course of the whole album, producer Jerry Wexler is keen not just to force Aretha to craft lightweight pop hits as in her previous work, but really dives into the gospel roots of her earliest musical outings, including call-and-response vocals with full gospel choirs, and ensuring a strong focus on the spiritual sound of the organ beneath everything else.

This is never more true than on the astonishing "Respect," which has firmly become Aretha's most iconic song. So ubiquitous is her version that the vast majority of people these days will almost certainly come into contact with her recording before ever hearing Otis Redding's original version, and I remember being surprised at just how tame and restrained Redding's original is in comparison. It's easy to forget, then, that his version had already been a big hit at the time, and the explosion of Aretha's gutsy, brash cover version must have been an even bigger shock to the public at the time. Replete with gospel call-and-response, fearsome, explosive vocals and the restless "Sock it to me, sock it to me" of its fidgety, frenetic finale have firmly established it as one of the all-time classic soul recordings, and such is Aretha's firm ownership of the song that this version quickly became an anthem for civil rights and feminist movements, taking on a political meaning far beyond anything it managed to achieve in Redding's hands (Redding himself admitted at the time to being absolutely stunned by Aretha's reworking of his song when he first heard it, having no idea that it could be transformed into something so powerful). There's also, of course, the gorgeous cover of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come," a song that had already become a political anthem in Cooke's hands, but Aretha's version, with its smoky, strident vocals and gently rippling piano, adds a sweetness and a beauty all its own.

Not everything here works, for me - the version of "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" is a tad slow-moving and turgid for my liking, while some of the songs are simply perfectly acceptable soul or R&B numbers that don't quite match the incredible highs. But even in its most generic moments, the material is lended a hand by Aretha Franklin's incredible voice, which is undeniably one of the strongest voices not just in soul music, but in all of music history. As if to confirm that this record was no fluke, Franklin and Wexler quickly repeated the formula and followed I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You with the equally brilliant Lady Soul, an album that continued to deliver iconic recordings such as "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," and it was soon confirmed that Aretha Franklin was no one-hit wonder or fluke, but one of the eternal, defining greats of soul music. This record is perhaps the first time everybody sat up and started to realise.

Track Listing:

1. Respect (Otis Redding)

2. Drown In My Own Tears (Henry Glover)

3. I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) (Ronnie Shannon)

4. Soul Serenade (Curtis Ousley & Luther Dixon)

5. Don't Let Me Lose This Dream (Aretha Franklin & Ted White)

6. Baby, Baby, Baby (Aretha Franklin & Carolyn Franklin)

7. Dr. Feelgood (Love Is A Serious Business) (Aretha Franklin & Ted White)

8. Good Times (Sam Cooke)

9. Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Dan Penn & Chips Moman)

10. Save Me (Curtis Ousley; Aretha Franklin & Carolyn Franklin)

11. A Change Is Gonna Come (Sam Cooke)

Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

Released - August 1965

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - Bob Johnston & Tom Wilson

Selected Personnel - Bob Dylan (Vocals/Guitar/Piano/Harmonica); Mike Bloomfield (Guitar); Charlie McCoy (Guitar); Paul Griffin (Piano/Organ); Al Kooper (Piano/Organ); Frank Owens (Piano); Harvey Brooks (Bass); Russ Savakus (Bass); Bobby Gregg (Drums); Sam Lay (Drums)

Standout Track - Ballad Of A Thin Man

As I think I briefly outlined in my review of Bob Dylan's 1963 breakthrough album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, he remains something of an anomalous blind spot in my musical interests. I'm well aware of most of his best-known songs, of course, and of what he represents and who he is, but I've never taken the time to actually try and digest much of his discography. This is partly down to the inherent reluctance that comes whenever considering tackling somebody with as extensive an output as Dylan's - is it really worth the amount of time it'll eat up? But it's also down to the fact that the few albums of his I have listened to haven't done much for me. His early folk stuff, for me, feels a little too self-indulgent - even the admittedly very good Freewheelin' Bob Dylan has plenty of fairly tedious filler to go along with such obvious highlights as "Blowin' In The Wind" or "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." His slightly later folk-rock material, meanwhile, was only known to me in the form of 1966's Blonde On Blonde, an album I really struggle to enjoy - if anything, it's considerably more self-indulgent than his folk epics, with vastly over-long songs that struggle to deliver enough musical inspiration to justify their running times. I'm well aware that's an opinion that flies in the face of a lot of received wisdom, mind you.

So I was surprised that I enjoyed Highway 61 Revisited as much as I did, and perhaps it's a sign that if I ever do find the time to listen to more of Dylan's stuff, I'd find more gems to enjoy than I might otherwise assume. Of course, one doesn't receive such iconic status without good cause, but I just can't shake the feeling that Dylan's importance as an activist and musical revolutionary overshadow the actual quality of a lot of his stuff. My theory is that perhaps Dylan's tendency towards self-indulgence and to prioritise lyrical intensity and poetic imagery over and above musical innovation or real listenability, is where he falls down for me, and there's a feeling with Highway 61 Revisited that those tendencies have abandoned him briefly (albeit to return in full force on Blonde On Blonde the following year). Possibly it's Dylan's conversion to a full-band electric sound rather than the stripped-back acoustic style of his earlier stuff that briefly shifted his focus elsewhere and delivered something restrained and genuinely great. That's not even to say that Dylan's strengths as a lyricist and poet aren't strongly in evidence here, in fact it's possible that the clarity and focus this album provides offer a greater insight into his lyrical genius than ever before, merely that the songs this time really do work as songs in their own right rather than being vaguely diverting musical accompaniments to his words, where what was being said was considered far more important than the way it was said, an attitude that never really sits right with me in music - obviously the lyrics of a song are vitally important, but for it to function properly as song rather than just being a poem or a spoken word piece, the music needs to be an equally integral part of telling the story, and I often get the feeling with early Dylan that that balance hasn't really been struck.

Highway 61 Revisited is of course infamous due to its status as the man's first electric album. After spending a few years being relatively obscure and relying on the championing of the likes of Joan Baez in order to achieve any recognition, he exploded to the status of the "King of Folk" in the sensational response to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (Baez's assertion on Diamonds & Rust that Dylan "burst on the scene already a legend," therefore, is a slight exaggeration, and modestly overlooks her own part to play in his success). This resulted in several international tours which left him exhausted and disillusioned by mid-1965. Perhaps the gruelling slog of having to sing the same songs night after night for months on end had robbed him of his sense of conveying a message of true importance, had diluted his own sense of any significance in his music. He was on the point of giving up singing altogether, frustrated by how little his sense of his ability or importance matched up with the rave receptions he received worldwide, and went away to pour himself into his writing, ultimately churning out a vast, pages-long early version of what would eventually become "Like A Rolling Stone." The song was pared down a little from its epic initial draft, but didn't really come alive in the recording studio until Dylan and producer Tom Wilson tried recording it with electric backing, most notably Al Kooper's contributions on organ. Kooper included a sprightly organ riff which breathed new life into the song, and must have got Dylan excited about a potential new direction - no longer was he limited to his own acoustic strumming in order to paint around his words, but he had been afforded a bigger, fuller sound.

Dylan's new full-band electric sound was debuted live at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, where he was booed and branded "Judas" by the audience, who for now couldn't see any virtue in Dylan giving into the commercial sounds of rock and pop, believing it would only cheapen the purity and sincerity of his words. Columbia Records were resultantly reluctant to put out "Like A Rolling Stone" as a single, but eventually did so and were surprised by its enormous chart success, particularly considering its six-minute runtime. It seemed that, in the context of a proper recording where the full impact of the instrumentation and sound can be heard properly, his audience were willing to go with him far more than in the volatile live setting of the festival. Accordingly, the remaining sessions for Highway 61 Revisited (now helmed by the album's second producer, Bob Johnston) pursued the same sound and arrangements.

"Like A Rolling Stone" is one of Dylan's finest songs, and perhaps the first to prove him capable of being more than just a love-lorn, overly sincere, hopeful activist. Even poetic masterpieces like "Blowin' In The Wind" or "The Times They Are A-Changin'" were characterised by a sort of naive optimism, a typical early-60s faith in things getting better. "Like A Rolling Stone" is cynical, angry, snide, even sarcastic, and Dylan snarls the tune more than ever before. Its subject is "Miss Lonely," supposedly based on Edie Sedgwick, one of the mainstays of Andy Warhol's Factory scene, someone who had a privileged and untroubled upbringing and, now they face troubles and hardship later in life, find they have no meaningful experiences by which to define themselves. Given the song's emergence from Dylan's own submersion into self-doubt and worry, it's possible to also perhaps see Miss Lonely as an allegory for himself - "How does it feel, how does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?"

The remainder of the album's first half consists largely of more by-the-numbers, up-tempo blues numbers - "Tombstone Blues" rocks out more than any other track on the album, complete with a fiery guitar solo from Mike Bloomfield, but these songs do little to really excite the listener after "Like A Rolling Stone" until the incredible "Ballad Of A Thin Man." Driven by the chilling, aloof pounding of Dylan at the piano, it's even angrier and more resentful than the title track and positions itself as an attack against all the conservative figures who stood in the way of the development of 60s counter-culture, characterising "Mr Jones" as a sort of by-the-numbers, backwards, officious type unable to understand the significance of an emerging movement that goes against what they understand - "Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?" It's easily my favourite Dylan song, conjuring up a far more vivid and engaging portrait of a collection of characters than many of his more overtly poetic offerings, and its anger and passion is really tangible.

The album's second half features another couple of more standard folk rock numbers and struggles to match either of the high points of the first, but does have a lot of fun with the title track, a fast-paced rock number that's punctuated by the clanging of guitars and by Dylan's cartoonish siren whistle. Thematically, it explores Dylan's own roots in context of the wider history of American blues music - Highway 61 was the road that linked his birthplace of Duluth to some of the homes of the earliest blues music, all the way down to New Orleans, passing by the birthplaces of such iconic figures as Muddy Waters, Son House and Elvis Presley. Dylan characterises himself as the "son" who God orders killed ("God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son," Abe said "Man, you must be puttin' me on,"" with Abraham being Dylan's own father's name), and by using the highway itself as a lyrical image, ties himself to the various other legends of the American blues tradition.

The album's epic closer, "Desolation Row," is its only concession to those early Dylan fans still angry at his transition into a rock musician, and reunites him with his typical arrangement of acoustic guitar and harmonica. Its length (over eleven minutes) might in other circumstances tie it in with other Dylan epics that have frustrated me in the past by failing to musically justify their run-time, but here, perhaps as a result of the renewed focus provided by the full-band sound elsewhere on the album, he remembers to keep things musically interesting. Rather than just being a vaguely tuneless recitation of poetic images against a sparse acoustic background (I feel like I should provide examples so it doesn't just look like I'm being difficult - I've always felt "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" from Blonde On Blonde makes this mistake), he remembers to set them to a real gift of a melody, with the arrangement occasionally lent some colour by the odd, crystal-clear flourish of classical guitar, and Dylan puts a bit more effort into really selling the tune than on some of his other epics. It imagines the titular Desolation Row as a kind of vast, imagined frontier against which all of history unfolds, be it imaginary or real - Cinderella, Cain and Abel, Einstein, Nero and the Hunchback of Notre Dame all have cameos, all drawn together into this vast landscape. It's a really lovely and visionary song, and never once outstays its eleven minutes, a real progression from earlier songs like "Talking World War III Blues" on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which felt horribly long and were only just over half the length of "Desolation Row."

I ought to feel spurred onto listening to more of Dylan's stuff having finally heard an album of his I really, genuinely enjoy, but I'm made wary by the knowledge that it was followed up by Blonde On Blonde, the album I have the most problems with of the ones I've heard. He's definitely a musician I'll find time to listen to more of at some point, but he's obviously one who I only really enjoy in a particular context, so I may have to be careful exactly which of his albums I take the time to get into. For now, though, Highway 61 Revisited is a really fun, focused, intelligent and impactful folk-rock album that for the first time gave me a glimpse at why he's as revered as he is.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Bob Dylan.

1. Like A Rolling Stone

2. Tombstone Blues

3. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

4. From A Buick 6

5. Ballad Of A Thin Man

6. Queen Jane Approximately

7. Highway 61 Revisited

8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

9. Desolation Row

Miriam Makeba - Miriam Makeba

Released - May 1960

Genre - World

Producer - Bob Bollard

Selected Personnel - Miriam Makeba (Vocals); Perry Lopez (Guitar); Milt Okun (Conductor); Charles Colman (Vocals)

Standout Track - The Click Song

A lot of the things I'm posting at the moment are being posted very much in the contrite spirit of "I really should have been into this much earlier," considering I'm currently filling in gaps in the years I've already covered, things I've listened to in the months since I last posted here regularly back in January. Much of that stuff is music I feel really should have been on regular rotation in my listening habits long before this year, and nowhere is that more true than with Miriam Makeba. I've generally grown up among traditional African music, specifically South African, for many years. My mum ran local community choirs in Salisbury for many years, and a large amount of the repertoire for those choirs tended to be drawn from traditional South African spirituals, so such music was played fairly regularly, and around 2005 my mum's interest in those musical traditions led to her organising the African premiere of Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace (which we'll get onto some other day) in Cape Town, an event which also saw a return visit for the Fezeka choir from the township of Gugulethu, who came to stay with us and perform in and around Salisbury for a few weeks. On top of all that, my best friend Frith, who I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is South African so the music and culture of the country has long permeated my awareness. But for some reason the only way that general interest and awareness ever pervaded into my active listening habits was through the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the South African choral collective who would achieve worldwide success in the 80s thanks in part to being pioneered by Paul Simon.

But perhaps the first South African artist to achieve mainstream success worldwide was Miriam Makeba, who started singing in Johannesburg with vocal groups the Manhattan Brothers and the Skylarks, who would sing traditional South African songs as well as more contemporary jazz numbers. Her early work saw her achieve success throughout South Africa, but it was her brief appearance in an anti-apartheid documentary that was screened worldwide that saw her introduced to a wider audience. In the wake of this success she visited London and, with help from Harry Belafonte who she met while there, later the U.S., and only learned in 1960 on trying to return to Johannesburg for her mother's funeral that the South African government had revoked her passport in response to her anti-apartheid activism. As such, Makeba was from then on an exile living in the U.S., and this sense of exile is strongly in play on this, her first record for a U.S. label.

It might be difficult to discern much of a sense of yearning for home on this album considering how generally playful and light-hearted it all comes across - by and large it consists of celebratory, joyful songs rather than aching laments for a lost homeland, but that's very telling in itself - it's very much in the tradition of South African music to be joyful and celebratory, with music often playing a binding and healing role within a community, and it's notable that the only song that vaguely flirts with maudlin introspection, the slightly sluggish "Where Does It Lead," is one of the western-influenced songs rather than one of the African ones. It also says a lot that, save for a couple of more western-style songs ("The Naughty Little Flea," "House Of The Rising Sun,") Makeba felt no need to try and diminish the prominence and importance of Africa in her music. At this time, America was barely aware of African music or of music from any other more diverse parts of the world than just America, the U.K. and Europe, but Makeba felt no compulsion to try and fit in with what her new audience would find familiar. Thus we have traditional Indonesian lullabies in the form of the soothing, lilting "Suliram," and a whole host of other songs sung in South African dialects. Makeba had no interest in trying to give the American market something it would immediately recognise, instead forcing them to just immerse themselves in the uplifting power of the music itself, regardless of whether they had heard anything like it before. There's even a brief piss-take of western audiences on Makeba's spoken introduction to "The Click Song," another celebratory song used to mark weddings in Johannesburg, in which she explains that it has to be given its title as the English cannot pronounce the click sounds used as consonants in many South African languages, and are used as their own percussive part in the song.

And the joy of this album is a really tangible thing. Makeba's voice is really given to warmth and celebration, so the soaring melodies of "Saduva" or the playful mischief of "Mbube" (a traditional African piece later reworked as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" to make it more palatable to western ears), really take off and instil a great delight in the listener. Of course, while many of the songs carry with them a sense of humour and playfulness, the two which communicate that most clearly to me are two of the English numbers, "The Naughty Little Flea," in which the backing singers swoop from high to low registers in imitation of the flea's scratching, and "One More Dance," in which guest vocalist Charles Colman makes the odd choice to struggle to restrain himself from hysterical laughter throughout as Makeba acts out the part of a woman at a party who refuses to go home and tend to her terminally ill husband until she hears he has actually died, at which point she rushes off to hear his will. It's a fairly tired shaggy dog story of a song, but Makeba's sweet, innocent delivery and Colman's (probably forced) hilarity at the impending punchline make it a really silly and sweet thing to listen to.

Accompaniment is kept simple throughout, largely limited to Perry Lopez's guitar and the occasional sprightly bass part as on "Mbube," with considerable space given to the backing vocalists the Belafonte Folk Singers, whose frequent call-and-response interactions with Makeba and complex harmonies again reinforce the sense that we're listening to a traditional African record rather than an African artist trying to skew things to fit western sensibilities, where backing vocalists are rarely as integral or as interactive as in African music.

Miriam Makeba established her as one of the major African artists to be introduced to the rest of the world, and she used its success as a platform to continue protesting against the apartheid system back in South Africa. In response, the government revoked her citizenship and her right to her country, but in response to the huge impact she had had on the world stage through both her music and her activism, she was given honorary passports by many other countries including Ghana and Belgium. Over the subsequent years she would work with the likes of Belafonte, Paul Simon, and South African musician Hugh Masekela, who she briefly married in the 60s, and would continue to be an icon of African music. Finally, after the apartheid system crumbled, she would be able to return home to South Africa in 1990 for the first time in thirty years.

Track Listing:

1. The Retreat Song (Miriam Makeba)

2. Suliram (Traditional)

3. The Click Song (Makeba; Khoza; Majola; Mdedle & Mogosti)

4. Umhome (Miriam Makeba)

5. Olilili (Silinga)

6. Lakutshn, Ilanga (Dvashe & Glazer)

7. Mbube (Linda)

8. The Naughty Flea (Thomas)

9. Where Does It Lead (Davis)

10. Nomeva (Miriam Makeba)

11. House Of The Rising Sun (Traditional, arranged by Perry Lopez)

12. Saduva (Miriam Makeba)

13. One More Dance (Carter)

14. Iya Guduza (Miriam Makeba)

Booker T. & The MG's - Green Onions

Released - October 1962

Genre - Soul

Producer - Jim Stewart

Selected Personnel - Booker T. Jones (Organ/Guitar/Bass/Keyboards); Steve Cropper (Guitar); Lewie Steinberg (Bass); Al Jackson, Jr. (Drums)

Standout Track - Green Onions

Honestly, it really doesn't matter that Booker T. & The MG's spend most of this album's running time trying very hard to do something even half as good as its title track. If the title track were a bit less stand-out brilliant, maybe it'd be a problem, but here it's really not. What you get with Green Onions is a number of really fun, perfectly decent slices of atmospheric, instrumental soul all serving to back up one of the finest blues-rock instrumentals of all time, and that's more than enough. Everybody knows "Green Onions," whether you know what it's called or who played it or not. It's that swirling, swampy organ piece used to immediately conjure up any number of culturally ingrained impressions of Americana that we all carry somewhere in our subconscious. A scant few seconds of Booker T. Jones' gargling, whirling organ and Steve Cropper's wiry, flinty guitar licks and we're all in some sort of New Orleans night-life scene in our heads, or maybe driving across some sort of vast American plain. It's one of the most immediately evocative pieces I know of, and whether that's in part down its all-pervasive use in film and TV as much as to its own musical integrity I don't know, but I do know it's just incredible.

Booker T. & The MG's were one of the most prolific and hard-working instrumental groups of the 60s thanks to their role as the resident house band at Stax Records. Hundreds of classic soul records by the likes of Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding would have been graced with the sounds of Jones and Cropper et al providing instrumental backing, and bassist Lewie Steinberg and Al Jackson, Jr. (later replaced by Donald "Duck" Dunn) providing the rhythm section. In between recording sessions for Stax's established artists, the band would occasionally jam together, and happened to be working on what would eventually become "Behave Yourself" when Stax president Jim Stewart was passing and liked what he heard. Amazingly, "Green Onions" was initially slated to be the B-side to "Behave Yourself" until eventually all concerned were convinced by the superiority of the former. "Behave Yourself" is a moody, slow blues number that has a lot of atmosphere going for it, but doesn't really worm into your brain the way "Green Onions" does.

By the time Green Onions emerged as a full album, the single had already become hugely successful and been covered dozens of times, finding itself used in numerous films and adverts, so the band were under pressure to try and match it with a whole album's worth of great material. Of course, they don't manage to match it, but nor do they record anything here that's remotely dull. Perhaps their inability to come up with any other original recordings that came close to it in quality (the only other self-penned song on Green Onions along with the already-released title track and "Behave Yourself" is "Mo' Onions," a slower and more thoughtful retread of their big hit which continues the mood and atmosphere of it but doesn't quite take off like the original song does) was what consigned them ultimately to never reach such commercial heights again - they would continue to record prolifically as Stax's backing band and have the occasional modest hit under their own name, but this was their one moment of being truly iconic.

The rest of the album, besides these originals, consists of instrumental covers of popular soul and R&B hits, the most recognisable of which include a playful, mischievous take-off of Ray Charles' "I Got A Woman" and a jubilantly party-esque version of Phil Medley & Bert Berns' "Twist And Shout." It says a lot for the ability of the band to really inject personality and playfulness into their instrumental music that on neither track do you really miss the presence of a vocal melody. Jones quickly proves himself one of the finest organists of the 60s - it's a difficult instrument to really get much tone or variation out of as the keys aren't touch-sensitive and therefore can't vary much in volume or sound, so for him to get such evocative flavours out of it is hugely impressive. The only other person that springs to mind with a similar playing style is Rod Argent, who gets a similarly smoky, moody sound from his organ solos on the Zombies' "Time Of The Season" on Odessey And Oracle, but that record came out six years later in 1968, so Jones is certainly blazing a trail. Cropper's guitar playing, meanwhile, is like a razor-wire, snapping and cutting out of the mists of Jones' Hammond organ solos to punctuate certain moments in the music.

The album suffers slightly from its sequencing - opening with the massive standout track is always a risk, particularly when it's then followed by pretty much all the up-tempo numbers on the first side and more of the down-tempo ones on the second - it means the album's second half becomes a more slow-moving meander through slow jams and thoughtful blues numbers like "Lonely Avenue" and "Stranger On The Shore", with all the fun R&B of "Twist And Shout" and the like now a distant memory. But like I say, ultimately, who cares? You'd have to be a very stony-hearted individual to not give credit to an album that includes a song as fun as "Green Onions," and fleshes itself out with plenty of perfectly enjoyable slices of soul and blues. One of the quintessential albums that sum up the sound of 60s soul.

Track Listing:

1. Green Onions (Steve Cropper; Booker T. Jones; Lewie Steinberg & Al Jackson, Jr.)

2. Rinky Dink (David Clowney & Paul Winley)

3. I Got A Woman (Ray Charles & Renald Richard)

4. Mo' Onions (Steve Cropper; Booker T. Jones; Lewie Steinberg & Al Jackson, Jr.)

5. Twist And Shout (Phil Medley & Bert Berns)

6. Behave Yourself (Steve Cropper; Booker T. Jones; Lewie Steinberg & Al Jackson, Jr.)

7. Stranger On The Shore (Acker Bilk)
8. Lonely Avenue (Doc Pomus)

9. One Who Really Loves You (Smokey Robinson)

10. You Can't Sit Down (Dee Clark; Kal Mann & Cornell Muldrow)

11. A Woman, A Lover, A Friend (Sidney Wyche)

12. Comin' Home Baby (Bob Dorough & Ben Tucker)

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out

Released - December 1959

Genre - Jazz

Producer - Teo Macero

Selected Personnel - Dave Brubeck (Piano); Paul Desmond (Saxophone); Eugene Wright (Bass); Joe Morello (Drums)

Standout Track - Take Five

Time Out is another one of those classic jazz records which I've long been aware of, even knowing full well that I love certain bits of it, but that I only really listened to properly this year, and has quickly confirmed the place in my affections I always knew it would have, really. It's one of the all-time best-selling jazz albums, largely due to the presence of the iconic "Take Five," though I was surprised to find on listening to it all the way through for the first time that all three of its opening tracks were already overtly familiar to me - whether or not I could have exactly put my finger on who performed them, they're pieces that have been absorbed into the pop-cultural identity of instrumental jazz, and it's easy to see why. It's also easy to forget, after decades of continued innovation not just in the field of jazz but in the whole wider sphere of popular music in general, quite how radical some of the innovations on Time Out were at the time - they've become such perennial favourites that it's difficult to ever think of a time when this music was fundamentally challenging and difficult rather than just being the pleasant, atmospheric dinnertime music that so much great jazz has sadly been relegated to today. I'm therefore enormously glad to have given this album the time it deserves to fully appreciate it and to ensure I didn't just consign these songs to the back of my mind somewhere.

Brubeck had firmly established himself as one of the great jazz pianists of the 50s over the course of several albums released with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, a group focused very much on the interplay between himself and his saxophonist and long-term musical collaborator, Paul Desmond. Brubeck's style of playing was fairly idiosyncratic and made him stand out from many of the other jazz pianists that surrounded him as he favoured blocky chords over single-note runs due to an ongoing health complaint with the nerves in his hands after a surfing accident in Hawaii. It's a pleasant-sounding affectation or habit, one that means the occasional flutters of single notes become lovely ornamentations on top of the firmer, blockier foundations of the piece that he constructs. The rhythm section of the quartet was on fairly regular rotation, with drummer Joe Morello being drafted in in 1956, and bassist Eugene Wright only joining in 1958, the year of Time Out's release.

Around the time that Brubeck started planning Time Out, jazz music was in a major transitional period - the traditional bebop style was falling out of favour, with more and more musicians attempting to innovate with the form, resulting in the development of cool jazz that had been documented in Miles Davis's 1957 compilation Birth Of The Cool, charting his own pioneering work in the field. Cool jazz generally grounded itself much more in atmosphere and space than in rhythmic impact or energetic soloing. It also tended to innovate more with unusual harmonies and draw more influence from classical music - essentially, it applied the same kind of thinking to traditional jazz as prog rock did to conventional rock music ten years later, attempting to diversify its influences and take it in more complicated, atmospheric directions beyond the more immediately impactful and perhaps more melodic convetions of bebop. Amidst all this, Brubeck developed the idea of trying to make a record built entirely around the idea of unusual time signatures, ones which jazz music was basically never recorded in.

The idea first surfaced on a trip abroad in Turkey, where Brubeck watched a traditional Turkish folk band play a song in 9/8 time, almost never used in western music. Columbia records were excited about the idea, seeing its potential to be something very different and brave, but were fairly reserved at the same time, nervous about Brubeck potentially spoiling his commercial standing by doing something so unusual. Virtually none of the songs on Time Out are in conventional time, although "Strange Meadow Lark," after its rhythm-less, drifting piano introduction, settles into a traditional 4/4, but the place where it feels the most obviously unusual are on the piece that drew direct inspiration from that Turkish folk song, album opener "Blue Rondo A La Turk." Its 9/8 time means it constantly lurches back and forth, never settling into what the general western audience at the time would have recognised as a comfortable rhythm, always being pulled from one place to the other by the unusual shifts in its tempo, making it just as unpredictable and rhythmically punchy as any more traditionally uptempo bebop piece without the need for fiery solos or pounding rhythm sections. It's able to confound and delight the listener merely with its rhythmic innovations.

"Strange Meadow Lark" is an absolutely beautiful piece, its rippling, glacial piano introduction one of the loveliest instrumentals of its kind, before settling into a more conventional jazz piece over which Desmond's sax dives and swoops. Desmond's real chance to shine, of course, is on "Take Five," his one compositional contribution to the album and ultimately the Brubeck Quartet's biggest hit, as well as one of the most instantly recognisable jazz piece of all time. Desmond's sax melody is instantly memorable, one of the catchiest jazz instrumentals, and Brubeck modestly chimes away in the background, never pulling focus from Desmond or from Morello, who gets his own big moment with the piece's extended drum solo. Indeed, Desmond has commented that "Take Five" was only ever written as a framework for a Morello drum solo, and had no idea it would become a hit. Whether he's being slightly coy here is anyone's guess - surely he must have been aware of what a gift of a melody he'd written.

Time Out as a whole is in fact very generous to the supporting players, and there's no sense that the Quartet was purely a vanity project by Brubeck. Morello gets moments to shine, and there are plenty of moments where Brubeck is happy to fade into the background and let the rhythm section have prominence, and the moments where he hands the focus over to Desmond to exercise one of his light, flitting sax solos over the top of everything crop up every few minutes. Perhaps Eugene Wright doesn't get much of a chance to stamp his own personality on things, but he's certainly not rendered irrelevant or invisible.

The record perhaps struggles to live up to the early promise of those first three tracks, with the latter four not quite being able to immediately lodge themselves in your head the second you hear them like the first three do, but they're still enormously enjoyable and pleasant to listen to. "Kathy's Waltz" is a lovely, breezy waltz piece dedicated to Brubeck's daughter, while "Everybody's Jumpin'" repeatedly jumps between time signatures and almost succeeds in repeating the trick of the lurching, unpredictable feel of "Blue Rondo A La Turk." Ultimately, though, even if it were just those first three songs and then a load of rubbish, Time Out would easily have ensconced itself as one of the great jazz albums, being able to be catchy, mesmerising, unpredictable, confounding, beautiful and deeply peaceful all within half an album. One of those albums that even people claim not to like jazz should listen to just to impress upon them how much they're missing out on.

Track Listing:

All songs by Dave Brubeck except where noted.

1. Blue Rondo A La Turk

2. Strange Meadow Lark

3. Take Five (Paul Desmond)

4. Three To Get Ready

5. Kathy's Waltz

6. Everybody's Jumpin'

7. Pick Up Sticks

Billie Holiday - Lady In Satin

Released - June 1958

Genre - Jazz

Producer - Irving Townsend

Selected Personnel - Billie Holiday (Vocals); Ray Ellis (Conductor); Claus Ogermann (Arrangements); George Ockner (Violin/Concertmaster); David Soyer (Cello); Danny Bank (Flute); Mel Davis (Trumpet); J.J. Johnson (Trombone); Urbie Green (Trombone); Mal Waldron (Piano); Barry Galbraith (Guitar); Milt Hinton (Bass); Osie Johnson (Drums)

Standout Track - I'm A Fool To Want You

The next one is another that owes a great debt to Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours, albeit this time a less directly tangible one than the more obvious link it has with Sinatra's own follow-up Songs For Swingin' Lovers! Billie Holiday is a singer I've been aware of my whole life, thanks to her presence on any number of classic jazz compilations we used to have on in the background over dinner, usually her definitive recording of "That Ole Devil Called Love." She was one of the most popular jazz singers of the 30s and 40s, and I was aware of some of her most famous recordings, but I'd never felt any compulsion to listen to a full album of hers - as I've said elsewhere on this blog, the idea of an album being anything more than a collection of recordings from various different sessions, with little cohesion or sense of self-contained identity, didn't really catch on until the mid-50s, so there's a lot of music from before 1955 that's passed me by. But then I heard about Lady In Satin, the last album Holiday released in her lifetime, and its fascinating status as a study of a broken woman at the end of her life. It's a fascinatingly tragic thing to listen to, and one of the earliest albums I'm aware of that manages to really crystallise the emotional state of the singer behind the songs.

Holiday had achieved huge success during the 40s, her slightly strangled voice becoming one of the most iconic sounds of jazz music at the time, but her star had begun to wane by the 50s. During this time she released records for Verve Records, who kept instigating ideas for grand, ambitious recording projects for her that would be comprehensive compilations of songs by particular composers like George Gershwin or Jerome Kern, but these projects ended up being given to Ella Fitzgerald, Verve's younger and more popular recent acquisition, and Holiday was just given cheaper, simpler projects to work on. At the same time, Holiday was battling with drug and alcohol addiction, and in 1957 married a Mafia enforcer named Louis McKay, who was abusive. Increasingly disheartened with her creative output and greatly damaged by the downward spiral of the last few years of her life, she became disheartened with Verve and contacted Irving Townsend, a producer at Columbia Records, to help her make a record she could feel more strongly about, and imbue with her own emotional state at the time. It seems that In The Wee Small Hours had become something of a touchstone for her in this time - several of the tracks she eventually chose for the album were ones Sinatra had recorded for that album, such as Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well," Lorenz Hart & Richard Rodgers' "Glad To Be Unhappy" and Alec Wilder's "I'll Be Around." She also initially wanted that album's virtuoso arranger, Nelson Riddle, to work with her on this new one, before hearing Ray Ellis's version of "For All We Know" and deciding to work with him.

Lady In Satin essentially takes the same template as In The Wee Small Hours, as borne out by its decision to reuse some of the same songs - it's an album in which every song explores loneliness, sadness and isolation, but whereas Sinatra's take on the theme was one that feels temporary, this feels tragically all too real. Sinatra's mood which led him to make In The Wee Small Hours had admittedly come out of genuine trauma and even an attempted suicide, but it was also a period he was able to work through in order to arrive at the highs of Songs For Swingin' Lovers! the following year. You don't get a sense listening to his album that you're listening to a man genuinely on the edge and at the end of his life, but Billie would be dead just over a year after the release of Lady In Satin as a result of direct complications relating to her drinking problem.

Comparing Holiday's vocals on Lady In Satin to her more well-known tones on older recordings like "That Ole Devil Called Love" is rather shocking - that strangled, fruity tone is still intact and it's still a unique, warm, earthy sound, but in 1958 there's a real strain to it, and it cracks and croaks and trembles in places it never used to. This is never more apparent than on the masterful opener "I'm A Fool To Want You," in which Holiday gives one of the most convincing portrayals of desperation ever recorded. Ray Ellis has remarked that when the two of them first listened back to her recording, she had tears in her eyes and he was simply frustrated she missed so many notes, but was only able to appreciate after a second listen quite how painfully emotional her performance was, and how perfect in its imperfections.

Ellis assembled the orchestra and conducted it, using arrangements by Claus Ogermann. Their arrangement of the songs seems to be a divisive point among fans - the record used a massive 40-piece orchestra, and it's objectively obvious that the gargantuan warmth and lushness and fullness of the sound, its flourishing strings and warm, muted horns is starkly in contrast to the reedy, cracking vocal performance Holiday gives. Some say this creates an unpleasantly voyeuristic quality to the music, as if everyone involved is trying to ignore quite how damaged the woman is and it becomes an unflinchingly unpleasant exercise in listening to someone in need of help. Others have said that that very disconnect between voice and accompaniment is what makes the album so masterful - a more stripped-back arrangement that less obviously demonstrated the limits to her voice might have robbed this album of its beauty. What makes it quite so strikingly powerful is how ambitiously it strains for something beautiful, and how narrowly it misses it in places. I should clarify that I by no means think Billie's voice here is unpleasant - it's still an absolutely wonderful sound, but it's those occasional cracks and moans that suddenly jar the listener out of an otherwise gorgeous listening experience and remind you of the tragedy of what you're really hearing.

"I Get Along Without You Very Well" is perhaps my other favourite on the record, as the light breeziness of the double bass part and the soft, tinkling piano, is perhaps the strongest contrast between sound and meaning - it's got a real upbeat friendliness to it which tugs more at the heartstrings when you remember what state Billie was in when she recorded it. The muted trombone solo on "It's Easy To Remember" also gets a shout-out as it's really lovely. There would be one more Billie Holiday album released after Lady In Satin, but posthumously, being recorded just a couple of months before she was taken fatally ill. Lady In Satin remains a tragically beautiful reminder of the tragic direction her life took after the more celebrated and iconic work she did as a younger woman, as well as being a reminder of how capable she was of still making truly beautiful music even in the midst of emotional turmoil. A difficult listen, but an important one.

Track Listing:

1. I'm A Fool To Want You (Frank Sinatra; Joel Herron & Jack Wolf)

2. For Heaven's Sake (Elise Bretton; Sherman Edwards & Donald Meyer)

3. You Don't Know What Love Is (Gene DePaul & Don Raye)

4. I Get Along Without You Very Well (Hoagy Carmichael)

5. For All We Know (J. Fred Coots & Sam M. Lewis)

6. Violets For Your Furs (Tom Adair & Matt Dennis)

7. You've Changed (Bill Carey & Carl T. Fischer)

8. It's Easy To Remember (Lorenz Hart & Richard Rodgers)

9. But Beautiful (Johnny Burke & Jimmy Van Heusen)

10. Glad To Be Unhappy (Lorenz Hart & Richard Rodgers)

11. I'll Be Around (Alec Wilder)

12. The End Of A Love Affair (Edward Redding)

Frank Sinatra - Songs For Swingin' Lovers!

Released - March 1956

Genre - Jazz

Producer - Voyle Gilmore

Selected Personnel - Frank Sinsatra (Vocals); Nelson Riddle (Arranger/Conductor); John Palladino (Audio Engineer)

Standout Track - You Make Me Feel So Young

I'm back! I've not blogged on here in a very long time as I just sort of stopped finding the time and inclination for it (I'm well aware nobody really visits here much, it's largely an exercise in just writing stuff I'm passionate about for the sake of it, but my apologies to any regular readers anyway), but recently have felt like writing here some more, so onwards we go! Sadly, since I last posted here I've been listening to lots of new music, much of which falls into the 20-year timespan I've already covered of 1955-75. I'd just got up to Joan Baez's Diamonds & Rust, but I've now got quite a lot of other entries to go back and fill in. I don't think many of the regular readers were that invested in the internal chronology of the blog anyway, so there we go.

My first new entry is a direct follow-on from the very first album I wrote about, and often considered the first iteration of "the album" as we now understand it anyway, Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours. On that album, Sinatra's jazzy, poppy youth appeal had deserted him as he reached his late 30s and a series of broken relationships led him almost to suicide. He teamed up with producer Voyle Gilmore and arranger Nelson Riddle to channel all the heartbreak and loneliness he felt into the first ever concept album, a collection of old jazz standards all themed around late-night remorse and regret abandonment. It's a bleak and sombre listening experience, but a masterpiece nonetheless, and saw Sinatra's career reignited. The next move seemed like an obvious one - what if the same team turned their attention to an album that would be that one's complete opposite? A collection of songs themed around the exuberance and excitement and confidence of new love?

The result is, perhaps understandably, a far more enjoyable record, but an equally assured and mature one. These are the same kind of songs Sinatra was recording in his youth, but the upbeat swagger and bonhomie of the recordings is no longer borne out of the naivete of youth but from the celebratory kind of happiness that emerges from coming out the other side of a great sadness. The Sinatra here is the crystallisation of exactly how he's remembered as a pop culture icon - not the brash pop singer of his youth, nor the sad, lonely figure of In The Wee Small Hours, but an older, wiser man still able to summon up all the enthusiasm and joy of youth albeit now through the lens of a maturer take on love.

Some of the tracks here have become straight-up classics and standards, some of the go-to songs one thinks of not just when thinking about Sinatra, but about the vocal jazz tradition of the Great American Songbook itself. His take on "You Make Me Feel So Young" is wholly definitive, its bouncy flourishes and skipping confidence wholly infectious. "I've Got You Under My Skin" has become equally definitive, as much for Riddle's band arrangement as for Sinatra's winning vocal performance.

In fact, that's the centre of what has often been my nagging problem with Sinatra - his takes on these classic songs have been the definitive take forever, but there's always a sense that that's as much down to his collaborators as it is to his performance. Sinatra's vocals are always nothing other than perfect - his voice as clear-cut and full-bodied and powerful as you could ever wish, with every note perfectly pitched. You can hear his enjoyment in every one of these songs, and it really sells the emotion behind all of them. But sometimes that perfection has an alienating effect - are we really sure we're hearing Sinatra's own version of these songs, or are we just listening to him singing them exactly as they should be sung? It sounds a silly thing to complain about, that his version is too perfect, but it's that problem that makes me enjoy Songs For Swingin' Lovers! much more than In The Wee Small Hours - on that album, the odd imperfection, the odd sense that Sinatra was doing these songs his way (no pun intended), would sell the alienation and sadness of those songs all the more. Just look at the way Tom Waits's growling or the cracks in David Bowie's voice render their songs all the more affecting - sometimes you just wish some sort of crack would show in Sinatra's facade. It's much less a problem here, as these songs really suit the confident, breezy, note-perfect rendition he gives to everything, but you can't help but feel, then, that the praise belongs as much to the songwriters and arrangers as to Sinatra himself. The one song here where Sinatra's take really jars is "Makin' Whoopee" - it's such a great song that it's still a highlight, but Sinatra's insistence on playing everything fairly straight-faced and sincere feels tonally wrong for a song that's so playfully aware of its own inanity that it's actually crying out for someone to affectionately take the piss out of it as they sing it. For Sinatra to play it as committed as does here just sounds odd.

Speaking of the songwriters, some of the big standouts come from predictable sources - Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "Anything Goes" are among the best ones here, while the gorgeous strings applied to George & Ira Gershwin's "Love Is Here To Stay" give that song a near-perfect rendition. For those strings, major credit is due to Nelson Riddle, who is able to have much more fun here than on the starker, bleaker songs of In The Wee Small Hours - from the warm strings of "Love Is Here To Stay" to the cheeky brass flourishes of "You Make Me Feel So Young" or the subtle syncopated horns of "It Happened In Monterey" (an underappreciated classic, whose gently tinkling piano part is one of my favourite bits of the album), he's having a ball throughout. Nowhere more so, though, than on "I've Got You Under My Skin." It's hard now to imagine there ever being a recording of this song that didn't heavily draw on Riddle's iconic arrangement, which builds from the quiet, lilting sax and soaring strings at the beginning into the full-on, joyous celebratory full-band chorus. Apparently the whole thing was recorded in one take, with the band not having played the arrangement before seeing it, and all burst into spontaneous applause for Riddle as soon as the take was done. Richly deserved.

Altogether, then, it's a wholly joyous listen which takes all the wisdom and maturity of the previous record and channels it all into exuberant, winning confidence and perfectly captures all the breeze and spirit of 50s jazz, as well as crystallising the iconic image of Sinatra that lasts to this day. As I said in my other Sinatra review, that slightly distancing perfectness of his voice has stopped me from delving further into his discography, though I said that when all I knew was In The Wee Small Hours with no idea I would discover something as fun as Songs For Swingin' Lovers!, so perhaps I'll hear more of his work one day.

Track Listing:

1. You Make Me Feel So Young (Mack Gordon & Josef Myrow)

2. It Happened In Monterey (Billy Rose & Mabel Wayne)

3. You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me (Al Dubin & Harry Warren)

4. You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me (Irving Kahal; Pierre Norman & Sammy Fain)

5. Too Marvellous For Words (Johnny Mercer & Richard A. Whiting)

6. Ole Devil Moon (E.Y. Harburg & Burton Lane)

7. Pennies From Heaven (Arthur Johnston & Johnny Burke)

8. Love Is Here To Stay (George Gershwin & Ira Gershwin)

9. I've Got You Under My Skin (Cole Porter)

10. I Thought About You (Johnny Mercer & Jimmy Van Heusen)

11. We'll Be Together Again (Frankie Laine & Carl T. Fischer)

12. Makin' Whoopee (Gus Kahn & Walter Donaldson)

13. Swingin' Down The Lane (Gus Kahn & Isham Jones)

14. Anything Goes (Cole Porter)

15. How About You? (Ralph Freed & Burton Lane)