Robert Johnson and the Reissue

The history of the record industry is one of reissues: some artists are plucked from out-of-print limbo, while others have anniversary editions of famous albums released with previous editions still being sold new in the marketplace. Predictably, recording technology has advanced in quantum leaps since the 1925 advent of electrical recording; it is further not surprising that each new incarnation of musical medium has inspired reissues of every label's most profitable material. Even the most forward-thinking executives, though, would have had a hard time even 20 years ago foreseeing the emergence of the remastering process. Advances in technology have made it possible not only digitally to excise noise once assumed totally inextricable from the source material, but even to extract detail from the grooves of weathered shellac 78s that went heretofore largely unnoticed. And perhaps most unthinkably of all to Executives of Labels Past, the process can be carried out without the investment of unworkable expense.

Robert Johnson is the unchallenged king of the reissue. His records sold well regionally during his own lifetime, and he was a much hoped-for participant in John Hammond's legendary "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts, the first to showcase black artists at Carnegie Hall. Johnson died four months before the first concert, however, and his memory languished, popularly forgotten, until the 1961 release of the Columbia compilation King of the Delta Blues Singers. The album and its 1970 companion volume deified Johnson with the folkie crowd (and by extension with rock stars, as well). Johnson posthumously shared the benefits of the blues revival - including a much-delayed, if incomplete, shedding of the "race records" label that had followed blues recordings since their inception - with many other artists, but he would come to exceed all of them in renown, due in equal parts to his remarkable talent and to the dubious Faustian myth that accompanies him to this day. The commercial success of the first CD reissue of his discography was nonetheless staggering. In 1990's Complete Recordings, Columbia had a set of 40+ songs more than half a century old that peaked at #80 on the Billboard charts and was eventually certified platinum.

Accordingly, the centenary of Johnson's birth in 2011 provided not only an ideal opportunity to show off the advances in remastering since the dawn of the millennium, but also a rare opportunity to provide a cash cow for a record label and a useful album for fans simultaneously. The Centennial Collection doesn't disappoint. The dual efforts of Steven Lasker (digital transfer) and Seth Winner (remastering) yielded results that save for minor background hiss sound ten - sometimes fifteen - years younger than they actually are. Columbia also provided much improved packaging and tracklisting over the previous release, this time placing every alternate take at the end of the CD, instead of immediately following the master. The astounding improvement in sound quality, together with these other considerations, raises hope for better reissues of other worthy contemporary discographies. Of course, few (if any) old-time jazz and blues masters share Johnson's all-consuming pull, and the likelihood of any such reissue making substantial money again seems slim. With any luck, though, as the technology continues to improve commercial risks will be undertaken in reviving Skip James, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and others. The standard established by The Centennial Recordings is a worthy one in ensuring that these records continue to be esteemed for what they are: landmarks of American culture and history.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (8) The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths

[This is the third in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Internal tensions have often been known to push bands to unprecedented peaks, yet rarely has a group's musical identity rested so squarely upon the contrast between its most visible members as it did with the Smiths. Lead guitarist Johnny Marr was one of England's most accomplished studio masters, an expert at weaving dense layers of guitars into music of striking depth; frontman Morrissey was a militant vegetarian whose outspoken politics were upstaged only by his dubious (purportedly nonexistent) sexuality and endlessly dour outlook on the value of life. Over a span of five prolific years, the Smiths released four studio albums and a bevy of non-album singles. Though the latter group includes an impressive number of the best songs of the decade, the band never produced a work of more consistent quality than its third studio LP, The Queen Is Dead. By the time of its 1986 release, Marr had come to control a range as diverse as that of Jimmy Page, and was as adept at conjuring sunny pastoral scenes ("Cemetery Gates") as crafting the brooding soundscapes that had become the band's signature (with the epic title track rivaling even "How Soon Is Now" in bombastic sweep). Morrissey, too, had refined every aspect of his persona, and they're all on display: never again would he be as morose as on "I Know It's Over," as defensive as on "Bigmouth Strikes Again," or as genuinely funny as on "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" (which presumably holds the distinction of being the only lyric ever to rhyme the phrase "flatulent pain in the ass"). Despite the apparent jockeying for position of the two leads, more than anything, The Queen Is Dead marks the high water mark of collaboration between them. The Smiths had always been at their best when using the beauty of Marr's compositions as counterpoint to Morrissey's melodrama, and they employed the contrast to perfection on both the aforementioned "Cemetery Gates" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," the best song of their career. The group ultimately would disband when long-standing differences between Morrissey and Marr - personal and musical - could no longer be reconciled. In retrospect, The Queen Is Dead is a remarkable document of a group that may well have understood it did not have much time left: it speaks to a period in which they were likely, if only so briefly, the greatest band in the world.

Dave Brubeck, 1920-2012

1959 was almost certainly the biggest year in jazz history. Beyond the justifiably beatified Kind of Blue, it featured the true emergence of at least three of its greatest icons, near simultaneously: Ornette Coleman, with The Shape of Jazz to Come; John Coltrane (in his own right), with Giant Steps; and Charles Mingus, with Mingus Ah Um. Often omitted among these landmarks in the purist's histories of the music - yet having outsold nearly all of them, especially then, but even subsequently - is Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

Throughout a long life well-lived, Brubeck retained an odd stature with music critics: one in which, seemingly, no matter how many of them put in writing that the man's music had never received its full due, that basic, underlying fact never changed. One reason that Brubeck always remained a consumer's jazzman was his very popularity with those consumers. For many jazz theoreticians, his lack of "true" musical vision was as well evidenced by the continued charting of his albums through the rock-heavy 1960s as by his disinterest in the free structure associated with the avant garde. Another reason is his affiliation with the Cool Jazz movement, one which lacked the political intrigue - and, it must generally be said, the sheer virtuosity - associated with bop.

Finally, of course, Brubeck was white. As with white artists in most other traditionally black musical arenas, white jazzmen have faced an uphill climb towards legitimacy. (Such dubiousness is often justified: for every Eminem there is usually at least one Vanilla Ice, and for every Elvis Presley a Pat Boone.) Unfortunately, this incredulity by association has tended to overshadow Brubeck's role as one of jazz's most forward-thinking bandleaders. His quartet, after all, became integrated at nearly the same time as the higher-profile addition of Bill Evans to Miles Davis' quintet. (He had also led an integrated band in Europe during his service in WWII.) Brubeck continued to cancel appearances that protested the presence of his bassist, Eugene Wright, until such protests finally stopped. Perhaps the most poignant evidence of the impact racial affairs had on Brubeck emerged 40 years later, during the filming of Ken Burns' Jazz, when he broke down in tears as he recounted his thoughts following the war:

You know the first black man that I saw, my dad took me to see on the Sacramento River in California and he said to his friend, "Open your shirt for Dave." There was a brand on his chest. And my dad said, "These things can't happen." That's why I fought for what I fought for.

Like Davis, Coleman, Coltrane, and Mingus, Brubeck released great albums both before and after his 1959 masterpiece; more than any of them, though, Brubeck's album has singularly defined his career. Time Out can more than stand on its own musical merits. The success of its pioneering experimentation with strange time signatures lies less in the act itself than in its unobtrusive execution. It's also impossible to deny the catchiness of the immortal "Take Five," or the beauty of "Blue Rondo à la Turk." The album is timeless, though, on account of its mood, and here it stands apart from the other landmarks mentioned above. The Shape of Jazz to Come and Giant Steps are opening salvos, and they continue to resound, first and foremost, with the air of great artists announcing themselves. Mingus Ah Um, by contrast, is a refinement of that which preceded it - the sharpening of the sweep and fury of Pithecanthropus Erectus that would ultimately culminate in The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Predictably, among the five, Time Out is closest in spirit to the sublime Kind of Blue. Yet where the latter's magic lies in the otherworldly nature of its perfection - drummer Jimmy Cobb famously argued that it "must have been made in heaven" - the calm of the former is decidedly of this earth. The effortlessness of the performances throughout seem to owe more to comfort than to confidence, and it's no coincidence that Brubeck was the only man of the five (save possibly Coltrane) who could accurately have been described as a "gentle soul." With his passing, jazz does not lose the last of its titans, but it does bid farewell to the one man among them who more than any other survivor represented calm amidst the storm. In the end, more than his undeniable chops or monumental output, Brubeck's legacy will rest on his basic decency, which as both a person and a musician made him a man truly worth admiring.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (9) Sign "☮" the Times - Prince

[This is the second in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Though few would ever have mistaken Prince's music for something other than the work of the man himself, all of his albums beginning with the breakthrough hit 1999 were co-credited to his backing group, the Revolution. By 1987, Prince had run out of patience with the band. In the beginning of a series of challenges to his established identity - one which would notoriously culminate in replacing his name with a ubiquitous, unpronounceable symbol - Prince disbanded the Revolution and embarked upon a mission to demonstrate the all-encompassing nature of his virtuosity. In the tradition of all great double albums, Sign "☮" the Times is a sprawling hodgepodge of genre and mood which eschews continuity in favor of glorious mess. The low-key foreboding of the title track abruptly gives way to the rollicking psychedelia of "Play in the Sunshine," and before the album is finished, Prince has touched upon every facet of black music that predated him. As ever, The Artist's refusal to be pigeonholed is more than musical: the genuine, austere gospel of "The Cross" lives alongside the bedroom funk of "It" primarily because both, incongruously, are important parts of the man's identity. Indeed, the many sides of Prince's personality are perhaps more prominently on display here than anywhere else in his vast discography. Sign "☮" the Times includes songs from the abandoned Camille project - which was to feature Prince vocals treated to sound (even) more feminine than usual - and as such, it's hardly a surprise that the album has Prince pushing the already exaggerated boundaries of his androgyny to confusing new heights. What is unexpected is the degree to which these tracks manage to transcend their novelty, and moments like the disarmingly (if unsettlingly) insightful "If I Was Your Girlfriend" speak to the quality of his songwriting at the time. Of course, as with all of his classic albums, they bear the distinct stamp of their time: the spartan electronica of "Housequake" is certainly a mark of the 80s, while lines like "Your face is jammin'/Your body's hecka slammin'" smack of 1987 worse than a Mötley Crüe music video. Beyond his ordinary, remarkable range, however - be it on guitar, vocals, or almost any one of the other instruments heard anywhere on the album - Prince imbued the proceedings with the energy of a man who finally felt free to express himself fully. This air of reckless freedom liberates the aptly-titled Sign "☮" the Times from its temporal anchoring, elevating what would otherwise have been simply another great Prince album and making it timeless.

Out of Print Gems: Sidney Bechet - Days Beyond Recall

Sidney Bechet led a remarkable life. Like many other turn-of-the-century New Orleans Creoles, he was born into a family that considered music a reprehensible profession (outside the opera) but a highly respectable vocation. Sidney played in his brother Leonard's band during his youth and quickly proved his superior; while his brother would settle down, Sidney continued playing full-time, eventually becoming perhaps the most famous of Dixieland clarinetists and a pioneering jazz saxophonist. Bechet's musical career spanned five decades, the last of which he lived as a celebrity in France - a country he adored as much for its relaxed attitude on race as for its appreciation of hot jazz. He played, among others, with Louis Armstrong and Freddie Keppard, and tutored future Ellington standout Johnny Hodges. Among these notable career highlights, an often overlooked landmark was a series of recordings Bechet made in the late 1940s and early 50s for Blue Note. Though the label would shortly become legendary as the preeminent home of hard bop, Bechet's recordings for Lion, Wolff, and co. were, if somewhat out of place in retrospect, nonetheless among the finest of his career.

Among the many Bechet Blue Note titles sadly languishing out of print was Days Beyond Recall, a collaboration with New Orleans contemporary Bunk Johnson. Johnson - a colorful character whose life was little documented, but whose trumpet prowess had been advertised by Armstrong and others - had been rescued from obscurity only three years earlier, when donations had enabled him to purchase the new dentures and horn required to resume playing and begin recording. Days Beyond Recall also included bassist Pops Foster, and the three Dixieland greats are in terrific form throughout. The band sounds lively as they stomp through "Blame It on the Blue" and album opener "Milenberg Joys" (written by Jelly Roll Morton, whose last recording session Bechet had already contributed to), while allowing themselves ample time to stretch out on the title track and "Weary Way Blues." The carefully-controlled vibrato that had made Bechet famous is on full display, and his interaction with Johnson suggests more familiarity with his musical personality than should have been allowed for by this (lamentably) one-off recording. With any luck, Blue Note will someday compile and reissue the many 10" records Bechet recorded for them, as they're truly deserving of reevaluation. Until then, Days Beyond Recall can be downloaded here.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (10) Swordfishtrombones - Tom Waits

[This is the first in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

At least as early as 1982, in an article reporting on his involvement with the soundtrack to the Francis Ford Coppola film One from the Heart, Tom Waits was referred to as a "Hobo Laureate." The honorific has followed him throughout his career, and must be among the most appropriate in all of popular music: everything about Waits' stage persona, from his appearance to his voice, mannerisms, and subject material, suggests either a personal history of homelessness, or else a consistent fascination with the subject. In 1982, Waits found himself at a crossroads, having been dropped from Asylum Records and seeking a new musical formula. Coincidentally, 1982 also marked the last recorded output of the closest thing American popular music had to a Waitsian precursor, Captain Beefheart. Waits and Beefheart had always held much in common: beyond the bottom-of-the-ribcage growls heard throughout their catalogs, both artists had shared an interest in the blues in their most brutal and elemental form, as well as a fondness for spinning musical yarns about the dwellers of societal margins. Prior to signing with Island Records, the music accompanying Waits had always been fairly conventional. The result had been albums like 1975's Nighthawks at the Diner - strong showcases of a highly original talent that nonetheless sounded as though they'd been produced by a peculiarly unhinged Billy Joel.

1983's Swordfishtrombones fulfilled all of Waits' promise in one fell swoop. Abruptly, the bed on which Waits' music rested was found to be as attention-grabbingly bizarre as the artist himself. The result was an exotic exploration of the world’s castoffs, from members of a subterranean society (the lurching stomp of "Underground") to a man who snaps under the pressures of suburban mediocrity (the painfully funny "Frank's Wild Years," later expanded into a concept album). Appropriately, most of the proceedings are very percussion-heavy. Waits sounds invigorated on the album's title track over the marimbas, whose ringing cadences provide an intriguingly shifty soundscape without sacrificing the atavistic sound integral to the artist's appeal. Elsewhere, melodic instruments serve a similar function. The bagpipes of "Town with No Cheer" and the Gary Lucas-esque guitars that ring throughout the album certainly echo latter-day Beefheart, but they also help announce Waits as a musician who's finally perfected accommodating his own eccentricities. Indeed, Swordfishtrombones represents perhaps the pinnacle of Waits' songwriting: his ballads, such as the superlative "Soldier's Things," maintain the sterling quality found throughout his Asylum years, while songs like "16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six" show him to also be uncompromising on harder-edged material. The critical acclaim of Swordfishtrombones and its outstanding follow-up, Rain Dogs, would reinvigorate Waits' career, and he has scarcely released an album over the last three decades to anything less than universal acclaim. Swordfishtrombones, however, continues to mark the boldest jump of Waits' career - an album that propelled him permanently into the vanguard of popular music, and one of the most impressive, cohesive statements of the decade.

(A) Man on the Moon

On August 25, the world lost one of its titans, Neil Armstrong - a man singular in his defining accomplishment, as well as his refusal to live his life on anyone else's terms. His stark refusal to be caught in the spotlight for most of the last three decades of his life seems especially striking in an era of internet-driven overexposure of erstwhile celebrities. (It should be noted that refusing to take credit for his feats in space hardly set him apart as an astronaut: one would be hard pressed to find one who doesn't automatically credit his accomplishments primarily to countless engineers, mission control, and the other members of his crew.) Yet to call his list of accomplishments staggering would, if anything, be an understatement. Needless to say, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and his deeply touching (if erratically delivered) "one small step for (a) man" quotation was heard live by 450 million people - more than 12% of the population of a world that was still widely devoid of radios and television sets. Often forgotten following what he did once on the moon, though, was his manual landing of the module on a site he had deemed safe on the spot while flying with less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the tank. His legendary eight days aboard Apollo 11 also overshadowed a career in which he logged nearly 2500 hours in experimental aircraft for the Air Force and flew in both the Gemini 8 and 11 missions to space.

More recently, two years nearly to the day before his death, Armstrong made a rare decision to broadcast his feelings when he criticized the Obama administration for its decision to surrender the forefront of American space exploration to private firms. Speaking before the Senate, he described the contemporary state of NASA funding as one that "presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere." It is curious that spaceflight has been so thoroughly neglected over the past (precisely) forty years. For a government so long committed to profligate spending - the best record of any American president over the last 70 years in providing balanced budgets was Dwight Eisenhower, at 3 years out of 8 - what was once perceived as a tenet of national (and indeed, earthly) pride has been reduced to only 0.5% of our larger-than-ever national budget. I hope that Neil Armstrong's greatest legacy may one day be his having taken part in the resumption of American predominance in manned space exploration. For now, as a small tribute to a man I admire as much for his few, well-chosen words as his grace under fire, I have digitized the long out-of-print CBS LP Man on the Moon, which was narrated by Walter Cronkite and documents the history and journey of Apollo 11. It's a beautiful reminder of man's all-too-fleeting capacity for genuine, transcendent accomplishment. You can download it here.