Betty Carter: “Naima’s Love Song” (1996)
There were singers too, and not all of them strictly jazz singers: two albums of Betty Carter; Kurt Weill music sung by Helen Schneider (pretty good) and Ute Lemper (good but not a lot of lightness); Mireille Matthieu’s Chante Piaf (1994); Wesla Whitfield (better in person than on record); Andrea Marcovicci (ditto); Mary Ann Moore and Mary Cleere Haren (Moore okay, Haren better than okay but neither album a knockout); a couple albums by Nanci Griffith, one of my longtime favorites.
Our first and second (of eight so far) Jimmy Scott albums. (1996’s Heaven was the first.) In his last years, Scott may have been the best jazz singer alive. Betty Carter would be his feminine analogue.
Judy Henske’s 1999 Loose in the World. Crime writer Andrew Vachss wrote of her: “If Linda Ronstadt’s a torch singer, Henske’s a flame thrower.”
A couple of Sheila Jordan albums. Some more Shirley Horn. Lots of Susannah McCorkle, whom Esther saw live but I didn’t during her year in New York. Maureen McGovern, whom we both saw. Blossom Dearie, whom Esther saw and I didn’t. Ann Hampton Calloway, whom we both saw live in Modesto, in a house with almost no one else in it. Cassandra Wilson.
Cirque du Soleil, “Let Me Fall,” Quidam, 1996. We saw this show in San Jose on a magical evening when Jeremy was visiting. We made a last-minute decision to go and ended up in restricted vision seating, behind a supporting pole directly in front of my seat. (Who cared?)
Billy Bragg: “Sexuality” (1991)
My first and only Billy Bragg album. He sang “Sexuality” on it. Great song, but the rest of the (double) album was less so.
A radio broadcast from the ’50s of bandleader Hylo Brown, bluegrass before the era of either Bill Monroe or Flatt and Scruggs.
Bobby “Blue” Bland: “She’s Putting Something in My Food” (1991)
Charlie Musselwhite: “The Blues Overtook Me”
As to blues albums, the sale was a gold mine. Nobody but me wanted blues albums so I got to sample Albert Collins, Live in Japan, 1994; bought my my first and second Bobby “Blue” Bland albums, Here We Go Again (1990) and Portrait of the Blues (1991), with classics on them like “Recess in Heaven” and “She’s Putting Something in My Food” (why else would I suddenly care about a woman like I did about her?); New Orleans-based pianist-singer Katie Webster; my first two albums by harmonica whiz-guitarist-vocalist Charlie Musselwhite (whom I heard live in Modesto); blues legend Buddy Guy; ditto, Koko Taylor, Magic Sam, Hound Dog Taylor; my first two Etta James albums, one blues and the other a recreation of Billie Holiday ballads; Eddie Kirkland, Professor Longhair, Shemekia Copeland; and samplers galore with artists I’d never heard of before, like Henry Quails singing “Squirrel Sandwich”; my first of several albums by Delta blues star R. L. Burnside. Les Nubians, Princesses Nubiennes (Jeremy gave me that one!). Sleepy LaBeef, albums one and two. The Big Doowopper. Solomon Burke. Steve Ray Vaughan (my brother gave me that one).
Ron Carter with MC Solaar: “Un ange en danger” (1994)
Spearhead with Michael Franti: “Positive” (1994)
Jeremy loaned me a Public Enemy album and I liked it but but it was at the CD sale that I actually dipped my own toes into hip hop and rap, though not deep and not for long. It left me with a taste for two artists, the French-Sengalese rapper MC Solaar and San Francisco’s Michael Franti and his group, Spearhead. I heard both of them first on the sampler, Stolen Moments: Jazz Red Hot + Cool (1994), an album to benefit AIDS research, which joined rappers with jazz musicians like Donald Byrd, Ron Carter, Don Cherry, Lester Bowie, Ramsey Lewis, Branford Marsalis. Bassist Carter and rapper MC Solaar’s joined forces on “Un Ange en Danger.” Spearhead’s “Positive,” about a young man waiting for the results of his blood test to find out if he’s HIV positive, was great music. I dug the Pharcyde’s “Rubber Song” too.
Hank Jones & Cheech Tidiane-Seck & the Malinkas: “Walibi Ya,” from Sarala
When I went to the hospital for an operation so gross I won’t discuss it here, Esther gave me Sarala, jazz pianist Hank Jones’s collaboration with African musicians like Mali’s Cheech Tidiane-Seck and the Malinkas.
Oumou Sangare: “Moussolou” (1989)
I picked up two albums by Oumou Sangare, the Malinese diva. (I just –last week- got her latest album, Mogoya, from 2017, along with an album by Orchestra Baobab, one of the most important Senegalese groups of the 1970s through 90s, and a few years back, I picked up everything I could find by the great Ethiopian sax player, Getatchew Mekuria. While I was at it, I picked up an album by The Ex, the Dutch anarchist-Dadaist-rock-funk-jazz combo that backed Mekuria on his concert tour of Europe, for which avant garde saxophonist Ken Vandermark wrote band arrangements. The more you listen to music, the more it spreads wings to outlying musics.)
I found a lovely album of music by a West Coast mandolin player named Rudy Cipolla who lived to the age of 99 and a quarter, played in all sorts of bands and for movies, and wrote really interesting half-pop, half-classical compositions for mandolin. “Rudy’s Theme” reminds me of the theme music for Stanley Tucci’s film, Big Night (1996), which I love.
I found a Lyle Lovett album or two; albums by Cheryl Wheeler and Katie Webster, both kind-of but not wholly C&W, Cheryl more in the vein of indie star Cris Williamson, whom Esther loves. (I didn’t hear Williamson but I did get to hear her sometime partner Tret Fure in concert in Hamilton, NY. Williamson’s 1971 The Changer and the Changed is classic. Good music doesn’t age.)
An album by the Klezmatics, backing Israeli singer-poet Chava Alberstein. Itzhak Perlman: Klezmer in the Fiddler’s House (1995).
Albita: “Corazon Adentro” (2000)
Trio da Paz. Gilberto Gil. Mario Bauza. Barbarito Torres. Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo. The Cuban singer Albita: Son (2000).
Brazilian composer Marlui Miranda’s indigenous mass, 2 Ihu Kewere: Rezar.
Ivo Papasov: “Mladeshki Dance”
Ivo Papasov, king of Bulgarian wedding music, played clarinet over an electrified, guitar, drum and accordion-driven background of sound. Then there was Yuri Yaakov, his disciple and a wicked sax player. (In the 2000s, I would discover Taraf de Haddocks, the predominantly but not exclusively Romanian gypsy band.)
About this time, Jeremy introduced us to Huun Hur Tuu and Tuvan (outer Mongolian) throat singing. (I picked up an album this spring by a vocal ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, who combine traditional classic techniques of sound production with methods like Tuvan and Eskimo throat singing and other world music vocal techniques. Merrill Garber of the tUnEyArDs writes for them.)
Two albums that blew my mind featured the Kronos Quartet. One was Steve Reich’s Different Trains, which is my favorite Reich composition, even ahead of Music for Eighteen Musicans. The other was Kronos’s collaboration with composer-bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla, Five Tango Sensations.
Roberto Goyeneche-Astor Piazzolla: “Vuelvo al Sur”
Thus started my Piazzolla phase, which included attending a performance of tangos in San Francisco and the purchase of album after album of his Nuevo Quinteto Tango, a group that changed the face and nature of Argentinian tango, I couldn’t get enough of it. I bought CDs of Live in Wien (1983). The Central Park Concert of 1987, Tristezas de un Doble A (1986). I’ve bought more since then, including his collaborations with master tango singer Roberto Goyeneche. I picked up a compilation of tangos, Todo Tango, and Mi Buenos Aires Queridos –Tangos Among Friends (1996), a lovely album by classical pianist Daniel Barenboim, who, like fellow pianist Martha Argerich, was born and raised in Buenos Aires, playing a full program of tangos accompanied by bandoneon, guitar, bass and drums.
Kronos Quartet: Harry Partch: “Two Studies on Early Greek Scales”
I was on a run as far as Kronos was concerned. I bought: albums of music by Reich. Piazzolla. Black Angels, title piece by George Crumb. (I bought a second album by Crumb and couldn’t get into it. I don’t even remember its name.) At the Grave of Richard Wagner. Osvaldo Golichov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, clarinet and string quartet. A juxtaposition of very old and very new music, Early Music. I used a John Cage piece and one by Harry Partch from that album as framing music for a play reading in the early 2010s.
I discovered Arvo Part.
Henryk Gorecki: Symphony no. 3, 2d mvt., Dawn Upshaw, soprano
And Henryk Gorecki. First his beautiful Third Symphony, with soprano Dawn Upshaw singing the glorious theme in the second movement. Then the string quartets –played by Kronos. Gorecki’s lively Concerto for Piano and Strings, his daughter playing the piano part, and some choral music by him. An album of compositions by Gorecki and other contemporary Polish composers.
Steven Isserlis: Wolfgang Bargiel: “Adagio for Cello and Orchestra” (1997)
Tons of albums by cellist Steven Isserlis, playing St-Saens (lovely), Schumann (incomparable), Tavener (interesting but hard to approach), Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Barber, CPE Bach, Haydn, Faure, Beethoven,Rachmaninov, Franck. I loved especially his rendition of Wolfgang Bargiel’s Adagio for Cello and Orchestra on the Schumann album. (Bargiel was Schumann’s brother-in-law.) I don’t know what else he wrote but this one piece by Bargiel is beautiful. After a lovely performance of Schumann’s Offertorium, with cello and voice, there is a silent cut, three and a half minutes of no music at all while you reorient your senses before launching into the final cut on the record.
Jane Bott: Henry Purcell: “When I Am Laid in Earth”
Lots of Purcell. Aside from Tosca, I don’t know any operatic aria I love as much as Purcell’s “When I Am Laid in Earth,” Dido’s lament from Dido and Aeneas, especially Jane Bott’s version of it on The Glory of Purcell (1995).
My favorite recording of St.-Saens’s Organ Symphony, Matthias Eisenberg on organ, Michel Plasson conducting. (The second movement of that symphony supplied our wedding processional for Esther’s march down the aisle in 1964.) (Ormandy’s version of the symphony sucks compared to Plasson’s.)
Bryn Terfel: Schubert: “An die Musik”
Shirley Gassner, Jeremy’s music teacher from high school, visited us and gave us an album of Schubert lieder done by bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. It was lovely music but it didn’t turn me on any more than our old Fisher-Dieskau album did. I’m not nuts about German lieder, at least not so far, though I know that objectively I should be.
(My other listening weakness is Wagner. I’d sooner have a root canal extraction than spend a night listening to Wagner –or most of Richard Strauss [though I do like till Eulenspiegel...)
Those were heady times.
MUSIC & ME 