Dr Simon Reads...

What happens if you pipe Machito’s Kenya via Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool? You get this, some seriously laid-back Latin jazz that, to be frank, sounds like hold music. Think Girl From Ipanema, then smooth it out some more and make it an ins trumental.   Not really my thing, with super-chill Latin r h ythms and be-bop type sax played over the top of it. Okay to let it wash over you, but not something I’d choose to listen to, and had I died and never heard this album I could probably cope with the other 1000 on the list.  

Oddly this is the first full-on 12-bar blues music in this list (and not simply something blues-adjacent like Elvis). Maybe because Dime ry starts his list in 1955 and thus leapfrogs the early blues pioneers like Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, even Howlin’ Wolf to some extent.    This is, however, another live recording from Newport Jazz Festival (showing how wide the definition of jazz can be pushed). Both of the live albums from Newport have involved audience fights. Not something I’d really associate with jazz, but different times I guess.   I don't have much to say about the album itself. Some blues standards here, and the thing with 12-bar blues is that you tend to know where a song is going. Waters straddles the divide between the old, raw, scratchy recordings of early bluesmen, and the later updated white blues of the likes of John Mayall, and in that respect it's a little of an unremarkable middle child, even though it isn't.

There’s no mistaking Baez’s distinctive soprano (although at times on this recording she belted out notes so high and loud it made the whole ear-bud experience a bit of an exercise in endurance).   Baez is known as both a folk singer and activist, although on this album she’s entirely in folk, rather than protest song, mode, covering what I think are mostly traditional songs. Notable is Silver Dagger, which tells t he story given by The Louvin Brothers in Katy Dear from the woman’s point of view. Baez’s version is truncated. All we get are the first few verses that tell of the mother advising her daughter not to run off with the man, and how her father has a “chain” of broken hearts. We leave off the bit where the father hunts down and kills the suitor and are left to surmise that perhaps in this telling the young girl heeds the advice of her mother (and thus the body count is significantly lower).   There’s yet another version of House of the Rising Sun as well, which still...

Here’s another time when I don’t quite understand Dimery ’s choice of album, one of the perils of doing this without reading the associated blurb. I think, perhaps, it’s as a part of musical progression. The Everly’s musically form a bridge, in style, between The Crickets and The Beatles (sidestepping having an insect-based name).  And oddly enoug h the Spotify auto-play decided to take me to Buddy Holly next, so I feel vindicated by The Algorithm (All Hail).   There are a couple of their famous songs – Love Hurts and Cathy’s Clown, the rest haven’t found traction but are all pretty good (there’s a cover of Little Richard’s Lucille ). The Everlys are a mix of rock ‘n’ roll with close harmony and more poppy overtones – apparently this is noted as a seminal stage of country rock , which, I suppose I can see that. The close harmony singing is reminiscent of the Louvin Brothers and there’s some twangy steel guitar stuff going on – I'd call them more pop than rock, and not tre...

More jazz. I don’t know what this sub-genre is. It’s very free and laid back, with Evans playing piano accompanied by bass and drums. Or, well, actually each of the trio accompany the other, shifting around in focus and taking turns to take centre stage.    Evans played piano on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. And there’s a tragic story to this album as the bassist, Scott LaFaro , was killed in a car accident just a few days after. Evans didn’t play again for months. So, for that, if you like jazz, I can see how this is an important work for more than just the music.   For me, it’s a little too much in the weeds of laid back, stripped down, free and loose jazz to really float my boat, but it was quite good to listen to while I worked on other things. The album also feature alternative takes to some of the tracks which is an intere sting compare and contrast exercise.    Doesn't he look a little like Eugene Levy on that cover, or is that just me?

I came across Miriam Makeba after hearing Pato Pato on the radio and loving it, but to my shame didn’t really check out the rest of her catalogue, apart from “The Click Song” (which really ought to be called Qongqothwane although Makeba wryly acknowledges that Westerners have difficulty with the distinctinctive sounds of the Xhosa langauage .   Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa”, helped bring (South) African music to Western attention over 20 years before Paul Simon will team up with Ladysmith Black Mambazo , singing in Xhosa and a variety of other African languages, and occasionally English. Escaping Apartheid, she lived essentially as an exile in the USA, unable even to attend her own mother’s funeral. I’m glad she lived to see the end of that era at least, must have felt some kind of vindication . Oh, and she had a long collaboration with her mentor Harry Belafonte.   The album overall is a great mix of traditional songs with some jazzy, bluesy elements including a cover...

Elvis is Back . Yay! B ut where has he been? In the army, that’s where, doing a tour of duty in Germany. And it’s a much more mature and assured sound compared to the debut album. Although the overall styling is rock and roll, there are elements of do-wop, rockabilly, r hythm and blues, even a bit of atonal jazz elements in Dirty, Dirty Nights.    Both Presley’s voice and the production are richer than before, with more range and depth. For all that, it’s surprising that this was not critically well received on release, with critics calling it boring. There a ren’t many songs on here that a non-Elvis fan is likely to have encountered at some point, apart from perhaps Such a Night, or the pop-rock do-wop ballad My Best Friend’s Girl , which in some ways is to its benefit; it’s not just the same old Elvis songs we’ve all heard a million times before . Presley even does a moody cover of Peggy Lee’s Fever . Yeah, I liked this one.   If my stats are to believed, it looks lik...

D imer y gives us a mammoth to finish the Fifties with – the streaming version is three hours long and listed as six “ disc s ”, although the Wikipedia entry for this album is limited to four discs, and the last one is Nelson Riddle rather than Ella Fitzgerald.   Plus, we return to where we started. Smooth vocal stylings of Great American Songbook tunes to a Nelson Riddle big band backdrop. Although here I think Fitzgerald (a) has an easier voice than Sinatra to listen to and (b) a t least here she mixes up fast and slow tunes s o we don’t get the relentless sadness of In The Wee Small Hours. Plus, since these are George and Ira Ger shwin tunes, the lyrics are always clever.    Not to take away from Fitzgerald, but it’s a shame that the decade ends how it began. The jazz albums show a progress in music, and perhaps there’s a sense of the blending of folk and country into rock ‘n’ roll, but otherwise it feels more like the 1950s laid the groundwork for later innovat...

Still going strong with the jazz recommendations. And surely every man and his dog has heard “Take Five”, which seems to have been used as part of themes and incidental music since, well, since 1959 probably.   Brubeck’s style is “cool” jazz, but this album is notable for playing with unusual time signatures (the 5/4 of Take Five for example), as well as punning in the titles. I see what you did with the album title too, Dave.    T here are some great, interesting, tracks on here – the famous Take Five, for one, and Blue Rondo a la Turk, and Kathy’s Waltz (which isn’t a waltz until the end). Others feel less innovative – Three To Get Ready sounds like a re tread of Take Five, pretty much, but without the clear clarinet hook or the central drum break. Overall though it’s pretty good.  

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information. I’m jumping back in time here. The next author should be Fred Saberhagen, but I missed Sterling Lanier before because I couldn’t find him. Now I have, so here I’m filling in a gap. I’ll be back to the regular order next time, with Saberhagen. Stirling Lanier Stirling E Lanier was born 1927 in New York, died 2007 in Florida, and in between he studied anthropology and archaeology at Harvard. He is best known for having championed the publication of Frank Herbert’s Dune, as well as an author and a sculptor – apparently he made some figurines of the Lord of the Rings characters and sent some to Tolkien, who liked them but didn’t want to commercialise ...