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Nov 13

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In London Town

I’ve lived in London since the last days of the 1960s, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. But there are certainly bits of the city, usually individual streets, where I feel at home. The photo above is of Meard Street, which joins Wardour Street to Dean Street in Soho. If I could, I’d live in one of the Georgian houses on the right-hand side, dating from around 1720. On the left, at No 6, under the blue awning, is the shop of the tailor John Pearse, who opened Granny Takes a Trip at World’s End on the King’s Road in 1966. Beyond it is what was until not all that long ago, and very obviously, a bordello. On the same side of the road, on the corner of Dean Street, was the club first known as Billy’s and then as Gossips, which hosted the weekly Gaz’s Rockin Blues sessions, run by John Mayall’s DJ son, from 1980 to 1995.

That’s the historic London I cherish. Billy’s and Gossips weren’t my scene but on Meard Street I’m a minute or two’s stroll away from the sites of the 2 Is, the Flamingo, the Marquee, the Pizza Express jazz basement on Dean Street, the 100 Club, the Astoria, Les Cousins, Ronnie Scott’s original and current clubs, Bill Lewington’s and Macari’s instrument shops, the record stores of long-gone days — Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road, James Asman’s on New Row, Collet’s on New Oxford Street and its successor, Ray’s Jazz, on Shaftesbury Avenue, One Stop and Harlequin on Berwick Street, and Transat Imports on Lisle Street — and the newsagents on Old Compton Street where you could buy the latest Down Beat.

Two new books — Robert Elms’s Live! and Peter Watts’s Denmark Street — deal, in very different but equally enjoyable ways, with London’s musical history. Elms is best known as a long-standing host on BBC Radio London whose show was unaccountably moved, a couple of years ago, from its daily slot to the weekends. Unlike most people who could be described as professional Londoners, he’s never boring on the subject of his home city. He’s the ideal host: genial without being effusive, genuinely interested in what his guests have to say. And on his show you’re never far away from an excellent piece of music.

He started his career writing for The Face and the NME before becoming a prime mover of the New Romantic movement. We won’t hold that against him. Had he been born 10 years earlier, he would have been a perfect Mod. And his tastes evolved to include all sorts of music, including reggae, jazz, flamenco and tango, all of which he writes about in his new book.

Live! — subtitled Why We Go Out — is an account of his gig-going career filled with the characteristic enthusiasm of a man who describes himself as a gadfly. “I’ve been an honorary member of every passing trouser tribe,” he writes, “sported every silly haircut imaginable and enjoyed almost every style of music, bar heavy metal and opera.”

There are chapters on the time he almost became a member of Spandau Ballet, on his life as Sade Adu’s boyfriend when she was on the way up, on the eternal strangeness of Van Morrison, on his affection for and encounters with the Faces, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Paul Weller, and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. He felt his life transformed by witnessing the Jackson 5 at Wembley Arena, saw Little Feat at the Rainbow and now regrets that doesn’t remember much about it, turned up to play football with Bob Marley wearing entirely the wrong sort of kit, listened to the young Amy Winehouse sing in his Radio London studio, and attended the last-ever gig by Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band in New York (how I envy that).

Elms isn’t Lester Bangs or Simon Reynolds. He doesn’t polemicise or analyse. What he’s good at is sharing the thrill of being in the right place at the right time. To me, nowhere is this better conveyed than in his descriptions of falling for flamenco music while living in Spain (he’s sent me off to listen to José Montje Cruz, known as Camarón de la Isla) and the music of Astor Piazzolla while visiting Buenos Aires. Now it’s my turn to make him jealous: when Piazzolla’s Quinteto Tango Nuevo played the Almeida Theatre in Islington for five nights in 1985, I was there for three of them, and the experience was unforgettable.

Peter Watts’s history of Denmark Street is a diligent but also lively and amusing trawl through the origins and evolution of London’s Tin Pan Alley, a narrow street in an area of ill repute in which Lawrence Wright became the first of many music publishers to open an office in 1911. Later, at No 19, Wright would start a weekly paper called the Melody Maker in 1926, followed in 1952 by the New Musical Express, founded by Maurice Kinn at No 5.

Other important addresses on the street were No 9, where a ground floor café called La Gioconda became a meeting place for ambitious young musicians; No 4, where the Rolling Stones recorded “Not Fade Away” and their first album at Regent Sound Studios in 1964; No 24, the home of KPM, specialists in jingles and library music; No 6, where Hipgnosis — Storm Thorgerson and Po Powell — designed elaborate album covers for Pink Floyd and 10cc and where the embryonic Sex Pistols lodged in a back room, later taken over by the embryonic Bananarama; and No 7, where the Tin Pan Alley Club offered a welcome to assorted crooks and gangsters.

Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound preserves for posterity the story of a piece of London now half-destroyed by a development that has turned the top end of Charing Cross Road into something resembling a cross between Times Square and the Las Vegas Strip: a garish high-tech entertainment facility that could have been born in the imagination of J. G. Ballard at his most dystopian. Like the east side of the bottom end of Charing Cross Road or the east side of Berwick Street, the south side of Denmark Street survives relatively untouched, forced to stare across at its latest iteration.

* Live! by Robert Elms is published by Unbound. Denmark Street by Peter Watts is published by Paradise Road.

Nov 3

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Val Wilmer: ‘Blue Moments, Black Sounds’

Val Wilmer is one of the most remarkable people I know, and you’ll know that too if you’ve seen her photographs. Whether it’s Muddy Waters playing cards with Brownie McGhee backstage at the Fairfield Halls in 1964, Archie Shepp sitting beneath a Jimi Hendrix poster in his New York apartment, or a joyful couple whose names we’ll never know at a blues dance in Bentonia, Mississippi half a century ago, she finds the essence of the human spirit.

Those three images are among the several dozen included in Blue Moments, Black Sounds, an exhibition of her photographs which opened this week. It’s on until the end of November at a very nice little gallery in Queen’s Park, North London, which specialises in music photography and where you can also go to get your own pictures framed.

I was particularly moved by the only photograph in the show that has an extended caption, written by Wilmer, in which she tells of going to see Louis Armstrong at Earl’s Court in 1956, when she was a 14-year-old schoolgirl. When Armstrong and the All Stars left the country, catching a plane to Ghana, she and her brother went to see them off at the airport. She took her mother’s Box Brownie camera, asked Louis if she could take his photograph, and got a lovely shot that put her, as she says, “on my way to a lifetime of learning.”

Then she adds something interesting and important: “Through getting to know the musicians, I learnt the importance of positive representation.” That doesn’t mean she learnt how to take PR photographs. It means she learnt to appreciate the importance of immersing herself in the world of her subjects, in order to portray them with greater sensitivity to their lives and to the art that came from it, and to realise that pictures of Ornette Coleman playing pool with Anthony Braxton or members of the Count Basie orchestra snoozing on the band bus can actually tell us more than photos of them on stage.

Those photographs, like most of the ones in the new show, could only have been taken by someone possessing not just painstakingly acquired technical skills but a deep sympathy with the music and the lives of those who make it, and with the courage and humility to take her own place in their world, and to find her unique vantage point.

* Val Wilmer’s Blue Moments, Black Sounds is at the WWW (Worldly, Wicked & Wise) Gallery, 81 Salusbury Road, London NW6 6NH until 30 November: wwwgallery@yahoo.com. Deep Blues 1960-1988, a pamphlet of Wilmer’s photographs from the world of the blues, edited by Craig Atkinson, has just been published by Café Royal Books: caferoyalbooks.com. Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution 1957-1977 is published by Serpent’s Tail.

Oct 31

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Sylvie Courvoisier x 2

Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson at Café Oto 30 October 2023

One way and another, Sylvie Courvoiser’s new album, Chimaera, contains the most sheerly beautiful music I’ve heard this year. Inspired by the paintings and drawings of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), these pieces recall the words of the French artist about his own work: “They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” Without getting remotely literal about it, Courvoisier finds ways of creating a music parallel to such works as “Partout des prunelles flamboient (Everywhere eyeballs are ablaze)” and “Le pavout rouge (The red poppy)”, summoning dream-like textures that swirl and mingle, float and evaporate, creating pictures of their own.

Courvoisier, the Swiss-born pianist and composer, has lived in Brooklyn for the past 25 years, becoming an important figure in the New York downtown scene. Her band for the new album unites her partners in her regular trio, the bassist Drew Gress and the drummer and vibraphone-player Kenny Wollesen, with the trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith and Nate Wooley and the Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz, who brings along his array of electronic tools. The broad palette of instrumental colours is used with immense care and subtlety, and with a sense of spatial resolution that invites the listener’s engagement.

She was at Café Oto in London last night with another regular partner, the guitarist Mary Halvorson, to present music based on their most recent album together, Searching for the Disappeared Hour. As piano-guitar duos go, this was neither Bill Evans with Jim Hall nor Cecil Taylor with Derek Bailey, although it contained elements of both those rare partnerships: the elegance of detail of the first and the fearless extended vocabularies of the second. This was music characterised by exactitude and generosity, making its own unique world, in which dizzyingly rapid written passages, never gratuitous, opened out into spellbinding improvised solo passages.

* Sylvie Courvoisier’s Chimaera is on the Intakt label. Couvoisier and Mary Halvorson’s Searching for the Disappeared Hour is on Pyroclastic Records.

Oct 27

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Our Island Story

To those who found Chris Blackwell’s 2022 autobiography, The Islander, long on charm but, shall we say, short on detail, The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68 will be the answer to their prayers. Here is the story of the UK’s most charismatic independent label during its formative years, in which the foundations were laid for the company that would later become the home of King Crimson and ELP, the Wailers and Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno, Sandy Denny, Sparks, John Martyn, U2 and Grace Jones before Blackwell sold it to Polygram in 1989.

Comprehensively compiled and meticulously edited by Neil Storey, who worked in the label’s press office (and was more recently responsible for the Hidden Masters archive box sets devoted to Chris Wood and Jess Roden), the book’s large square format — handsomely designed by Jayne Gould — enables LP covers to be reproduced at their original size. The scale also allows the enormous amount of information to breathe amid the mass of photographs, press cuttings, record labels and other paraphernalia and ephemera, plus masses of oral history from figures both famous and unknown to the general public but significant to the way the label was run, all deployed to inform and entertain.

After Storey’s discursive and amusing introduction, it begins by describing Blackwell’s origins in Jamaica and the UK, including a Daily Mirror clipping from 1933 showing a picture of his mother on her way to Buckingham Palace be presented as a debutante to King George V and Queen Mary, and his own Harrow School house photo from 1954. Island’s first release, the cocktail pianist Lance Haywood’s At the Half Moon Hotel, Montego Bay, from 1959, is accompanied by quotes from Blackwell, the guitarist Ernest Ranglin, the drummer Clarence “Tootsie” Bear, and the daughter of the hotel’s director, who invited Blackwell — then a water-ski instructor — to listen to the trio performing in the lounge, an encounter on which history hinged.

That’s the degree of depth the reader can expect, whether the subject is Jackie Edwards, Millie Small, Traffic, Jimmy Cliff, Spooky Tooth and the nascent Fairport Convention or the American artists — Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Inez & Charlie Foxx, J. B. Lenoir, Billy Preston, Jimmy McGriff, the pre-Spector Righteous Brothers and Huey “Piano” Smith — released on the Sue label by Guy Stevens, the DJ at the Scene club in Ham Yard whose vision was recognised and given free rein by Blackwell, to the lasting benefit of me and many other ’60s teenagers.

The more obscure bands — Wynder K. Frog, Art, Nirvana, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble — are covered in full, as are the projects undertaken to pay the bills while providing a laugh along the way: That Affair (about the Christine Keeler scandal), Music to Strip By (with a lace G-string stuck on to the cover), For Adults Only (comedy) and Big Theo (Johnson)’s Bawdy British Ballads. The company’s first gold disc was apparently secured by Why Was He Born So Beautiful by the Jock Strapp Ensemble, the first of several volumes of rugby songs, at least one of which was recorded at Sound Techniques by the engineer John Wood, who would later record Nick Drake and the other Witchseason artists at the same Chelsea studio.

The making of all these is illuminated by the people who were there, not just the artists but those who were playing important roles in the background, whether by working in the Basing Street office — where everyone sat at round tables, erasing a sense of explicit hierarchy — or by going around the country selling the records, or simply by being Blackwell’s friends. How they all made it up as they went along, and how the founder encouraged and allowed it to happen, is an object lesson in human and cultural dynamics.

“I’m not a collector,” Blackwell says. “I was always looking forward.” Island maintained no real-time archive during his era (which, of course, made Storey’s task of research more demanding and almost certainly more entertaining). When I worked in A&R there, in the mid-’70s, someone told me one morning that the Richmond branch of the Blackwell-owned One Stop Records was closing that evening and that the basement contained a cache of the company’s old 45s. They were going to be chucked out and did I want to do something about them? Collectors had better close their eyes at the next bit: I drove straight down there, found boxes and boxes of mint Sue and white-label Island singles from the ’60s, sorted out two of each — one for the company, one for my office — and sent the rest to be melted down. I have no idea what happened to the ones I saved after I left in 1976. Everyone was looking forward, which is the right way to run a record company.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68, edited by Neil Storey, is published by Manchester University Press (£85).

Oct 24

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Nina & Monk, etc

If you happen to be in Paris this week, you might wander along to the little bookshop and gallery of Robert Delpire, tucked away on a street beside the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to see a small show of photographs taken by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater.

Nica, as she was known, took snapshots of many great jazz musicians during her encounters with them in the 1950s and ’60s. To them — the pianists Thelonious Monk and Barry Harris in particular, but many others, too — she was a friend, patron and benefactor, which means that her photographs, taken in dressing rooms and hotel rooms and kitchens, have a rare intimacy and candour.

The photo above, of Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone, is one of about a dozen of the original Polaroids framed and mounted on the walls of the gallery. Many more — of Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Pettiford, Billy Higgins, Paul Chambers and others — are included in a new book called Dans l’oeil de Nica (Through Nica’s Eye).

Her photos have the tonal richness and warmth characteristic of Polaroids. They were also badly stored for decades and are presented as found, many of them in a semi-distressed condition that inevitably enhances their romantic allure.

The new book is a follow-up to Three Wishes, published in English by Abrams Image in 2006, in which Nica’s photos were accompanied by the answers given to her by dozens of musicians when she asked them the question implied in the title. Many of them are very personal, others poignant, viz. Eric Dolphy: “1: To continue playing music all my life. 2: A home and a car in New York. That’s all!”

* The exhibition is at Delpire & Co, 13 Rue de l’Abbaye, Paris 6, until Saturday 28 October (Wed-Sat 12-6pm). Dans l’oeil de Nica is published by Buchet/Chastel (€44). Nica’s remarkable story is well told in The Baroness, a biography by her niece Hannah Rothschild, published by Virago in 2013.

Oct 22

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Kronos at 50

The Kronos Quartet were already well into their second decade when I saw them for the first time, sharing the bill with John Zorn’s Naked City at the Royalty Theatre in London in November 1988. They closed their set with Aarvo Pärt’s “Fratres”, whose hushed, prayer-like cadences were what stuck in my head, and are still there. But they’d become famous for daring to introduce the compositions of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and Jimi Hendrix to the format, and for making it clear that they’d be treating those works with the seriousness, rigour and spirit of inquiry that others applied to the standard Beethoven-to-Bartók string quartet repertoire.

Last night at the Barbican, during a year-long tour to mark the 50th anniversary of their creation in San Francisco by the violinist David Harrington, “Purple Haze” was their encore: a shout of joy to celebrate their longevity and the continued relevance of their founding ideal. Harrington and his fellow violinist John Sherba, Hank Dutt on viola and Paul Wiancko, the latest recruit to the cello seat filled so long and so brilliantly by Joan Jeanrenaud, worked their way through a dozen pieces, divided into two sets, coming as close to a career summary as would be possible in two hours for an organisation that, in its lifetime, has commissioned more than a thousand works.

Two guest artists appeared, both on pieces specially written for the quartet: the Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini to deliver the swooping, chattering vocal lead on her “Maduswara” and the London-born djembe player Yahael Camara Onono to add percussive momentum to Dumisani Maraire’s “Mother Nozipo”. There were reminders of Kronos’s early days in the performance of works by three Americans commonly, if misleadingly, called minimalists: Philip Glass with a piece from the Mishima soundtrack, Steve Reich’s dense and fast-flowing “Triple Quartet”, and Terry Riley with “Lunch in Chinatown”, a light-hearted extract from a new suite featuring the members of the group chatting as if ordering a meal in a restaurant.

For me, the moments of seriousness were the most powerful. The ethereal “God-music” from George Crumb’s Black Angels featured Wiancka coaxing fragile melodies built out of harmonics from his cello while Harrington, Sherba and Dutt each bowed a table full of wine glasses. Dutt took the lead on Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Antonio Haskell’s “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away”, a setting of a gospel song recorded in 1938 by Mahalia Jackson. This directly followed an excerpt from Zachary James Walker’s Peace Be Still, played against projection of newsreel footage from the Alabama civil rights marches in 1965 and the words of Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King Jr’s lawyer and adviser. Jones had helped draft the “I have a dream” speech given at the March on Washington in 1963 — which only took its final form during the speech itself, when Mahalia implored King to break away from his prepared script and tell the crowd of more than 250,000 about his dream.

And then there was their arrangement of Alfred Schnittke’s “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief”, which they recorded in 1997, a year before the composer’s death: its skeins of muted melodies and modal harmonic underpinning settled on the hall like a pale but gently glowing mist, much as I remember “Fratres” doing 35 years ago.

Oct 19

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Carla Bley 1936-2023

Carla Bley during one of the recording sessions for ‘Escalator Over the Hill’

It seems so true to Carla Bley’s nature, such a characteristically mordant mixture of the sad and the funny, that her last album should have been called Life Goes On. Carla, who was one of jazz’s greatest composers and arrangers, died this week, aged 87. The four pieces recorded in 2019 and making up the short suite that gave the album its name are titled as follows: “Life Goes On” / “On” / “And On” / “And Then One Day”.

And then one day Carla was gone, her death making us think of the music she leaves behind, all of it suffused by her unique personality. In my case, I’m most grateful for the five studio albums she made Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, starting in 1970 with its eponymous debut album, continuing with Ballad for the Fallen (1983), Dream Keeper (1990) and Not in Our Name (2005), and ending with Time/Life in 2016, all of them keeping the precious flame of resistance alight. Carla had grown up listening to her father play the organ in church, and the LMO often brought out her wonderful way of orchestrating hymns and anthems, from Hanns Eisler’s “Song of the United Front” to “Nkosi Sikelel’i Afrika” and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio”, acknowledging the beauty of their aspirations while spiking that beauty with the knowledge of human frailty.

And then there is Escalator Over the Hill, the triple vinyl LP box set released in 1971, the crazily ambitious and magnificently enigmatic “chronotransduction” on with she collaborated with the poet Paul Haines, enlisting a huge cast, perhaps the most extraordinary ever assembled for a single composition. The performers went from Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd and Gato Barbieri through Jack Bruce, Paul Jones and John McLaughlin to Viva, Linda Ronstadt and her own four-year-old daughter Karen, recorded against the odds over a long period of time in several locations, using several levels of technology, subsidised by money begged and borrowed to complete it before its release on JCOA Records, the independent label set up with her then husband, the trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler.

In my copy of Escalator there’s a five-page letter written by Carla to me on yellow legal-pad paper in pencil — “We’re up at our farm in Maine for a rest and we don’t even have running water and electricity, much less typewriters and stationery” — early in 1972, soon after its release. She’d heard from Jack Bruce that the Melody Maker had made it jazz album of the year, or something like that, and she wanted to tell me about how it was now being distributed in the UK as part of a reciprocal arrangement with the saxophonist Evan Parker and the Incus label. Within months she and Mantler would set up the New Music Distribution Service, whose initial foreign partners included Incus and ECM, and which lasted until 1990, having helped disseminate the music of Laurie Anderson, Julius Hemphill, John Adams, David Murray, John Zorn and many others.

The letter is a reminder of Carla’s persistence in championing not just the value of creativity but the rights of the creator and the right to be heard. Others will write about how, as a teenager, she hitched a lift from California to New York to hear Miles Davis and took a job as a cigarette girl at Birdland, and about the enduring qualities of songs like “Sing Me Softly of the Blues”, “Vashkar”, “Ida Lupino” and “Lawns”, and how A Genuine Tong Funeral, the suite she wrote for Gary Burton in 1967, represented the first full exposure of her gifts as well as her sense of humour, beginning as it did with a sequence titled “The End”.

I last saw her at the Cadogan Hall in 2016, an almost spectral figure in black at the side of the stage, sitting down at the piano but also standing to listen as her music was played by the members of the Liberation Music Orchestra during the London Jazz Festival, two years after Charlie Haden’s death. It filled the audience’s hearts and moved me to tears, as she could.

Oct 16

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Terry Riley in Japan

In the early weeks of 2020, at the outset of a world tour, Terry Riley was in Japan when the Covid-19 epidemic began. The tour was cancelled. He was 85 years old, and his wife — the mother of their three children — had died five years earlier. In his words: “As I had no particular place to go, I decided to stay for a while.” He’s still there.

Before long he was recording in a friend’s studio. That’s not unexpected. What might be surprising is the nature of the resulting album, which consists mostly of solo piano interpretations of Broadway songs with a couple of original pieces, one of them featuring a synthesiser.

Before he became celebrated as the composer of In C, A Rainbow in Curved Air, Cadenza on the Night Plain and Salome Dances for Peace, and as the creator of beguiling extended organ improvisations given titles like Persian Surgery Dervishes and Shri Camel, Riley played the piano in San Francisco bars. When I was writing the book from which this blog takes its name, I talked to him about his experience of visiting the city’s jazz clubs — particularly the Blackhawk — to hear Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Jazz was an important part of his own evolving music. The nature of this new album, he says in the sleeve note, was suggested by friends and family members who had heard him warming up for his solo concerts by improvising on standards.

The album, called STANDARDSAND: Kobuchizawa Sessions #1, begins with “Isn’t It Romantic”, “Blue Room” and “The Best Thing for You (Would Be Me)”. These all very poised and charming mainstream-modern treatments of well known items from the American Songbook. Riley’s touch is sure, his conception that of a somewhat less introspective Bill Evans but his lines nevertheless probing and sometimes surprising. In particular, “Blue Room” is beautifully interpreted. Then comes “Round Midnight”, in which he treats Monk’s great ballad with proper respect and evident fondness while discreetly finding one or two little extensions and decorations that perhaps no one has thought of before among the many thousands of versions of a tune currently celebrating its 80th anniversary.

“Ballad for Sara and Tadashi”, a discursive original, is given in two versions. The first is for solo piano, and follows seamlessly on from the standards. After a six-minute piece for synthesiser titled “Pasha Rag”, which works its way towards a light-hearted reminder that ragtime piano was among Riley’s early accomplishments, “Ballad of Sara and Tadashi” returns with the synth adding an electro shadow-texture to his pensive melodic lines.

There’s a return to Broadway with “Yesterday”, eight minutes of variations on Jerome Kern’s melody swimming in some sort of light electronic reverb against synth backwashes, and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “It Could Happen to You”, the tolling of isolated chords introducing an unadorned treatment somewhere between pensive and sombre, and for me the most satisfying thing here. The album ends with a 43-second miniature in which voices apparently singing some sort of ritual chant fading in and out before they’ve even had time to register properly. A little jeu d’ésprit, maybe, to close one of the more surprising additions to the long and varied discography of one of the most extraordinary musicians of our times.

* Terry Riley’s STANDARDSAND: Kobuchizawa Sessions #1 is released in Japan on Star/Rainbow Records. The uncredited photograph is from the booklet with the album.

Oct 13

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The Isleys’ folk-rock moment

Dress me up for battle when all I want is peace / Those of us who pay the price come home with the least…

The news of Rudolph Isley’s death took me back to a particularly cherished period in the Isley Brothers’ long history: the time between 1971 and 1976 when they found an effective way of bringing Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter music into their world of gospel, soul and R&B.

After putting the commercially disappointing Motown years behind them and scoring a huge hit in 1969 on their own label, T-Neck, with the funky “It’s Your Thing”, the three of them — Ronald, Rudolph and O’Kelly — posed for the cover of the 1971 album Givin’ It Back in sepia tones and casual dress with acoustic guitars. The album included Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”, a conga-driven version of Stephen Stills’ “Love The One You’re With”, James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Neil Young’s “Ohio”. With their next album, Brother, Brother, Brother in 1972, they covered three songs from Carole King’s Southern California period, including a perfectly paced 10-minute version of “It’s Too Late”. The cover of that album was a bleached-out black and white triple portrait, like a Black Panthers pamphlet.

The secret behind this new direction for a veteran group was the arrival of three younger members. Ernie and Marvin Isley on guitar and bass guitar and Chris Jasper on keyboards brought with them new sounds and new attitudes. In 1973 this realignment was made explicit in the title of the group’s first album under a new deal with Columbia Records: 3+3 was one of the best albums of the decade, full of wonderful tracks, including a couple of original compositions, “If You Were There” and “What It Comes Down To”, that showed how their writing had been positively influenced by the borrowed material and how far their arrangements had moved from standard R&B moves.

The cover picture may have been back in full high-styled Soul Men mode, which perhaps betrayed an uncertainty about the response from their established following, but musically the album persisted with their new direction and contained their masterpiece from this period. “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” was a decent song when James Taylor recorded it on his fourth solo album, One Man Dog, in 1971. In the Isleys’ hands it took on a new dimension.

The opening three seconds alone are magical: Ernie’s acoustic guitar figure, Marvin’s bass, Jasper’s piano and George Morland’s drums are like an indrawn breath, gently tipping Brother Ronald into the opening line. “Do me wrong, do me right, baby / Tell me lies, but hold me tight.” The vocal delivery is exquisite, every phrase subtly teased and inflected, bringing all the arts of the Baptist church-trained soul singer to bear on the task of creating emotional torment, without for a moment overdoing it. The rhythm section remain focused on their task of providing one of the greatest singers of his type with a platform of impeccable steadiness and infinite sensitivity.

All that — and an almost equally stunning version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me” on Live It Up in 1973 — would lead in 1976 to “Harvest for the World”, their own composition, a thoughtful and carefully crafted protest song in which all these resources are brought to bear: the gentle but resilient strummed acoustic guitar, the chorded acoustic piano, the supple bass underpinning, the handclaps on the backbeat and the shrewdly timed tom-tom turnarounds, deployed with a gentle restraint and a quiet grace that strengthen the song’s impact. The two lines quoted at the top show how the message of a good anti-war song can pass from one generation to the next, always sadly relevant.

Oct 7

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Sly Stone’s testament

On Thursday, September 3, 1970, a few days after Sly and the Family Stone had appeared at the Isle of Wight festival, I had an appointment to interview him for the Melody Maker at the Londonderry House Hotel on Park Lane. He blew me out, and the appointment was rearranged.

I turned up again at the hotel promptly at 6.30pm on Monday, September 14. I was shown up to his suite and invited to take a seat in the drawing room, where I could wait for him to emerge. Then I was left alone.

The door to the bedroom was ajar. From inside I could hear the sounds of what sounded like two people. They were intimate sounds. Giggling. Gasping. Other noises. It was hard to know whether someone was putting on a show for my benefit, but I chose to assume it wasn’t an invitation to join in.

So I stayed in my chair and waited. The sounds continued. No one emerged. After what may have been 15 or 20 minutes, I gave up and left, without an interview. Two nights later I saw Sly and his band give a performance at the Lyceum that started late and lasted barely an hour but in the end comfortably overcame the handicap of a very poor PA system.

What had been going on? There’s a clue in Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin), Sly’s new autobiography. Writing about that visit to London, he mentions meeting up with Ginger Baker. “Ginger showed off some high-quality coke, pharmaceutical grade, and then he mentioned a big party that night where Jimi Hendrix would be. He had an idea of sharing the coke with Jimi, only the best for the best. I was eager to see Jimi. We were scheduled to have a jam session the night before, or maybe that night, but Jimi had gone to Ronnie Scott’s instead to jam with Eric Burdon and War. And Jimi wasn’t at the party either. ‘We’ll catch him tomorrow,’ someone said. As it turns out, there was no tomorrow, at least for Jimi.”

Most drug-related deaths of stars who came up in the ’60s happened fast, their lives ending while they were still shockingly young. By contrast, Sly’s happened in slow motion, killing first his concentration and then his creativity, and of course it isn’t over yet.

Now he’s 80, apparently freed from his long-term crack addiction and seemingly in good enough shape to have given a co-writer, Ben Greenman, the material from which to fashion a ghosted autobiography. I read it without, I’m afraid, much enthusiasm. You may feel differently about the blurred, indistinct story of a man whose most characteristic utterance, at least as far as the specificity of the narrative is concerned, is “I heard about it later, but it was too late.”

He was, of course, a genius. If you were around in 1967, you’ll know that “Dance to the Music” proposed nothing less than a new kind of pop music. The only other record of that year which brought black and white into such fruitful creative miscegenation was “Purple Haze”. Out of those two records came an entire universe. With another hit single, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”, Sly kicked funk up a gear. And There’s a Riot Goin’ On, in all its self-indulgence, is one of the key documents of the early ’70s. Nothing quite chills the blood like that rusted-out voice opening a No. 1 single with “One child grows up to be / Somebody that just loves to learn / Another child grows up to be / Somebody you’d just love to burn.”

So it made me sad to read this book, a chronicle of waste and unreliability. What might Sly Stone have achieved, had he grow out of his addictions much earlier in the way that, say, John Coltrane did? Some will respond that what he achieved was enough, that he could only do those things by being himself, and maybe that’s right. Many of those people will no doubt enjoy what he has to say, and I wouldn’t want to put them off.

His ghostwriter has clearly mined the cuttings file in order to provide the detail. That makes reading it an uneven experience, as passages of woozy semi-recall concerning family feuds or disputes with managers and record companies are suddenly interrupted by something curiously precise, whose source might be a TV interview preserved on YouTube. Sadly, my experience of failing to interview him means that I can’t tell you whether Greenman has found a way, as a good ghost should, to translate Sly’s authentic voice on to the page. But in the end I didn’t feel I’d been told anything surprising. It’s the book of the guy who, one September evening in 1970, wouldn’t come out of his bedroom.

* Sly Stone’s Thank You (Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin) is published in the UK by White Rabbit on 17 October.

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