Monthly Archives: February 2016

“It’s funny how the universe forces you to develop as a person and learn. Keeping you interested(ing).”

“It’s possibly why I started a vinyl collection and why it came pretty easy to get it started. It wasn’t because my parents had an extensive hand-me-down collection in the garage filled with records. In fact, my parents were hardly music fans up until my brother Charlie and I showed interest. CDs had become a mainstay and the standard music listening platform. Along with Napster and Limewire, downloading David Bowie’s discography was a quick “Wam Bam Thank You Ma’am” away. All of which is why it’s so odd that at 10 years old, I had a bigger collection than someone’s Grandpa.

Living in Los Angeles it’s only fitting that it started at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. My Dad had taken Charlie and I to the huge vinyl, video, and CD store off Sunset Boulevard. Not for music I add—he was looking for the 1979 film The Warriors on DVD. After rummaging through a bunch of vinyl, CDs and videos, there was one thing I really wanted, even though I had already downloaded it free, it was the size and grasp of that Gorillaz record on vinyl that was calling my name! I needed to have it! That vinyl was a trophy! A trophy for knowing all of the words to every song on that record.

In my mind it never clicked that it was a vinyl record, because all I cared about was how cool it would look in my room, and how it probably came with a poster and a big lyric sheet. After convincing my Dad that I needed it, he decided he would buy it for me.

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Ennio Morricone’s credits span far beyond the role of film composer, touching upon pop-song arrangement and avant-garde free improvisation. But it’s indeed his scores for the movies, now totaling deep into the hundreds, which have brought him his highest acclaim; if one desires to absorb the possibilities of cinematic composition as art, engagement with Morricone’s oeuvre is a prerequisite, and that one would not err in choosing the soundtrack to The Hateful Eight is testament to his greatness. It’s out now in a splendid 2LP gatefold edition exclusively through Third Man; folks in Nashville and Detroit can scoop up the ludicrously elaborate box set.

The critical response to The Hateful Eight, the final entry in Quentin Tarantino’s bloodily ambitious historical trilogy following Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, has been fairly wide-ranging; one area of general consensus is Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack, his first for Hollywood since 2002’s Ripley’s Game. It’s already won a Golden Globe and will be competing for Best Original Score in this year’s Academy Awards, where many have it favored; improbably (though not really), the composer’s never won an Oscar.

Morricone’s finished work eschews the twang-filled atmosphere of his defining contributions to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone in favor of the darker environments of his giallo and horror scores, particularly his collaboration with John Carpenter on his classic The Thing, of which three themes were reused for The Hateful Eight.

“Eternity,” “Bestiality,” and “Despair” surface alongside “Regan’s Theme (Floating Sound)” from John Boorman’s wonderfully wacko Exorcist II: The Heretic, though none are on the soundtrack. As Tarantino borrowed Morricone’s stuff on all of his films since and including both halves of the Kill Bill saga, the reuse of extant material falls squarely into place.

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“The first vinyl record I ever bought was Kinda Blue at a thrift store in San Luis Obispo on a weekend getaway with friends. I didn’t own record player at the time, but Miles Davis had become one of my undisputed music heroes and the contemplative cover portrait of him mid melody just pulled me in.”

“I took it home under my arm and thus began my late long love affair with vinyl. I say late because I was in my late 20s. I grew up in a musical household, thanks in big part to my mother, Carmen. She would always be singing in the kitchen to the Bee Gees or an old bolero. She also played guitar and would wake my sisters and me with a serenade of “Las Mañanitas” on our birthdays. You could say mom was my first music programmer. She showed me The Beatles, Doo-wop, and Motown, but she had abandoned the record player of her day for the convenience of the digital era.

My mom’s brother, my uncle Abel, had a record collection that I would dare to thumb thru everyone once in a while but they seemed so antiquated and crude, I didn’t it. I thought they were more for nostalgia than anything else. When I was old enough to buy my own music it was cassette tapes. One of the first being Kriss Kross. (A purchase which I wholly stand behind, by the way.)

In high school it was 50 page CD jackets full of every album you love, riding around with you in the car with your friends. Not to be outdone by the iPod, which changed everything. Or so I thought.

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The history of jazz is dominated by events transpiring in New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, California, and of course New York, but all the while the music was thriving elsewhere in a variety of styles. As evidence one need only inspect the outstanding new compilation The Boston Creative Jazz Scene 1970-1983; collective improvisation, full-bodied fusion, post-Fire Music free wailing, consciousness raising spoken word, and advanced composition for large ensembles all helped shape the scene. It offers an exhaustive amount of info in an 80-page book, and is available now on 2LP and CD from Cultures of Soul.

Many thousands undertook the migration to well-ensconced cultural centers in hopes of adding to the jazz discourse and achieving something immortal; a few did, the vast majority did not, and yet their accumulated sonic narrative is still a formidably mountainous accumulation of sound. A percentage of those in the early navigation stages of the established jazz canon might find Cultures of Soul’s latest compilation a daunting item to be soaked up only after contending with a few hundred records of higher profile.

This is a questionable approach. For starters, the canon isn’t going anywhere, and The Boston Creative Jazz Scene 1970-1983’s standard of quality is likely to get absorbed into the annals of important jazz recordings anyway. Furthermore, Mark Harvey’s extensive notes do a fine job of illuminating the specifics of the city’s jazz environs (particularly venues and educational avenues) and relating them to the East Coast and Midwest scenes while providing background into the larger avant-garde and pinpointing a succession of noteworthy Boston players in the style.

Admittedly a wide field, Harvey details the early Boston avant motions of pianist Cecil Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Makanda Ken McIntyre, moves into groundbreaking work of pianists Lowell Davidson and Ran Blake (both of whom cut albums for ESP-Disk in 1965), bassist John Voigt (sessions with guitarist Joe Morris, saxophonist Jameel Moondoc and more), and The Fringe, a trio formed in the early ‘70s comprised of saxophonist George Garzone, bassist Rich Appleman, and drummer Bob Gullotti (their self-titled debut emerged in 1978).

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“My father was a musician growing up and he had accumulated a healthy record collection, but as a younger child of the ’90s I was caught in that strange time when CDs were so new and beautiful.”

“To my parents the thought of no longer dealing with warped vinyl, large audio units, and broken needles was a sweet sigh of relief. Because of this I was unaware of the amazing music that sat waiting for me in my dad’s attic. It wasn’t until years later that we brushed off the dusty late ’70s silver turntable that I was then introduced to the ritual of listening to a record.

I’m pretty sure that my first experience was the Jackson 5. I remember thinking the sound was so completely foreign to me. Because those early records were recorded all live, imperfections and human error were so apparent. I had this feeling of being in the room with the artist and it definitely left a serious impact on the way I approach music and writing today. That’s why in Blacktop Queen we record everything live, no click, with one or two takes. We are trying to recapture that magic that these precious recordings had.

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Well, there goes another theory shot to shit. I always thought Genesis hit the aesthetic skids the moment Peter Gabriel split and drummer Phil “The Anti-Christ” Collins took over on lead vocals, but I’ve been listening to 1976’s Trick of the Tail, the first post-Gabriel LP, and I’m afraid I was sadly mistaken. Trick of the Tail is not a great album but it’s a very good one, packed with well-constructed tunes with lovely melodies that occasionally, but not too often, stray into the prog trap of technical virtuosity purely for virtuosity’s sake.

Peter Gabriel’s departure threw Genesis’ future into question. A Melody Maker writer went so far as to declare Genesis officially dead. But the band committed itself to proving it could make good music without Gabriel, and after a fruitless search for a new lead vocalist Collins, who wanted to turn Genesis into an instrumental act, reluctantly agreed to take on the vocal duties himself. Which in hindsight seems like a no-brainer, as Collins is a virtual vocal doppelganger for Gabriel and the obvious candidate as a replacement.

Album opener “Dance on a Volcano” has muscle and a fetching melody, to say nothing of some powerhouse drumming by Collins, whose exhortations (“Better start doing it right!”) sound convincing. There is some technical showing off for its own sake, especially at the end, but this one is more hard rock than prog, thanks to Steve Hackett’s guitar work and Tony Banks’ synthesizer. “Entangled” is a bit fey for my tastes, a quiet little pretty ditty, but it wins me over with its melody, which is simply lovely. There’s a beautiful synthesizer solo, which doesn’t attempt to mime classical tropes the way your more virulent and dangerous progmeisters would, and I like it for that.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Vincent Colbert – Beth (Hold On)
Wanderwild – Optimist
Jon Patrick Walker – Hideous Monster
Gazebos – Just Get High
The Black Watch – Pershing / Harvard Square
Sea Caves – Spanning the River
Gladiola – The Uninvited Guest
Suntrodden – It’s Never Over

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Joy Crookes – New Manhattan

Sharks In The Deep End – Shadows In The Sunset
Chris Storrow – A True Christian
Badlands – Echo
Andrew Grant – Slow Burn
Mangoseed – Lucy
Du Tonc – Little Bird (Du Tonc Rework)
Database – PressPlay Mix
Neuman – Scarface (You Need People Like Me)