Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Deja Vu

Released - March 1970

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash & Neil Young

Selected Personnel - David Crosby (Vocals/Guitar); Stephen Stills (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Bass/Percussion); Graham Nash (Vocals/Keyboards/Guitar/Percussion); Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar/Keyboards/Harmonica); Dallas Taylor (Drums/Percussion); Greg Reeves (Bass); Jerry Garcia (Pedal Steel Guitar); John Sebastian (Harmonica)

Standout Track - Almost Cut My Hair

On my review of Buffalo Springfield's second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, I was fairly disparaging about the sum efforts of all of Neil Young's collaborators across both that band and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which wasn't particularly fair of me considering I'd based that opinion solely on that one album and on CSNY's 1974 best-of So Far. I've since dug a little deeper and am willing to redress my opinion slightly, though I still maintain that Young is an infinitely more original and interesting musician than any of Crosby, Stills, Nash or Richie Furay, and I'm still not remotely moved to investigate the solo discographies of any of them - their partnership with Young remains the main reason I'm interested in any of them. Nonetheless, I am willing to concede that, far from being a collection of tired West Coast folk rock tropes as I half-expected them to be, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were capable of recording a genuinely brilliant album, and Deja Vu is just that.

As a brief side note - I've also recently listened to Buffalo Springfield's self-titled first album and so have heard "For What It's Worth," a song which, incredibly, I'd never heard before. As a result, Stephen Stills' reputation as a songwriter suddenly makes sense, as that song's a masterpiece. Its parent album is very middle-of-the-road, however, and I've yet to hear anything by Stills that comes close to it, but at least the respect he commandeers suddenly makes a bit more sense.

Anyway, on to CSN. In the wake of the disbanding of Buffalo Springfield, and of David Crosby's dismissal from the Byrds as a result of high tensions within the group, Stills and Crosby started jamming together and soon added the Hollies' Graham Nash to their lineup thanks to his skill with close-part harmonies, and recorded a hit album with their self-titled debut. Neil Young, meanwhile, forged out as a solo artist with his own self-titled debut, which failed to impress many people, but followed it up with the brilliant collaboration with new backing band Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which cemented him as one of the most serious and credible country-rock musicians around - one who was more interested in lengthy, hard rock jams rather than radio-friendly singles, more interested in doing things his way than anybody else's.

The Crosby, Stills & Nash album, by contrast, achieved great chart success and radio play, and the result was the need to expand their lineup in order to tour successfully, considering Stills played the majority of the instruments on the record. At the suggestion of their manager Ahmet Ertegun, they recalled Young to the lineup, and put out their great masterpiece, Deja Vu, as a quartet. Young's relationship with the others seems a strained and fractious one - he insisted on being given equal billing in the band's title if he were to be involved, but then occasionally sat out certain albums and tours from then on, causing the band's name to fluctuate depending on whether he was interested at the time or not. His contributions as a songwriter also seemed to be very dependent on whims - shortly after the release of Deja Vu he would record the blistering protest song "Ohio" pretty much as a solo record, and then casually let them put it out as a CSNY single. His attitude very much seemed to indicate that he found the context of CSNY occasionally interesting to work in, but that they ultimately needed him more than he needed them.

Nonetheless, and the obsessive Neil Young fanboy in me is shocked to say it, Young's contributions to Deja Vu aren't even the best on the album, and perhaps the presence of a genuinely credible, serious musician caused the others to up their game on the songwriting front and aim for more than just radio-friendly folk rock singles. I mentioned on my review of Buffalo Springfield Again that one of that band's failings was that it never quite gelled into what really felt like a single identity, instead lurching between the different styles and approaches of the main songwriters Stills, Young and Furay. The same is, of course, true of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but this time it doesn't feel like a missed opportunity - the entire supergroup concept is built around the idea of four different creative figureheads coming together to force their approaches to work in concert with each other, so the different tones and styles on the resultant album feel more like a deliberate attempt to do something interesting than like a band that's failed to find a strong identity for itself as it did with Buffalo Springfield.

For my money, the one who comes off best here is David Crosby, who contributes two of the album's very best songs in the hippie anthem "Almost Cut My Hair" and the title track. "Almost Cut My Hair" features fiery, angry guitar licks under Crosby's barking, guttural vocals. Its lyrical content is, in hindsight, almost a pastiche of late 60s/early 70s hippie counter-culture ("I feel like letting my freak flag fly!"), but Crosby pulls it off with such commitment and passion that it never feels corny. "Deja Vu" itself is a much more complicated song, one with less gutsy fire in its belly than "Almost Cut My Hair," but far more intricate in veering between the fast, syncopated, close-harmony intro to its slow, mysterious middle section. Those close harmonies that were a CSNY staple also get a good workout on Stills' rousing opening track, "Carry On," driven by the insistent strum of acoustic guitar. Stills' other contribution is the pleasant but not hugely memorable ballad "4+20."

Young, meanwhile, places his two contributions at opposite ends in terms of effort. "Helpless" is a bland, plodding piece of country rock that remains a live favourite in his repertoire to this day, a fact which always baffles me as I find it one of the most boring songs he's ever written. At the other end of the spectrum, he also offers the complicated multi-part suite of "Country Girl," a brilliant piece of epic, cinematic music that climaxes in perhaps the grandest, most overblown moment of the record in its stirring finale. Then, of course, there's Graham Nash. Perhaps it's unfair of me to have formed this opinion being totally unfamiliar with the Hollies and with Nash's work elsewhere in his career, but I always get the feeling with Nash that he was a totally different sort of musician to the others and probably couldn't believe his luck that he'd become part of a classic rock supergroup. His songs are jaunty, novelty little pop songs that are totally out of touch with the folk rock vibe on the rest of the album, and to me sound reminiscent of the sort of stuff Paul McCartney was contributing to later Beatles albums, the kind of thing John Lennon dismissed as "Paul's granny music." Don't get me wrong, it's not even that I dislike it - "Teach Your Children" is pretty bland, but "Our House" is genuinely fun and lovely in its wide-eyed, innocent silliness. It's just that his compositions stick out like a sore thumb and are clearly pursuing a different kind of tone than everything else, though that's not necessarily to the album's detriment. I just find it endlessly amusing that the man who wrote the lyrics "Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy 'cos of you - la la, la-la-la, la, la-la-la, la!" went on to write an autobiography called "Wild Tales - A Rock & Roll Life."

The final two songs on the album consist of "Everybody I Love You," a great little rock song and another album highlight co-written by Stills and Young (though it seems more Stills' work than Young's, being reminiscent of his excellent "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.") Then there's the cover of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock." Mitchell has since expressed frustration that David Crosby formed the opinion that she had written "Woodstock" about them after they returned from playing at the festival and told her about it, when it was actually an idea she was already exploring in her writing and then worked some of their own thoughts on Woodstock into it rather than basing the entire thing on their exploits. Indeed, the song is far less about the experience of a rock band playing the festival itself, and much more on the spiritual journey that that gathering of people represents - "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden" ties the song into a much more religious, redemptive arc than any story Crosby might have told her about playing a rock festival could have been. Nonetheless, the band, convinced the song was about them, decided to record an upbeat, hard rock cover of it. The idea itself is ludicrous - one of Mitchell's most intense, atmospheric and contemplative songs sped up to double speed and covered in intense guitar solos. Bizarrely, though, it works. It doesn't come close to the emotional intensity of Mitchell's original version from Ladies Of The Canyon, but they do manage to pull off making into an enjoyable rock song.

Deja Vu deservedly proved to be another big hit for the band, and cemented them as one of the biggest supergroups of the early 70s. As a result, the various solo albums each of its members put out later in 1970 all achieved massively increased exposure and acclaim, including Young's After The Gold Rush. However, the increased success of each of them as solo artists made it more difficult to continue operating as a collective going forward. Young, as mentioned above, relased "Ohio" as a CSNY record, but CSNY as a group would falter in the next few years as they all focused on their solo work, with the odd exception of the occasional tour or the release of So Far as a sort of stop gap in 1974. By the time the next album appeared (with Young noticeably absent) it was 1977 and it would be fair to say that interest had waned.

Track Listing:

1. Carry On (Stephen Stills)

2. Teach Your Children (Graham Nash)

3. Almost Cut My Hair (David Crosby)

4. Helpless (Neil Young)

5. Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)

6. Deja Vu (David Crosby)

7. Our House (Graham Nash)

8. 4 + 20 (Stephen Stills)

9. Country Girl: Whiskey Boot Hill/Down Down Down/Country Girl (I Think You're Pretty) (Neil Young)

10. Everybody I Love You (Stephen Stills & Neil Young)

Miles Davis - In A Silent Way

Released - July 1969

Genre - Jazz Fusion

Producer - Teo Macero

Selected Personnel - Miles Davis (Trumpet); Wayne Shorter (Saxophone); John McLaughlin (Guitar); Chick Corea (Keyboards); Herbie Hancock (Keyboards); Joe Zawinul (Organ); Dave Holland (Double Bass); Tony Williams (Drums)

Standout Track - In A Silent Way/It's About That Time

As I've vaguely intimated in a few other reviews on this blog, there are certain areas of music I feel I can write about with a certain degree of confidence in my opinions. Others less so. Jazz is, by and large, in the latter category. I'm certainly not totally ignorant about jazz music - a number of landmark jazz records stand as some of my favourites, and I'm basically familiar with the general evolution and development of jazz music, and its influence on rock music. But the general thrust and direction of my interests has already leaned more towards classic and art rock, and my awareness of the inner workings of jazz music are just less intricate. It means that writing a review of something like In A Silent Way poses a significant challenge - it's an album by one of the greatest ever jazz legends, but one that saw him deliberately turning away from the hallmarks and traditions of jazz music, yet neither wholly embracing the styles of psychedelic rock music either. What emerges is an album very difficult to categorise and even more difficult to actually talk about, but ultimately my approach to complicated, challenging albums like In A Silent Way comes down to the age-old defence of "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." This is an album that might have emerged out of experimentation within a whole range of different genres and traditions, but regardless of how much you know about those traditions, it's undeniably beautiful, ambitious and hugely atmospheric.

Miles Davis is one of those artists who I've never become obsessive about, but who I enjoy and admire enough to keep track of their career milestones, from the early promise of Birth Of The Cool through the all-time classic Kind Of Blue, all the way up to the ambitious but messy jazz fusion landmark Bitches Brew in 1970. In A Silent Way is the most recent of his classic albums that I've listened to, and easily on a par with Kind Of Blue, albeit an entirely different kind of record. On that earlier album, Davis had taken a pioneering attitude to jazz music, stripping it of its reliance on rhythm, melody or virtuoso solos, creating a new style of jazz that was more atmospheric and more able to play with the space it occupied. On In A Silent Way, ten years later, he takes that same attitude to its logical extreme, but this time incoporating psychedelic rock elements and ultimately combining them to create what is almost a proto-ambient record. In the ten years since Kind Of Blue, Davis had gradually been incorporating more rock elements into his band, with the addition of the likes of Joe Zawinul on organ alongside the more long-standing members and traditional instrumentalists like Wayne Shorter on saxophone and Herbie Hancock on piano. The most recent addition to the lineup prior to the recording of In A Silent Way was guitarist John McLaughlin, who Davis invited to join the sessions literally the day before after meeting him and being hugely impressed by his playing.

The addition of electric guitar to Davis's pallette of instruments was of course sacrilegious to more traditionalist jazz enthusiasts, and the extent to which he would continue to radicalise his sound on Bitches Brew the following year would presumably only alienate them further. I've never been a huge fan of Bitches Brew - in its attempt to match some of the rhythmic structures of psychedelic rock to the improvisational traditions of cool jazz, I feel it ends up being a collection of over-long, meandering pieces that struggle to find much of a melody or a memorable hook, going more for assault-on-the-senses overload than for anything genuinely musically compelling. In A Silent Way, while it still has the same experimental spirit of trying to marry disparate styles and instruments together, is infinitely superior in its dedication to being something all its own, never relentlessly jamming in search of a tune but always content to just explore the space around it. It might be equally tuneless and formless, but the fact that it gives itself time and space rather than forcing itself into song-structures makes it infinitely more enjoyable.

Producer Teo Macero used the classical structural methods of piecing together sonatas, assembling lengthy, formless pieces into an ABA structure so that they achieve a kind of progression and resolution. In both of them, Davis's trumpet drifts in and out, never the strident, fiery blasts of Bitches Brew but always soft and contemplative, while the organ and electric keyboards played by the likes of Hancock and Chick Corea create a constant, shimmering soundscape throughout both the album's lengthy tracks. McLaughlin, Shorter and Zawinul, like Davis, drift in and out as the occasional guests, McLaughlin indulging in spidery, rapid-fire guitar work, or Shorter free-flowing through similarly low-key and thoughtful solos. Drummer Tony Williams is a hugely significant presence throughout as well - his urgent, frenetic cymbal work on "Shh/Peaceful" and metronomic, insistent drum beat in the middle section of "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time" anchor the entire album and keep it moving with an urgent rhythm that might otherwise abandon it in its more loose, atmospheric moments.

The only moments where Williams' drumming stops, thanks to its constant insistence elsewhere, feel truly breath-taking as a result. The free-form section that starts and ends "In A Silent Way/It's About That Time" is perhaps the closest thing anybody had recorded to genuine ambient music prior to Brian Eno actually codifying it as a genre in the 70s. The shimmering keyboards, McLaughlin's slow, languid guitar and the occasional drifts of saxophone and trumpet feel so detached and dreamlike as to be fragments of sound floating through space, and it's easily one of the most achingly beautiful things Davis ever recorded.

Further analysis of the album's scant two tracks would both require more technical knowledge than I have, and would also largely be unnecessary - in this album, Miles Davis succeeded in creating something totally unclassifiable that drew influence magpie-like from wherever he cast his eye and ultimately creates an incredible array of moods and atmospheres and sounds unlike anything any jazz musician had before created. Jazz fans, of course, hated it, feeling Davis had abandoned the genre in response to its declining popularity, and only over the coming years would they begin to see just how radically he was trying to revitalise the genre by incorporating new elements. Rock fans were cautiously positive about In A Silent Way, however, appreciating the way a jazz musician they would previously have ignored was taking steps to imitate what they considered good, and it was In A Silent Way that opened the door for such rock fans to follow Davis on an increasingly eclectic musical journey in the future. These days, it's regarded as one of his great masterpieces, and rightly so. Ultimately, it wasn't as big a seller as the following year's Bitches Brew, but for me it will always be more profoundly beautiful, more imaginative, more coherent and more enjoyable than that slightly messy follow-up.

Track Listing:

1. Shh/Peaceful (Miles Davis)

2. In A Silent Way/It's About That Time (Joe Zawinul & Miles Davis)