Sunday Music

It's Sunday, you're here for the music so let's get straight into it.

Earlier this week I posted about Lazy Bird by John Coltrane and how I think it's a perfect introduction to jazz. It's a great track from a great album but it was released in 1957. Sometimes jazz can be pictured as rooted in the past. I don't want jazz to come across that way on this blog so here are a couple of tracks from The Bad Plus. This trio may be my favourite current jazz band. Both of these tracks are from their 2004 album Give.

First, a live version of an original composition And Here We Test Our Powers of Observation

and next a cover version of Iron Man, originally by Black Sabbath. This, in particular, is fantastic in a menacing and broody way.

Our tour around Tricky's back catalogue continues with another two songs. This is Black Steel, a cover of Public Enemy's Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, and is very, very different from the original. It comes from Tricky's debut Maxinquaye.

This next track is I Be The Prophet from the album Nearly God. This was released under the name Nearly God as a side project rather than under Tricky's name. Tricky is joined on this track by Martina Topley-Bird who provides vocals, just as she did on most of Maxinquaye.

Gang of Four are a post-punk band who had they're biggest impact in the late 70's & early 80's. Although there best known song is almost certainly Damaged Goods, a John Peel favourite, my favourite song is Natural Is Not In It. Here's a live version from 1979 that I think really captures the urgency that great live music can bring.

I posted Frank Turner's Photosynthesis a while ago. He's nowhere near as famous as he should be so there's a good chance you're not that familiar with him. Here's some of his music to start and fix that, Reasons Not To Be An Idiot.

My favourite albums - Different Class

Not long before I put this blog on hiatus, a phrase which implies a degree of planning that certainly did not exist, I had decided to do a series of posts about my favourite albums. It's still something I want to do, now I'm going to do it.

A few ground rules first:

I'll be choosing 99 albums. Obviously, this won't be a short term project.

I'm going to limit myself to three albums per band/solo artist. This is to avoid filling the list with just the discographies of my favourite bands and seek albums that I love rather than just come up with the easy answers.

I'm going to avoid Best Of albums with the exception of some older jazz and blues artists who didn't really record albums, just singles.

These albums are not in any ranked order, I'll just write about them in the order I want to.

That's it, let's move on to the first album, Different Class by Pulp.

Different Class came out in October 1995 in between 1994's His 'N' Hers and 1998's This Is Hardcore, two other albums that will eventually feature on this list. All three of those albums were nominated for the Mercury Prize and the three albums together, in my opinion at least, form a cohesive whole about changing views and experiences of life.

Back to Different Class. Even though His 'N' Hers broke Pulp through to mainstream success Different Class made them absolutely huge. As good as His 'N' Hers was, and I think it's a great album, Different Class improves significantly on it. There's a maturity to the songs. A sense that these aren't just kids anymore but reflective adults, looking backwards to the past and forward to the future as well as recognising the present. Different Class came out in the midst of Britpop, it is very much a Britpop album, but it's also much more. It's not just about the present, about modern life in 1990's Britain and when it does talk about those subjects it isn't just about the perils of the rat race or the fun to be had at parties and festivals. It has major themes of working class life and sex running through it. It is, as I've said, an album of people who have become adults and are starting to have adult worries.

Live Bed Show by Pulp

The most well known song from the album, and from Pulp's career, is of course Common People. A song that pretty perfectly sums up the album. A song about cultural tourism the song is Jarvis Cocker's definite statement, at least it seems to me, about the class system in Britain. All done in a way that is funny and never boring. It's also covered by William Shatner if you want a really weird experience.

Common People by Pulp 

At the heart of it all Common People is an album about identity and belonging. It doesn't lionise or demonise the culture it's part of, it never sneers at it or tries to excuse it. It's full of sarcasm, piss taking and self-awareness It's about belonging regardless of how valuable or not the thing you belong to is. It's about creating something of your own to belong to, about not being afraid of life or living it your way. Not better or worse than the alternative ways and cultures, but truly yours.

Mis-Shapes by Pulp

The perfect introduction to jazz?

Jazz is a genre that a lot of people have preconceived ideas about. It's a genre that a lot of people are put off from trying. I am a huge fan of jazz and I wanted to talk a little bit about it. Honestly though, the world doesn't need another lecture about jazz. Instead I decided to share one of my favourite jazz songs and briefly describe why I think it's such a good introduction to jazz.

First we need a little bit of background. Jazz as a genre has been around for a little over 100 years. There's no definitive first jazz song and the start of the genre can be roughly placed as between 1890 and 1910. THe lack of surviving recordings from this time make it impossible to pin down exactly and I have no intention of going through the history of music in that time period here to try and provide a more definitive date, it's not needed for this post. All we do need for this post is a very rough timeline.

1890-1910 Musicians merge ragtime and blues together to form jazz.

Early 1930's Swing jazz develops

1943-45 Bebop jazz develops.

1948-49 Cool jazz, a 'softer' development from bebop develops, mainly on the west coast of the US.

Mid-1950's Hard bop develops in NYC.

That's pretty much as far as we need to go. Rather than describe hard bop to much I'll just say it's a more driven development of bebop than cool jazz. I think the best hard bop album, I'm not going to pretend to be an authority on it, is Blue Train by John Coltrane, who I rank as the greatest musician I've ever heard. I think the song that is the perfect introduction to hard bop is Lazy Bird from Blue Train. The band is:

John Coltrane — tenor saxophone
Lee Morgan — trumpet
Curtis Fuller — trombone
Kenny Drew — piano
Paul Chambers — bass
Philly Joe Jones — drums

The reason I think it's the perfect introduction, not just to hard bop but to jazz as a whole, is the way it's structured. Jazz can seem to be overwhelming at times with too much going on. Lazy Bird is far from sparse but it is never overwhelming. The solos are beautiful and contained within the song, they never wander from the rest of the band. The song starts with the full band playing and soon moves into a solo from John Coltrane. Then come Lee Morgan, (only 19 when this was recorded), on trumpet followed by Curtis Fuller on trombone. Coltrane plays another solo before Kenny Drew's piano solo progress into Paul Chambers bass playing. Chambers plays his solo with a bow but plucks the strings in the rest of the song. Philly Joe Jones, one of the great names in jazz, has a short drum solo before Coltrane leads the band to the end of the song with another sax solo. Six incredibly talented musicians playing as a cohesive band. It really is a fantastic piece of music. So that's why I think it's the perfect introduction to jazz. As to why I think you should listen to it? I think listening to jazz is an incredibly rewarding way to spend your time, it'll give you experience of music that you would never otherwise hear. It's a beautiful and expensive pool of music just waiting for you to start listening to it.

Sunday Music

Another Sunday and some more music. In case you only read my music posts I'll repeat from one of my earlier posts, last Sunday was Father's Day so I didn't have time to post anything. One day I'll be organised enough to get things written in advance so we won't have any missing weeks or long parts of the week without any posts. 

Originally I'd planned on using this song when I posted Here's the thing but I decided it didn't fit. I think it would have come across as a little narcissistic in the context of the post. Without that context I think it's time to post Regina Spektor's cover of Radiohead's No Surprises. I think this version really highlights the clarity and pureness of her voice.

On the basis that more people need to hear Fela Kuti and people who have heard some Fela Kuti need to hear more of him here's his song Water No Get Enemy. At the very least you should all own The Best of The Black President, two discs of music and the DVD 'A Slice of Fela'

His 'N' Hers was Pulp's fourth album and their breakthrough. It was nominated for The Mercury Prize but narrowly lost out to M People's Elegant Slumming, which is a superb album title. Back to Pulp, this was the album that broke them to a mainstream audience in the UK and lead to them being labelled as part of the Britpop movement. Their next album Different Class came out at the end of 1995 and won the 1996 Mercury Prize. This is the title track from His 'N' Hers and serves as a perfect example of their mid-90's output.

Possibly my favourite hip hop track ever Harder Than You Think by Public Enemy. If you're from the UK you may now this better from the 2012 coverage of The Paralympic Games. Channel 4's usage of the track lead to the track reaching number 4 in the single charts 5 years after it's original release. The themes of persevering and not giving in to outside pressures and the tribulations of life of course tie in perfectly to with The Paralympics but the songs success really is down to how good it sounds. A lesson in how well songs can do with the right amount of exposure. If you still need convincing to listen to this, the horns are sampled from a Shirley Bassey track.

 Trenchtown Rock by Bob Marley & The Wailers. You should know this is a great track already. This is from the Live album recorded in London in 1975. It may be the greatest live album I've ever heard.

As promised I'll be including a track by Trick in every edition of Sunday Music for the immediate future. This week it's Tricky's cover of Something In The Way, originally by Nirvana. As you can imagine it is very different from the original and very much worth listening too.

Let's talk about comics a little

I was originally going to write a review of Craig Thompson's Blankets here but instead I decided first I want to talk about comics in a more general way. Something to serve as a preface for reviews and other comics-related writing I'll be doing here.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

One of the main things I want to address is the idea that comics=superheroes. Comics are a medium, superheroes are a genre. The two are certainly very closely linked but we need to get away from the idea that one inevitably contains the other. You've probably seen at least one of Christopher Nolan's Batman films, Joss Whedon's Avengers or the more recent X-Men: Days of Future Past, all superhero stories told outside of the medium of comics. The Adventures of Tintin, Blue Is The Warmest Colour and The Walking Dead are all comics that aren't superhero stories.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World by Bryan Lee O'Malley

It's not my intention in anyway to try to say that superhero comics aren't a large and important part of the medium. Nor do I want to try and belittle superhero comics as in some way less worthy stories than other types of comics. It is my intention to show that comics are much more than superheroes. As an example I've just counted all of the graphic novels (a quick aside. I'm using the term graphic novel here to refer to the sort of comic you'd find in a book shop rather than pamphlet style comics you'd find in a comic shop. Graphic novel isn't technically the correct term for all of these but it will do as a catch-all term) my wife & I own. We have 332. Of those 71 are superhero comics.

Two things come across to me from those numbers, apart from the need to buy/build some more shelves. First, we have a lot of superhero stories. Secondly, we have a lot more non-superhero stories. I hope from this that when you see I've written a comic review you won't automatically think it's a superhero and I hope the word 'comic' won't make you dismiss the review or the book I'm reviewing.

One last thing. When you're thinking about superhero stories be it film, TV or comic books you're almost certainly thinking of a character from one of two publishers. Marvel or DC. The Avengers, The X-Men, Spider-man, a whole host of characters with alliterative names, those are all Marvel. Superman, The Flash, (Green) Arrow,  Batman and plenty of other bat-related characters, those are from DC. These two companies dominate the superhero market almost totally. But not completely. There are other superhero comics not published by these companies. One of my favourites is Martin Eden's Spandex about a team of 7 LGBTQ  people based in Brighton. It is fantastic and I'll be reviewing the first volume Spandex - Fast & Hard as my next review after Blankets.

Spandex by Martin Eden

Here's the thing

I know it's been a while since I posted, much longer than I wanted. I've been thinking about what I want the blog to be and what it's actually been since I re-started it. I want it to be a few things but mainly they can all be summed up as, I want it to be somewhere I can write about the things I want to write about. Somewhere to get my ideas and music and film and books out of my head and down somewhere. I hope that this will help me clarify why I feel the way about certain things, why I like the things I do. I hope it'll help sharpen my writing up too. I was pretty happy where it was when I was blogging regularly, now I've not only failed to continue to improve, I've regressed. I want to turn that around.

When you're a kid people ask you what you want to be when you grow up. I still don't know, I'm 34, but I do know that what I don't want to do any more is my current job. Don't worry, this isn't going to be a 'poor me I'm so unfulfilled' post. The truth is I am fulfilled in pretty much everyway. My family (now might be a good time to mention that there was no Music for Sunday last week because it was Father's Day and my daughter was determined to spend as much of the day letting me do as little as possible. It was lovely), my friends, all the things I love to do.  But not work. I want to do something else. I don't know how doing this blog will in any way help me do that, but it is at least doing something else. Something that is, even if only in a small way, productive. And something that is productive for me, again maybe only in a small way, and not for a huge company. I don't hate my job by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just utterly bored by it. Thinking about what I want to write about in my blog is a good, here's that word again, productive way to help pass the time. But if I don't ever do it, if I just think about it, then it's not really helping at all.

I'm aware that this hasn't really explained much in the way of why I haven't been blogging. Mainly the purpose of this post was to shake off the inertia and get something down. I guess in a lot of ways everything I wanted to say could have been better expressed by Frank Turner's song Photosynthesis. If you aren't familiar with his music you really need to get familiar with it. Start now.

Stuck

Some songs get stuck in your head, even if it has been months since you heard it. Something calls them to mind and they're there, in your mind. If it happens to me at work, where we have no music, the song can be stuck there for hours. Today it was Do You Remember The First Time by Pulp. Below is the live version from BBC2's New Years Eve show, Jools Holland's Hottenanny, from 2002.

I remember this performance. I watched it the next day on the New Year's Day repeat. I was 22 and had been dating a woman for 6 or 7 months. In two months it'll be our 9th wedding anniversary. Of course, that has nothing to do with why this song was stuck in my head today and it has no special relevance in my relationship with my wife. But it is why I chose this version for the blog.

Sunday Music

Time for some more Sunday music. Just the three songs today, but I think they pack in enough quality to make up for the lack of quantity.

Let's start with a cover. First, a bit of Velvet Underground history. The band were signed with Verve and released their first two albums (The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat). They then moved to MGM, Verve's parent company, and released a third album (The Velvet Underground) in 1969. MGM were going through some financial troubles and released The Velvet Underground from their contracts. (This would be much easier to follow without all the eponymous records, I'm sorry). The band then signed with Atlantic and released Loaded. However between the release of the album The Velvet Underground and the band's release from their contract with MGM they had recorded 19 tracks, the so called Lost Album. Verve eventually (in 1985) released most of these tracks on what was essentially another eponymous album, VU. One of the tracks on VU is Temptation Inside Your Heart. The song is recorded in a much more light hearted, traditional rock and roll style than is common for The Velvet Underground. This cover bu the Crystal Stilts sounds much more like a Velvet Underground song. A band reimagining a covered song and making it sound more like the sound of the original band than it was at the start is unusual enough for me to include it here. And of course, it's really good.

A few recent conversations with a good friend have led to me re-listening to a lot of Tricky lately. It's not that I'd forgotten that his music was good, more that I'd forgotten just how good it is and how much of it he's released. Expect to see a lot of Tricky showing up on the blog in forthcoming posts as I go through his discography. For today here are a couple of live performances from his debut album Maxinquaye. If you do not have this album in your collection you are missing out and you should remedy that as soon as possible. First up, Hell Is Round The Corner from Glastonbury's jazz stage in 1995:

This is Overcome. Tricky co-wrote Karmacoma with Massive Attack, Overcome is his own version of the song:

A few days off

I took a week off work and so, decided to take the same week off from blogging. And then when I got back to work I found I had to do so much catching up that I didn't really feel like blogging for the first part of the week. In retrospect taking the week off was a mistake. Having time off work gave me plenty of time to spend on blogging, I should have used that time. Especially when I've just started blogging again.

Regardless, I made a bit of spare time tonight to post something and avoid this becoming another week without a post and to share some music. This is a great Live version of Ian Dury and the Blockheads best known song, hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.