Concord Jazz -- Still Swinging After 50 Years

Downtown Concord, CA

About 30 miles east of San Francisco is the city of Concord, CA.  The photo I found online of Concord's downtown (above) makes it look quite fetching.  Since I've never been, I can't say for sure, but the next time I'm in the Bay area I'll try to stop by and report back.  For the moment, I will just say that all jazz fans owe a large debt of gratitude to Concord, CA.  Pound for pound, it's one of the most important cities in the history of jazz.  

Concord's favorite son, Dave Brubeck

First of all, Concord is the birthplace and childhood home of Dave Brubeck, one of the seminal figures in jazz music.  Brubeck was born in 1920 and lived at the family's home on Pacheco Street in Concord (where his mother gave piano lessons) until he was 12.  On the Concord Historical Society web site, there is a page dedicated to Brubeck that quotes him as saying: "I have many happy memories of life in Concord. It was an ideal place for a boy to grow up. I recall playing in Todos Santos Park on summer evenings . . . I roamed the hills surrounding Concord on my Cleveland bike and door to door peddled apples from our back yard tree."  Brubeck alone is more than enough to put Concord on the jazz map of the world.

Carl Jefferson
at the Concord Pavilion

But Concord also boasts another famous long-time resident who had an enormous impact on jazz music.  Carl Jefferson was born in 1919 (almost exactly one year before Brubeck) in Alameda, CA, a suburb of Oakland about 20 miles west of Concord.  Jefferson moved to Concord in 1958 to become the general manager of a car dealership called Montclair Motors.  Two years later, he bought out the owner and renamed the dealership Jefferson Motors.  By the end of the 60s he was one of the premier Lincoln Mercury dealers in the country.  As a big jazz fan (who apparently loathed rock 'n' roll music), Jefferson wanted to help promote jazz and give back to the community that had made him quite wealthy.  What better way than to sponsor a jazz music festival in Concord?  He contributed seed money, recruited donations from his friends in the business community, talked the city into matching their contributions, and together they launched a summer music festival in Concord.

The first edition of the festival opened on August 26, 1969, just one week after Woodstock closed in upstate New York.  According to the "Visit Concord" website: "The music showcase was called the Jazz in the Park Festival, and was held in a field near Concord High School.  More than 17,000 jazz fans showed up to hear music by Vince Guaraldi, Stan Kenton, Jean Luc Ponty, Carmen McRae, Don Ellis, Mel Torme, and the Buddy Rich Band."  Not a bad lineup to kick off a jazz music festival.  A brief report in the September 6 issue of Billboard Magazine (correctly) refers to the event as the "Concord Summer Festival" and adds that artists Bola Sete, Shelly Manne, and Cal Tjader also performed.  (By 1972 the name of the festival had changed from the Concord Summer Festival to The Concord Jazz Festival, but both names appear interchangeably in news articles for a couple of years.)

Vintage post card of the Concord Pavilion

The Jazz Festival grew so quickly and became so popular that after only a couple of years, Jefferson began to urge the city to build a performing arts center that could serve as a permanent home for the event and that would attract other cultural performances to the community throughout the year.  In 1973, a search committee (including Jefferson) made a fact-finding tour of performance sites around the country.  Based on the committee's recommendations, the city agreed to a $4.5 million bond issue to fund construction and hired architect Frank Gehry to design the Concord Pavilion, a covered, open-air venue in the hills east of the city.  The Pavilion opened in May, 1975, in time to host the 7th Festival.

If Jefferson's only contribution to the promotion of jazz had been the creation of the Concord Jazz Festival and the construction of the Concord Pavilion, that still would have been significant.  But as it turns out, Jefferson was just getting started.  As a fan of straight-ahead jazz, Jefferson lamented how rock music was changing jazz, pushing the music toward fusion, free jazz, and other non-mainstream styles.  He is quoted as saying that "The major labels are no longer making the kinds of records I like to listen to."  If you are a determined, wealthy businessman with a long list of musician friends and growing influence in the jazz music world, what do you do?  Well, if you are Carl Jefferson, you start your own label.

According to the founding lore, the light-bulb moment came during the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival.  After one of the shows, Jefferson invited some of the performers out for drinks at a local inn.  Among the musicians present were jazz greats Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, and Ray Brown.  During the conversation, the musicians expressed their sadness at how the music industry was changing and said that for the first time in a long time, they were having trouble getting a record deal.  Sources differ somewhat on Jefferson's exact response, but it was something on the order of:  "Well, hell, how much could it cost to make a record?  I’ll make a record with you.  How do you do it?"  Within a few short months, Jefferson had started his own record label and named it Concord Jazz.  [It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the label was formed.  The date the label was incorporated, January 5, 1974, is often cited as the founding date, but it seems clear that things were up and running well before the end of 1973.]

In the beginning, Jefferson ran the label out of his Lincoln Mercury showroom.  John Burk, a former producer for Concord Jazz who eventually became president of the Concord Music Group, says that "They literally ran the label out of the dealership.  The guys who washed cars would pack records.  It was a great way to start a label, because all the overhead was covered by the car dealership.” 

The 1st release on the Concord Jazz label

True to his word, the first album released on Jefferson's new label featured guitarists Joe Pass and Herb Ellis, with Ray Brown on bass and Jake Hanna on drums.  The album (left), catalog number CJS-1, is titled Jazz/Concord, and perhaps not surprisingly for a record label run out of a car dealership, it seems a bit slipshod.  

To begin with, the cover art has a home-made feel to it -- which turns out to be the case.  The drawing is credited to Jay Toffoli, who, at the time, was the teenage son of the Executive Director of the Concord Summer Festival, John Toffoli.  The fact that the references in the drawing -- a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train, a stage coach, a festival ticket, and the large "C" on a red flower background (the logo of the city of Concord) refer to the Summer Festival and the city and not to Herb Ellis and Joe Pass leads one to believe that Jefferson pressed the advertising agency for his car sales into service, and they recycled a poster from the festival for the album cover. 

Beyond that, there is confusion about where and when the session was actually recorded.  While the album cover art and title imply that this is a live session from the Concord Jazz Festival, the credits on the back of the jacket say: "Recorded at Wally Hyder (sic) Studios in Los Angeles on July 29, 1973."  Hmmm.  In the first place, the studio is Wally Heider's.  But regardless, it couldn't have been recorded there on July 29, 1973, because Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna were the featured performers at the 4th Annual Concord Jazz Festival in Concord, CA on that date.

In his extensive liner notes on the back of the jacket, San Francisco music critic Philip Elwood doesn't provide any explanation.  Even when he comments on the track titled "Happiness Is The Concord Jazz Festival," he doesn't take the opportunity to reveal if the track was, you know, actually recorded at the festival.  

Jazz/Concord Mk. II

In his AllMusic review of the album, critic Scott Yanow states that the album "was recorded at the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival."  In my experience, Yanow knows his stuff, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  However, the recording doesn't sound live, as there is no audience noise or applause, and no patter between the performers.    

I couldn't find the precise release date for the first album, but it appears to have come out at the beginning of 1974.  (Although a couple of sources indicate that it may have been released in late 1973.)  Interestingly, not long after the album's debut, a second version with a new cover (right) was released.  The new cover replaced the "Festival" drawing montage with a mocked-up image of ticket stubs from the 1972 Festival.  While the new cover looks more professional, it actually adds to the confusion by suggesting that the recording might have been made made at the 1972 Festival.

Herb Ellis signed copy of CJ-2

The revised version of Jazz/Concord came out around the same time as the label's second release, in February of 1974, which was titled Seven, Come Eleven.  Since a professional team (credited as Dan Buck Graphic Design on the back of the jacket) were thankfully brought on board to create the second cover, it appears that Jefferson may have taken the opportunity to have the team revamp the first cover in order to create a more uniform look for his new label.  The team from Dan Buck also came up with a new label design and a new corporate logo (below) both of which were used on the second album and subsequent releases.

The original logo (left) and revised logo (right)

There is no mystery about the source for the music on CJ-2, Concord's second release.  The subhead on Seven, Come Eleven (named for the second track on the album, a classic written by Benny Goodman and guitarist Charlie Christian) reads: "From their live performance at the Concord Summer Festival."  The lineup is the same as the first release, with Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna.  The back cover of the jacket features photos of the quartet onstage at the 1973 festival.  [Fun fact: My copy of CJ-2 (above left) is signed on the front in green ink by Herb Ellis.  I bought the album online, and didn't know it was signed until it arrived.  The inscription is a little hard to make out, but says: "I Loved It - Herb Ellis."  I don't know if he's referring to the Festival or something else, but it's very neat having his signature on the album.

In his AllMusic review of Seven, Come Eleven, Scott Yanow states that "The second Concord album was recorded the day after the first with the same lineup."  Which would mean that CJ-2 was recorded at the Festival on July 30, 1973.  Once again, I'm assuming that Yanow knows what he's talking about, which means that the first two Concord Jazz releases actually make up Vols. 1 and 2 of Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Jake Hanna live at the 1973 Concord Jazz Festival.  In contrast to the first album, Seven, Come Eleven is clearly a live recording, with lots of applause and other audience noise, as well as Carl Jefferson's welcome remarks and introduction of the band.

Jefferson may have started Concord Jazz as a sideline (or almost as a barroom boast), but it wasn't long before the label was the dominant player in straight-ahead or mainstream jazz.  While most of the major labels were promoting free jazz, fusion, or other new crossover trends, Carl Jefferson stuck with making records that he liked.  By the fall of 1978, just four and a half years after he started the label, Concord Jazz had a catalog of 69 albums, including recordings by veterans like Bud Shank, Hank Jones, Barney Kessel, Joe Venuti, Tal Farlow, and Louie Bellson, as well as newcomers like Scott Hamilton and Grant Geissman.  

In 1980, Jefferson sold his car dealership in order to devote full time to running the label.  At its peak, Concord Jazz put out 30-40 new albums each year.  By the time Jefferson died in 1995, he had supervised the release of more than 650 albums.  (The last vinyl release was CJ-397 in 1992, which featured Gene Harris And the Philip Morris Superband on an album titled Live At Town Hall, N.Y.C.)  Jefferson is listed as "Producer" on almost all Concord Jazz titles, although numerous sources say that he had little musical or creative input into the recordings, giving the artists a free hand to play what they wanted.  Like other successful independent jazz labels such as Contemporary, Pablo, and CTI, Jefferson had an in-house stable of musicians who regularly played on each other's sessions and toured together to play at music festivals around the world (not least of which, the Concord Jazz Festival).

Shortly before Jefferson's death in 1995, he sold Concord Jazz to Alliance Entertainment.  In 1999, Alliance was bought out by a group of investors that included film and TV producer Norman Lear.  In 2004, Concord Jazz bought the Fantasy Group of labels, and renamed the new, combined company the Concord Music Group.  Today, the Concord Music Group is the largest independent music organization in the world, controlling a staggering number of classic labels, including Concord Jazz, Milestone, Pablo, Prestige, Riverside, Savoy, Stax, Telarc, Vee-Jay, and many others.

Sadly, the Concord Jazz Festival folded in 2004 after 35 years.  In 2019, the Concord Music Group put together a one-time 50th anniversary festival to honor founder Carl Jefferson and his festival, which featured an all-star lineup of current and former Concord label performers (poster above).

A note about the labels on Concord Jazz albums.  The original label that first appeared in 1974 on CJ-2 (and on the revised CJS-1) is white with black text and a gray Concord logo at top (left below).  The logo is cleverly designed to be both a "c" connected to a "J" for Concord Jazz, as well as an eighth note.  Beginning with the release of CJ-80 in 1979, the redesigned label (right below) features "Concord Jazz" in a new, white font at the top on a gray/silver checkerboard background covering the entire label.  The gray squares (which can appear tan-colored in the right light) are copies of the original Concord logo that used to appear at the top in the old label.  The revised label was used from CJ-80 up until the last LP (CJ-397) in 1992.

The original 1974 label at left was used up until CJ-80 (right), which was released in 1979

Be aware that many of Concord Jazz's early titles were reissued over the years.  If you find a title with the catalog number CJ-1 through CJ-79 on the checkerboard label, then you know it is a reissue from 1979 or later.

I have about 175 of the 379 Concord Jazz releases on vinyl.  Almost without exception they are great, swinging, mainstream jazz.  You (almost) can't go wrong with any title in the catalog.  The engineering and mixing (mostly by Phil Edwards) is first-rate, as is the mastering (mostly by Leo Kulka and George Horn).  In general, Concord Jazz titles sold well and most are not difficult to find.  However, because of the high quality of the catalog and the enduring appeal of the music, they remain in demand and usually sell for $10-15 in VG+ or NM condition.  If you are a fan of mainstream jazz and run across any Concord Jazz titles, I urge you snap them up.  

Enjoy the music!

A Great Lost Album From 1975

Pop quiz!  Name the group in the photo below.  No peeking.

Give up?  Here's a hint, it's the back cover photo from one of the most neglected albums of 1975.  Despite the growing scourge of disco and punk rock, 1975 was still a pretty good year for rock music.  Among the classic releases that year were Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen, Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, Katy Lied by Steely Dan, A Night At The Opera by Queen, Still Crazy After All These Years by Paul Simon, Physical Graffiti by Led Zeppelin, One Of These Nights by the Eagles, Young Americans by David Bowie, and Patti Smith's Horses.  Alright, 1975 was no 1969, but it was no slouch either.

As happens every year, there are some really fine albums that fall through the cracks, don't find an audience, and don't sell nearly as well as they should.  Assuming you haven't guessed the group in the photo, it's the back cover from the album Change by Spanky & Our Gang (front cover photo way down below).  Not only was Change one of the best albums of 1975, I'd argue it's pretty high up on the list of all-time great neglected albums.  Yeah, yeah, just hear me out.

New Wine Singers - first album, 1963

In the early 1960s, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane (b. 1942) left Peoria for Chicago where she hoped to make it as a singer.  Her first paying gig was in 1962 with a jazz-based vocal group called the Jamie Lyn Trio.  By 1963, she was singing in a folk group called The New Wine Singers.  The New Wine Singers had some modest success and put out two albums of folk and protest music in 1963 and 1965.  

For the purposes of our story, The New Wine Singers are important because it was here that McFarlane got the nickname "Spanky."  Reports vary as to why, but in a 2012 interview, McFarlane says that the band liked to watch reruns of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedy shorts, and the resemblance between the name of the child actor who played Spanky -- George "Spanky" McFarland -- and McFarlane, was too hard to resist, so she became Spanky McFarlane.  It was also during her time with The New Wine Singers that McFarlane met multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Hale, who would later join Spanky & Our Gang.

By late 1965, The New Wine Singers had split up, and McFarlane headed to Florida.  The story goes that she met musicians Oz Bach and Nigel Pickering when they were trapped for three days by a hurricane.  They apparently hit it off, and McFarlane invited the guys to come see her in Chicago sometime. 

Mother Blues nightclub in Oldtown Chicago

Some months later, in early 1966, McFarlane was living in an apartment over a Chicago club called Mother Blues.  (It's unclear, but she may also have been working at the club).  In any case, the club's co-owner, Curly Tait, knew McFarlane and knew she was a singer, and asked if she could put together a house band to open for the headliners at his club (including the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Muddy Waters).  McFarlane quickly convinced her Florida hurricane buddies, Pickering and Bach, to come up to Chicago, and together they formed an acoustic jug-band trio, with Pickering on guitar, Bach on bass, and McFarlane singing and playing kazoo and washboard.  Since they didn't have time to rehearse a lot of songs, the group mixed in silly costumes, gags and novelty bits.

The trio called themselves Spanky & Our Gang, which was originally meant to be a joke.  After (somewhat surprisingly) getting some favorable press and attracting a local following with the name, they decided to keep it.  As word spread and the group began to play bigger venues, they brought in McFarlane's old bandmate from The New Wine Singers, guitarist and percussionist Malcolm Hale, to fill out their sound.  Soon they were in demand at the hottest spots in the Windy City.  Curly Tait signed on to manage the group.

First single, 1967

Mercury Records was based in Chicago, and pretty soon the label took notice of the up-and-coming group in their backyard and offered Spanky & Our Gang a contract.  Once the group was on board, the label shipped them off to New York to give them more exposure and assigned their NYC A&R man Jerry Ross to help polish their sound and get them ready for the studio.  Their first single (which had been rejected by The Mamas And The Papas) was "Sunday Will Never Be The Same."  It was released in May, 1967 and quickly charted, reaching #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.  Two more top 40 hits, "Lazy Day" and "Making Every Minute Count" followed in short order.  By late summer, the group added drummer John Seiter to the line up, and Mercury sent them to Los Angeles to record tracks for their first LP.  

First album, 1967

The eponymous Spanky And Our Gang album was released on August 1, 1967.  Unfortunately, as Bruce Eder writes on Allmusic, "The group's debut LP demonstrates what can go wrong, even with a group enjoying a trio of hit singles.  Though those hits are here, the album is the least representative of what the group was about and a mixed bag for fans."  

Indeed, the stylistic confusion of the material -- which included everything from the spoken-word song "Trouble" (from the Broadway show The Music Man) to a make-believe "Commercial" for pot to John Denver's "Jet Plane" to the depression-era dirge "Brother Can You Spare A Dime" -- made it difficult to get a handle on the group's style.  Historically, they've been lumped into the category of bubblegum pop, but that really just applies to their hit singles and doesn't do justice to their gorgeous multi-part harmonies and McFarlane's world-class vocals.  Unfortunately, the goofy Vaudevillian patter, the novelty songs, and the collage of "old-timey" photos inside the jacket showing the male band members in turn-of-the-century costumes with stiff, high-collared shirts, straw boaters, bowler hats, leather football helmets, and handlebar mustaches, all combine to make it difficult to take the group seriously.  

1968

For their second album, Like To Get To Know You, released in 1968, the high jinks continued with a 1920s gangster theme complete with Tommy Guns, fedoras, and Keystone Cops (on the back and inside the gatefold).  Though buoyed by two top 30 hit singles "Like To Get To Know You" and "Sunday Morning," the album was once again a confusing mish-mash of slick pop singles, a novelty song about paying bills, a terrific cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," all topped off with Hoagy Carmichael's 1942 classic "Stardust."  Eclectic doesn't begin to cover it. 

1969

Spanky & Our Gang's third and final studio album, Without Rhyme Or Reason, was released in early 1969.  Although the album received more favorable critical reaction than their first two LPs, it didn't sell as well.  It featured only one charting song, a beautiful and powerful protest song called "Give A Damn."  Otherwise it was another hodge-podge of styles and genres, this time including hard rock, another Hoagy Carmichael period piece ("Hong Kong Blues"), alongside some signature pop ballads with beautiful harmonies.

Graphically, however, the album was a big departure.  The cover, with the band all in white with puffy shirts and peace chains, looks like a lost Fifth Dimension album.  Which might help explain why the album didn't sell so well.  I suspect that many of their fans, who were charmed by the nostalgic, retro style of the previous albums, may have been put off by the full-blown psychedelia of the new release.  In addition, the band didn't tour to promote the album because by the time it was released in early 1969, the group had already broken up.  Oz Bach left in early 1968, and then Malcolm Hale tragically died (either from pneumonia or carbon monoxide poisoning) on Halloween night.  Soon after, drummer John Seiter accepted an offer to join The Turtles, and then McFarlane announced she was pregnant and was quitting to raise a family.  Though Mercury would release a bootleg live set in 1970, Spanky & Our Gang phase one was over.

Change, 1975

Which (finally!) brings us back around to Spanky's great lost album.  In 1974, six years after the original group broke up, McFarlane decided to put together a new gang.  With her old friend Nigel Pickering -- the only holdover from the original band -- she recruited Bill Plummer on bass, Marc McClure on guitar, banjo, and steel guitar, and Jim Moon on drums.  After some touring to tighten up the band and compile a set list, the Gang (Mk II) went into the studio to cut their only album, Change, released in 1975 on Epic Records (right).

In his liner notes for the album, Jim Charne, who was head of marketing at CBS Records, writes: "I had instructions not to call Spanky & Our Gang "country" (even though they are - sort of), and instructions not to call Spanky & Our Gang "rock" (which they also are - sort of)."  In fact, the new group was very much in the style of a wave of mid 70s country rock artists like Marshall Tucker, The Doobie Brothers, The Eagles, The New Riders Of the Purple Sage, Loggins And Messina, and The Flying Burrito Brothers.

Nashville Cat and
Producer Chip Young

The details of the recording of the album are unclear.  Radio World (an industry trade publication) reported in their July 5, 1975 issue that the new Spanky & Our Gang "have signed a long-term contract with Epic Records" and have completed recording their first album for the label with producer (and noted Nashville Cat session guitarist) Chip Young (left) at his Young'un Sound Studio in Murfreesboro, TN, about 35 miles outside Nashville.  (Young had recently been working with Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge.)  

However, the credits on the jacket note that only track A1 ("I Won't Brand You") was produced by Chip Young.  The rest of the album is "Produced with Spanky & Our Gang."  I can't say for sure, but it sounds like the band at some point took the reins back from Young and did it their way.  Paul Grupp at the Record Plant in L.A. is given credit as Associate Producer, and the mixing was done at Mama Joe's Studio in Hollywood by Alex "The Turk" Kazanegras (who did a lot of work with Loggins And Messina and Poco, among others).  A photo of the test pressing for the album on Discogs shows that it was mastered at Allen Zentz in San Clemente, CA.  Epic Records was a subsidiary of Columbia, so the album was pressed by Columbia Records.

Regardless of the provenance, Change sounds great and delivers a first-rate selection of tracks by songwriters like Guy Clark, Ronee Blakley, Tom Waits, and Gary Busey (yeah, the actor guy).  In contrast to Spanky's first three albums, this time the songs fit together to create a coherent feel - ballads skillfully mixed with more up-tempo folk/country rockers that all flow together nicely.  

In addition to the core band, a long list of crackerjack studio pros and guest artists lent their talents, including legendary Nashville arranger Bergen White, banjo wizard Herb Peterson, Richard Thompson (from Fairport Convention) on piano, Jerry Yester (late of The Lovin' Spoonful) on backing vocals, the Tower of Power Horns, Juke Logan on harmonica, bass player Ray Neapolitan, and guitar ace Rick Vito.  Thompson and Yester also scored gorgeous string arrangements for several songs.  Gone are the sunshine and lollypops and the goofy gags.  The music on Change is sophisticated Americana, beautifully-arranged and tightly played, with Marc McClure's ethereal steel string guitar and the heavenly multi-part vocal harmonies floating over it all.  

If all you know about Spanky & Our Gang are the hit singles from the 1967-69 albums, you are in for a pleasant surprise and a musical treat.  I've listened to the LP three times in the last couple of days and it still raises the hair on the back of my neck.

The album has never been released on CD or re-released on vinyl.  If you want your own a copy of Change, your only choice is the original 1975 LP.  Luckily, copies are easy to come by and available (as of this writing) for less than $10 (plus shipping) in NM condition.  Cheap for a forgotten gem. 

Enjoy the music!

Deciphering Dave Brubeck

I've always been a little ambivalent about Dave Brubeck.  While I appreciate his genius as a composer, musician, and jazz innovator,  most of the time I don't really connect emotionally with his music.  Don't get me wrong, I have 55 (!) Brubeck albums and play and enjoy many of them regularly.  But while Brubeck often gets my toes tapping, I find that I don't always get into the music as much as I should because I'm busy thinking about key changes, time signatures, and poly rhythms.  Something that never happens when listening to a record by, say, Bill Evans. 

Bill Evans moves me.  When I'm listening to him play I don't think about keyboard technique or the structure of the tune.  I'm just transported by the lyricism and the beauty of the music.  It's kind of like how I can enjoy and admire a painting by De Kooning and appreciate the tension between his use of form and color and space.  But when I look at a painting by Van Gogh, I just marvel at the beauty without thinking about his brushwork or technique.

After recently reading the 2020 biography "Dave Brubeck: A Life In Time," by British musician and musicologist Philip Clark, I think I finally figured out what's going on.

Clark spent 10 days shadowing Brubeck's quartet during their 2003 tour of the UK.  Brubeck rented a house in London as a home base and hired a bus to shuttle the band back and forth to gigs around England.  During the sometimes lengthy bus rides, Clark and Brubeck spent long hours talking about Brubeck's life and discussing his music in microscopic detail.  (Brubeck's wife, Iola, and other members of the band often take part as well.)  Clark mines these conversations to provide insights into Brubeck's life and music.  

While I do recommend the book, be aware that a lot of it is tough sledding.  The first hundred pages or so are an in-depth look at Brubeck's musical influences, with long sections devoted to explaining the theories of Brubeck's primary teacher, the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud, with whom Brubeck studied at Mills College in Oakland, CA.  You will learn far more than you probably ever wanted to know about Milhaud, George Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Louis Dorey and a host of other French composers who, under the influence of Cubism and surrealism, attempted to rewrite the rules of classical composition.

In a not atypical passage, Clark describes an early Brubeck composition called "Playland-at-the-Beach" thus: "The opening section darted agitatedly between three distinct keys, with jolts and collisions in the orchestration -- like a trumpet line being snatched and sucked inside the texture like a Venus flytrap -- matching the non sequitur upsets of Brubeck's harmony."  Venus flytraps eating trumpets, yep, my thoughts exactly.

Of another Brubeck composition, Clark says it: ". . .re-accented the 3+3 of 6/8 to become 2+2+2 of 3/4, a neat rhythmic pun to chew on as Brubeck's harmony feasted on another, more existential ambiguity: Was this music in the major or the minor?"  Very good question.  I took piano lessons for ten years and I have have no idea what he's talking about.

While there is a fair amount of interesting background information about Brubeck's life and family, the book isn't a normal biography.  Instead, it's a detailed dissection of Brubeck's music with hundreds of pages devoted to analyzing Brubeck's choice of time signatures and keys, his use of counterpoint, rhythm, and tonal contrast.  Reading the book didn't tell me a lot about Brubeck the man (except that he was a complete egghead), but it did give me a much better understanding of why his music sounds like it does.  Brubeck combined jazz with French modernism -- a classical movement that embraced polyrhythm and polytonality -- that is, musicians playing different time signatures and different chords at the same time.  My takeaway is that Brubeck was not a classical musician who became a jazz composer, he was an avant-garde classical composer who became a jazz musician.  [Hmmm.  Discuss.]

Even though this interpretation of Brubeck's music only came to me after reading Clark's book, Brubeck's place in the history of jazz has long been a subject of debate.  As one of the originators of "West Coast" jazz, Brubeck and his mostly white contemporaries were often dismissed by the predominantly black East Coast beboppers.  In his harrowing autobiography "Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper," white West Coast alto saxophonist Art Pepper describes how at some gigs the black musicians he was playing with were so disdainful of a white jazz musician from California that they wouldn't even acknowledge his presence.  He says they resented him and other white jazz musicians who they felt were appropriating "their" music.

Miles Davis apparently had similar feelings.  He was famously quoted as saying that "Brubeck doesn't swing."  Not all black musicians agreed however, as Charles Mingus wrote a letter to Downbeat magazine upbraiding the (at the time) very young trumpeter for his comment, saying: "At Newport and elsewhere Dave had the whole house patting its feet and even clapping its hands.  If a guy makes you pat your foot, and if you feel it down you back . . . then Dave is the swingingest by your definition."  I don't know if anyone but Mingus could have smacked down Miles like that and lived to tell about it.  But it apparently had an effect.  Clark reveals in his book that some time later, at a late-night jam session at the famed Black Hawk night club in San Francisco, Miles sidled up to Brubeck at the bar and by way of a grudging apology, said: "You swing. Your band don't swing."  (It helps if you think about how that would sound in Miles' raspy voice.)

In addition to the obvious racial component, the schism between East Coast and West Coast jazz was based on the feeling that East Coast was the true jazz idiom pioneered by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke and other black jazz musicians.  Real jazz had its roots in the blues and evolved organically from juke joints and jam sessions in the black bars and clubs of Harlem, Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis, where young, hungry black musicians (like Miles Davis) took part in late-night cutting sessions, challenging each other and showing off their chops.  Only the best players survived.  As Miles Davis latter said of his early days playing jam sessions in New York City, "If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's (in Harlem) and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you, you might get your ass kicked."  

While white, West Coast musicians like Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Bud Shank, Shorty Rogers, Zoot Sims, (and Dave Brubeck of course), had impressive chops, on the whole the West Coast style was more lyrical than East Coast jazz.  The audience for many of the West Coast groups were suburbanites and white college students.  What's more, the West Coast cats often played from charts (for goodness sakes) and many of them earned a living playing sessions for television shows and movie soundtracks, or backing up crooners like Frank Sinatra.

The music press and record labels lost no time in promoting the rivalry between the two styles of jazz in an effort to sell records.  There were a number of albums (including the one above) from the 1950s that played up the West Coast - East Coast split.  It is telling that in the photos of the musicians on the cover of the West Coast Vs. East Coast album, only two of the West Coast players are Black, while only two of the East Coast musicians are white.

Which brings me back to Dave Brubeck.  As Clark relates in his book, Brubeck struggled for years to sell albums and find an audience for his cerebral style of jazz.  The turning point came in the early 50s when he began to focus on performing at colleges, where he finally found a receptive audience of young, white college kids.  Brubeck quickly became a media darling -- a safe, white, jazz musician who didn't use drugs, didn't drink or smoke, and didn't scare the bejeebers out of the parents of white kids.  By 1954 Brubeck was on the cover of Time magazine (below), and his career and record sales took off.

While Brubeck certainly benefitted from his status as a clean-cut, white jazz musician, this is in no way meant as a criticism.  The fact is, Brubeck was a stand-up guy in the fight against racism in the United States and abroad.  In 1958 he refused an offer to tour South Africa when he was told that his bassist Paul Morello (who was Black) would not be allowed to play.  And in 1959, Brubeck cancelled most of the dates on an extensive (and highly lucrative) tour of southern U.S. universities when the schools said that Morello could not appear on stage with the quartet.  What's more, wherever they played, Brubeck insisted that audiences at his shows not be segregated and demanded that Morello be given the same treatment and be allowed to use the same dressing rooms and facilities as the rest of the band at a time when blacks were regularly forced to use the back entrance or segregated toilets.  And for what it's worth, Brubeck was said to have been mortified that he was on the cover of Time, as he thought the honor should have gone to his hero, Duke Ellington.  (For the record, Ellington got his own cover two years later.)

All this is by way of saying that Brubeck was a genius and an upstanding human being who is rightly considered one of the greatest jazz innovators of all time.  His work forever changed the history of jazz.  But in the end, as much as I appreciate and enjoy Brubeck's music, it just doesn't resonate with me like the work of many other jazz artists.

Here's another way to put it: If my house is on fire and I only have time to save Brubeck's Take Five or Kind Of Blue, by Miles Davis, I'm taking Miles.

Enjoy the music! 

The Definitive Burt Bacharach Songbook By Trijntje Oosterhuis?

During the 1960s and early 70s, no popular singer was more closely identified with a songwriting team than Dionne Warwick was with Burt Bacharach and Hal David.  

Beginning in 1962 and continuing for a decade, Warwick released a string of 39 consecutive chart hits, all penned by Bacharach-David.  Among the (now) standards were such great songs as "Walk On By," "Don't Make Me Over," "I'll Never Fall In Love Again," "Make It Easy On Yourself," "Anyone Who Had A Heart," "Alfie," and "Do You Know The Way To San Jose."  

Although dozens of other artists have recorded songs by Bacharach and David, Warwick's interpretations were without question the definitive versions of their great catalog.  That is, until now.  (Well, maybe.)  Let's take a look.

The contender for Warwick's title, believe it or not, is Trijntje Oosterhuis (pronounced) "train-chi oh-ster-haus"), a 48-year-old Dutch singer born in 1973 (the same year that Bacharach and David split up).  In the early 1990s, while she was still in her teens, Trijntje and her brother formed a band called Total Touch and began gigging in music bars around their native Amsterdam.  In 1994, Dutch alto saxophonist Candy Dulfer  (who has played with Van Morrison, Prince, and Maceo Parker among others) caught a show by Total Touch and promptly asked Trijntje to contribute vocals to her 1995 album, Big Girl.  That same year, Trijntje accompanied Dulfer's band on a world tour to support the release.  

The next year, back home in the Netherlands, Trijntje and Total Touch had their first big EU hit with a 1996 single called "Somebody Else's Lover."  Following the release of a couple of successful Total Touch albums, Trijntje decided to go solo.  Her first album was 1999's For Once In My Life - The Songs Of Stevie Wonder.  That was followed by two more EU-only CDs.  In 2004, Trijntje signed with Blue Note Records and released her first album for the label, Strange Fruit, a slightly odd mash-up of songs made famous by Billie Holiday, together with a handful of George Gershwin standards.  Then, in 2006, Trijntje put out The Look Of Love (above), the first of three all-Bacharach studio albums.  The second volume was 2007's Who'll Speak For Love (below), and the third (and final?) album was Everchanging Love (further below), released in November, 2021.

Even though I had heard and enjoyed some of the tracks from Trijntje's first two Bacharach albums, I didn't really sit up and take notice until I saw that all three of the albums were slated to be released as limited vinyl editions.  Since the team of Bacharach-David is, for me, right up there with Lennon-McCartney as one of the great songwriting teams of the second half of the 20th century, I immediately put in advance orders for all three LPs.  [There is actually a fourth volume, Best Of Burt Bacharach Live, which came out in 2009, but as of this writing, there is no indication that it will be released on vinyl.]

All three studio albums were made with the cooperation and limited participation of Burt Bacharach (he plays piano on several selections).  While volumes one and two are heavy on the great 1960s and 70s Bacharach-David hits, 2021's third volume (a double album) brings things up to date by including later Bacharach collaborations with Steven Sater, Bill Conti, Marvin Hamlisch, Carole Bayer Sager, and Elvis Costello.  In addition to more great interpretations of Bacharach tunes by Trijntje, the third volume includes a duet with Gregory Porter (also a Blue Note recording artist) on one track.  

The LPs are released by the Dutch-based Music On Vinyl label.  They are pressed at Record Industry in the Netherlands on 180-gram vinyl and sound superb.  Volume one and two were recorded and mixed by legendary engineer Al Schmidt.  Schmidt died in 2021 and was replaced by Dutch recording engineer Tijmen Zinkhaan for volume three.

Bernie Grundmund did the mastering on volume three, while the lacquer was cut by Rinus Hooning at Artone Studio (the in-house mastering shop at Record Industry).   

Vince Mendoza did most of the arrangements and conducts The Metropole Orchestra (based in Amsterdam) for all three volumes.  Volumes one and two are limited to 1,000 copies, while volume three is limited to 1,500 copies.  Serial numbers are individually stamped in gold on the back of the jackets.  The three releases are on different colors of vinyl, including a striking translucent turquoise color for volume one, orange for volume two, and "Blue Note" blue for volume three.

OK, back to the question of whether Trijntje sets a new standard for interpretation of the Bacharach songbook.  The answer is (waffle, waffle) -- it's complicated.  Trijntje has a marvelously expressive voice, with great power, range, and control.  She brings a compelling new take to Bacharach's classic canon.  Dionne Warwick's voice is more contained, but also more vulnerable, with a world-worn quality that conveys more emotion; when she sings "a house is not a home" or "say you'll be my guy -- if not I'll just die," you believe her.  And let's be honest, you can't undo 60 years of hearing Dionne Warwick sing Burt Bacharach.  So from a vocal and nostalgia perspective, Dionne Warwick is still the one to beat.

However, where Trijntje has the edge is in the consistently superb sound quality of her albums.  Mendoza's arrangements are fabulous, the Metropole Orchestra is shimmering, and the third-row-center feel that Al Schmidt (volumes one and two) and Tijmen Zinkhaan (volume three) capture is off the charts.  And while we're at it, volume four, Best Of Burt Bacharach Live, is a two hour and twenty minute, 21-song, live performance available as a double CD or on Blu-ray video (with 24khz 48bit audio) that also sounds terrific.  Bottom line, with some small personnel changes, you get four volumes of Trijntje singing Bacharach (five hours of music), all arranged, performed, conducted, produced, recorded, mixed, mastered, and released by the same team.

Fortunately, there is no reason to chose between Dionne and Trijntje.  In fact, I've had fun queueing up versions of the same song by each singer and playing them back to back to enjoy the different interpretations.  If you dig Bacharach, I'm assuming you already have many or most of Dionne Warwick's interpretations.  You owe it to yourself to check out Trijntje's take on these classic tracks as well.

And just so you know, Trijntje isn't completely fixated on Bacharach.  She now has some 20 albums to her credit, ranging from standards to jazz to R&B (as well as some really awful Dutch Europop).  Blame it on her youth.  

If you are looking for a non-Bacharach album, I highly recommend her fine 2011 release called Sundays In New York, where she is backed by the the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra.  In addition to one original by Trijntje, it has a great mix of jazzy pop and R&B hits, written by the likes of Sam Cooke, Valerie Simpson, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield.  Sadly, it's not yet available on vinyl.

Enjoy the music!

How Many Chet Atkins Albums Do You Really Need?

My music room has custom LP shelving that covers a wall which is 17 feet long and 9 feet high.  I have approximately 120 linear feet of shelf space, designed to hold about 8,000 records.  When we moved into the house, I had about 3,000 records and thought I would never run out of room.  Seven years later, I literally can't wedge any more records onto the shelves.  And there are about 150 records piled up on the floor with nowhere to go.

An "after" picture once I started to clear out some albums working from the left

For a while I tried to delay the inevitable by moving groups of LPs that I don't listen to very often to overflow shelves in the garage.  First to go were the classical and big band albums.  Next were the vocal and light jazz albums.  Then I moved the soundtrack albums, "various artists" collections, stereo demonstration discs, comedy albums, assorted box sets -- all out to the garage.  At this point all the low hanging fruit was gone, and there was nothing left but the "core" collection of classic rock and jazz.  There appeared to be no solution except to build a bigger house.

Well, ok, there was one obvious solution -- I could quit buying so many records.  But a man has to know his limitations, and not buying records is one of mine.  After a period of indecision, I finally decided I had to go through the collection and get rid of some of the thousands of records that I like having around, but that I almost never listen to.  Some of them are former favorites that I've grown out of, and many others are strange and sundry albums that I picked up at estate sales or thrift stores for 50 cents or a dollar apiece.  Among these are a bunch of fun and even classic albums by Doris Day, The Lettermen, Jonah Jones, Eydie Gorme, Melanie, Jerry Vale, The Limelighters, Johnny Mathis, Andre Previn, and so on.  I do occasionally listen to some of these old gems, but life is short, and I realized that I was sacrificing a lot of shelf space on the off chance that I might have an uncontrollable urge to hear Al Martino's heartfelt version of "Torna A Surriento" off the classic The Italian Voice Of Al Martino album (above left).  So, I pulled out several hundred of these orphans and plan to see if one of the local used record dealers will buy them or maybe give me some store credit for the whole bunch.

So far I hadn't touched any of what I consider my core collection - the thousands of classic rock and jazz albums that I listen to 95% of the time.  However, it finally dawned on me that I don't need every album by every artist that I like.  

Which brings me to the title of this post: How many Chet Atkins albums do you really need?  Before you take a swing at me with your Gretsch hollow body guitar (Chet Atkins signature model), let me start by saying I'm a big fan of Chet Atkins.  In the 50s and 60s, he was the man -- a virtuoso on the electric guitar and a seminal figure in the development of modern recording technology.  [Fun fact:  Chet was one of first musicians to have a full-fledged professional recording studio in his home -- partly visible on the LP cover above.]  But as much as I like Chet Atkins, I don't listen to him very often -- maybe a few times a year at most.  And when I do have a yen to hear some Chet, I almost always listen to one of the same four or five favorite albums.  Hmm, maybe I don't really need 22 Chet Atkins albums.  The thing is, all of Chet's albums are pretty good.  But, to be honest, most of his 91 albums (!) sound pretty similar.  Almost every one is a tasteful collection of (then) current pop and country hits, show tunes, maybe a few standards, all done in the breezy and seemingly effortless Chet Atkins style.  And of course nearly all backed by a crackerjack group of "Nashville Cats," which is to say some of the top session players in the business.  In addition, the sound quality on many of them (mostly on the RCA label) is outstanding.

Ready - Take One

Once I got going, it was fairly easy to pare down a number of other artists as well.  A good example is Erroll Garner.  I love Erroll Garner and have 41 of his albums.  But like Chet Atkins, the majority of the 140 albums (!) that Garner released have a certain sameness.  By and large they feature a selection of show tunes, popular standards, and tracks from the great American songbook, all done in the incredibly inventive and imaginative Erroll Garner style.  But (like Chet Atkins), as much as I dig Erroll Garner, I just don't play his albums all that often.  And when I do, I usually reach for the same five or six discs that I like best.  As a result, I have albums by Garner that I'm pretty sure I haven't heard in 10 years.  If I keep a core collection of, say, 8-10 LPs, (including the fabulous Ready - Take One, above left), that gives me room for another 30 or so albums.  (I should also point out that I have 87 Erroll Garner albums ripped to my hard drive in case I do want to hear a particular title.)

In a slightly different exercise, I next started going through my collection looking for albums that I don't really like, even though they are by artists that I generally do like.  Case in point: Elton John.  Elton's first five or six albums are classics, great music that I bonded with in my teens and enjoy hearing regularly.  However, after about 1975, Elton's output is mostly all downhill.  But I kept buying his albums for decades because I kept thinking: The early albums were so good, surely he'll get his groove back soon, no?  Alas, no.  (Ditto Rod Stewart, Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, etc., etc.)  I have 31 albums by Elton John, but I only ever listen to the early ones -- Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection, Honky Chateau, Don't Shoot Me.  I haven't listened to Victim Of Love since I found it in a $1 bin 20 years ago.  Cripes, no wonder I'm out shelf space.  So, 20 Elton albums are headed back to the $1 bin at my local used record store.

I'm making progress, but it's not all smooth sailing.  For instance, I pulled out the ten albums I have by The Youngbloods, most of which I haven't listened to in years.  They seemed like perfect candidates for the garage or maybe even the big heave-ho.  But before I sent them into exile, I thought I'd listen to a few sides.  You can probably guess what happened next.  I ended up playing nearly all of them and deciding that they are really quite good. Led by bassist/vocalist/songwriter Jesse Colin Young, The Youngbloods never reached superstar status (their only top ten hit was 1969's anthemic "Get Together"), but they were a talented band that released some solid records.  So I've spared them from the ignominy of the garage for the time being.  And even though I didn't gain any shelf space, a side benefit of my efforts to thin out the collection is that I've re-discovered a number of excellent, neglected albums that I haven't heard in a long time.

Long story short, I've moved about 1,500 records out to the garage or into boxes ready to take to the used record store.  My shelves feel downright roomy.  Which means, of course, that it's time to buy some more records!

Enjoy the music!