This has been fun.
First Rock, then Jazz. How about some Christmas Rhythm & Blues?
Here’s a favorite of mine. “Hey Santa Claus” was recorded by The Moonglows in 1953 – a very good year – for Chance Records. I discovered it on an album called Rockin’ Little Christmas put together by MCA Records in 1986.
Enjoy!
So, it’s the end of a busy day. You’ve decked the halls, jingled the bells and harked the herald angels. You’re about to settle down on the couch, enjoy the warm glow of the lights on the tree and a glass of your favorite beverage and you ask yourself: “What would make a more perfect soundtrack than a long cut from a 1981 Christmas Jazz LP featuring one of the world’s best tenor saxophonists and his legendary quartet gently swinging their way through a fabulous holiday classic?”
Well, nothing.
So, here it is: The Dexter Gordon Quartet – Dexter Gordon on tenor sax, Kirk Lightsey on acoustic piano, David Eubanks on acoustic bass and Eddie Gladden on drums – playing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”
Sit back and enjoy.
That track was recorded in New York City on November 4, 1980 for Columbia Records. It was released in 1981 on an LP called God Rest Ye Merry Jazzmen.
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane in 1943. It was introduced by singer Judy Garland in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me In St. Louis.
What’s your favorite Christmas Jazz recording?
Need a little somethin’ to get you rockin’ on this Friday before the last weekend before Christmas day?
I know just the thing.
Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only…
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band!!!!!!!!!
(Turn it up!)
Merry Christmas from sixstr stories.
The book is called: History of the World in Nine Guitars.
It was written by Erik Orsenna, accompanied by Thierry Arnoult and published in 1996. The English edition was translated from the original French by Julia Shirek Smith and published in the United States in 1999. I bought my copy of the small hardcover at the gift store in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston several years ago. It was one of those occasions where I felt like the book found me as much as I found the book.
In the chapter titled “Woodstock, 1969,” Mr. Orsenna writes in the voice of the young Jimi Hendrix.
My father’s name is James. He is a gardener. He doesn’t talk much. But when you ask him a question, he knows how to answer.
I have restless fingers. They won’t stay still. They tap on every surface they see. They beat time on the walls and the tables, on my desk at school. They live their own life, and I can’t do anything about it. It’s no good telling them to stop. They don’t hear me.
My father doesn’t just know how to answer. He knows how to look: ‘I’ve seen your fingers, son. Yours are waiting for something, you can depend on it. All the fidgeting, that’s their way of calling. Now I’ve brought you something. Do you think maybe it’s what they’ve been waiting for?’
I am eleven. My father has just taken the guitar from behind his back. A big brown box with strings. My fingers are happy. They have found their garden, their house, their promenade, a door to the world, a way to speak.”
Listen to the fingers of Jimi Hendrix speak.
“Little Wing” was written by Jimi Hendrix, recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience and released on their 1967 album Axis:Bold As Love.
On that recording, Jimi Hendrix sings and plays electric guitar, Noel Redding plays bass guitar and Mitch Mitchell plays drums.
Much has been said about Jimi Hendrix, but Richie Unterberger, writing in the All Music Guide to Rock, offers one of the best single sentences about Jimi: “In his brief four-year reign as a superstar, Jimi Hendrix expanded the vocabulary of electric rock guitar more than anyone before or since.”
Jimi Hendrix was born this day, November 27, in the year of 1942, in Seattle, Washington. His birth name was Johnny Allen Hendrix, but changed to James Marshall Hendrix by his parents in 1946.
Jimi passed away on September 18, 1970 in London, England.
I wrote my first post in honor of Jimi Hendrix’s birthday on November 27, 2010. You can find that post in the Archives by clicking on November 2010 and scrolling down through that month’s earlier entries.
In my formative years as a singer, guitarist and songwriter, I learned much from the music of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
Joni Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon and Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush, also from 1970, provided countless hours of inspirational listening and several impeccable songs that soon became favorites of my performing repertoire.
In particular, Joni’s “For Free” and Neil’s “Birds” are songs that I still love to play and sing. But upon listening again to the original album tracks, I’ve been reminded that these were among the songs that Joni and Neil, both exceptional guitarists, played on the piano. I came to play them on the guitar thanks to a friend and a bootleg record.
Bob was a guitarist, singer and equally music-obsessed friend from my high school and college years. He turned me on back then to a guitar-based version of “For Free” that David Crosby (Bob’s most favorite musician in those days) had recorded on a reunion album with The Byrds. After I had learned to play it, Bob and I worked up a duo version of “For Free” with some of the best two-part harmony vocals I’ve ever been part of. (I so wish that I had a recording of us doing that song.) Every time I played that song solo, I wished the audience could hear his voice singing along, too.
Bootleg albums – illegal, mysterious and defiantly produced 12-inch vinyl records with minimal (if any) graphics, containing surreptitiously-procured recordings of live concert performances and/or studio work by well-known artists – were a somewhat rare and controversial delight back in those days. For a New Hampshire-based music fan, a trip to Boston was necessary to find a record store that carried a selection of these LPs. On one such excursion, I found a live Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album that contained (as I found out when I got home and listened to it) one side of horribly-recorded full-band, “electric” songs and one side of gorgeously-recorded “acoustic” songs. One of the latter tracks was “Birds” with Neil Young accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. That became the model for my rendition of the song.
Here, for your listening pleasure, are videos of these two songs. The Joni Mitchell video is a live performance recorded by the BBC on October 9, 1970. The Neil Young video contains the studio recording of “Birds” from the After The Gold Rush LP.
On November 7, Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada) celebrated her 69th birthday.
On November 12, Neil Young (born in Toronto, Canada) will celebrate his 67th birthday.
I hope you enjoyed the music. I think I’ll go get my guitar and sing those songs.
Here’s what I know, also knowing that a complete accounting of the subject would be much, much, much longer.
In 2012, Barack Obama has James Taylor, will.i.am and Bruce Springsteen.
Mitt Romney has Kid Rock.
In 2008, the folks running the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain used songs by Heart (“Barracuda”) and Jackson Browne (“Running On Empty”) until the artists told them unequivocally to stop.
In his campaign for 2008 New Hampshire Presidential Primary, Democratic candidate John Edwards had Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne. I attended a rally for Edwards on December 19, 2007 in Portsmouth, N.H. that featured a live performance by this duo. Bonnie Raitt kicked off their five song set with her hit version of the John Hiatt song “Thing Called Love.”
Of course, there’s a video!
In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had Carole King.
On Tuesday, January 20, 2004, my wife and I saw Carole King perform at the Concord City Auditorium in Concord, N.H. in a “special FREE concert to welcome John Kerry back to Manchester for the 7-day countdown” to the New Hampshire Presidential Primary. Sen. Kerry opened the show, welcomed everyone, gave a brief campaign speech and, before introducing Ms. King, explained that he had to head back to his hotel room to watch President George W. Bush give his State of the Union address.
Carole King then came out on stage, sat down at a grand piano and treated the audience to an exquisite 45-minute, 9-song concert. Among the songs she played and sang were “Beautiful,” “I Feel The Earth Move,” “Love Makes The World” and, of course, “You’ve Got A Friend.”
In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore had the Paul Simon song “You Can Call Me Al.”
In 1992, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton had the Christine McVie/Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop.” (“thinkin’ about tomorrow…”)
In his 1984 re-election campaign, President Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen’s recently released and very successful song “Born In The U.S.A.” until Bruce said “No.”
In 1968, Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy had John Stewart.
Singer/Guitarist/Songwriter John Stewart had been a member of the Kingston Trio from 1961-1967. He had also written the song “Daydream Believer” that The Monkees turned into a #1 hit in 1967.
In 1968, John Stewart “traveled with the (Kennedy) campaign and sang on the backs of trains, flat-bed trucks, town squares and high school auditoriums.” He wrote songs along the way and, in 1985, Stewart recorded and re-recorded many of them for an album he titled The Last Campaign. (The quote above is from Stewart’s liner notes to that album.)
In 1944, politician and singer Jimmie Davis had “You Are My Sunshine” – a song he’d recorded in 1940 and claimed authorship of – during his successful campaign for Governor of Louisiana. At campaign stops, Davis would frequently sing the song and even, on occasion, while riding his horse, whose name was “Sunshine.”
Finally, and on a lighter note, during the 2004 presidential campaign there was JibJab and JibJab had “This Land Is Your Land.”
JibJab was two brothers: Gregg and Evan Spiridellis. They wrote, directed and produced an animated musical video called “This Land!” The soundtrack was a parody of Woody Guthrie’s classic Folk song “This Land Is Your Land.” It was a huge hit in the relatively new universe known as YouTube.
It’s still rather outrageous and hilarious.
That’s all from me. But please, dear reader, feel free to add to my list with anything you recall from your political past. Just leave a comment!
My post of November 2, 2010 started thus:
“On November 2, 1923, African-American Blues guitarist Sylvester Weaver sat in front of the large horn/”microphone” of the acoustic recording machine in the New York City studios of OKeh Records. He played and recorded two original instrumental guitar pieces that day: “Guitar Blues” and “Guitar Rag.” The resulting 78-rpm record stands as the first recordings of solo acoustic Blues guitar music.”
With the following essay, I added a link to the original recording of “Guitar Blues.” (It’s still there. Check it out!)
For this post, I did my usual search of YouTube for a video/recording of “Guitar Rag” to embed for your listening pleasure. However, the only recording of “Guitar Rag” I could find was not from 1923. The version of the guitar instrumental that’s on YouTube is the re-recording of the piece that Weaver cut on April 13, 1927 in New York City for OKeh Records.
Though the 1927 recording is of much better fidelity (due to the change over to electric recording that transformed the recording industry in 1925) than the 1923 take, there is, in my mind, no substitute for an original.
So, here it is, from 89 years ago today. (It is still November 2 here in NH as I write this.)
For the past several days, with every weather report and TV news story that mentions the name “Sandy,” the voice of Bruce Springsteen singing his song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” has gone through my mind.
But today, another singer and song has been pushing Bruce aside.
“Wasn’t that a mighty storm, wasn’t that a mighty storm in the morning.”
That’s the first line of the chorus of a song called “Galveston Flood” as recorded by Tom Rush in 1966 on his Take A Little Walk With Me LP. I first heard it on the 1971 compilation Classic Rush.
I decided to look around on YouTube for a video with the song to post and I found something rather incredible.
On September 8, 1900, a hurricane boasting 145 mph winds slammed into the town of Galveston, Texas, leaving somewhere between 6,000 to 12,000 people dead in its wake.
On September 24, Thomas A. Edison sent a film crew to document the destruction.
The following video uses Tom Rush’s recording of “Galveston Flood” as the soundtrack to some of Edison’s film.
The song/video is a bit more than five minutes long. I highly recommend that you take the time to listen and watch.
The story goes that the land my neighbors and I live on was once home to a farmer.
In the late 1970’s, long after the farmer passed on and the fields turned fallow, a real estate developer bought the large property, stripped off the still-valuable topsoil and divided the many acres into 59 house lots. In the beginning, a tall sign stood at the entrance to the developement and welcomed prospective home buyers to “Brittany Park.”
Thanks to the foresight and insistence of the city planners at the time, the developer begrudgingly planted two maple trees along the street side of each lot when a house was finished. Though one of ours did not survive the first winter, the front lawn of our half acre is now graced with a tall, broad and beautiful tree.
Over the years, thanks to my parents’ generosity and, specifically, my father’s expertise, a variety of other trees came to decorate our property. As of now the landscaping includes four red maples, six clumps of white birch, a dogwood, a blueberry bush and, bordering the back yard, a u-shaped hedge made up of 18 hemlocks. All on our own, my wife and I have contributed another maple, two forsythia, two pines and an oak.
On this October afternoon, as I survey my yard with its newly raked and mowed lawn, there is much that I am grateful for.
I am very grateful that hemlocks are evergreens.
I am also grateful (so far, at least) for the song that’s been running through my head all day: “Autumn Leaves.”
There is a reason, after all, that we call this season “Fall.”
sixstr stories 