Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band were performing in support of their fourth album, Darkness On TheEdge Of Town. They’d hit the road on May 23, 1978 in Buffalo, NY. On this night, the venue was The Music Hall (now called “The Wang Theatre”) in downtown Boston, MA. For each of three sold-out nights, May 29, 30 & 31, the place belonged to Bruce, the E Street Band and about 3600 fans.
The night we were there – May 31, a Wednesday – Andrea and I had great seats, located in a what is now called the “orchestra box right.”
About 45 minutes into the show, as the applause started to die down after a loud, majestic, full-band rocker, the stage and the room went black. Out of the darkness came the haunting but declarative sound of a grand piano: arpeggiated chords strode steady and sure beneath a shimmering, insistent melodic phrase. (The pianist was Roy Bittan.) After a minute or so, one white spotlight came on, front and center, from directly above the stage. Shining down, it illuminated Bruce, standing at the microphone, at first seemingly entranced by the piano music, but then beginning to sing.
Listen.
If you’re a new (since May 2010) visitor to this blog, the purpose of my Wrestling With The Angel series (or category) is to highlight and share individual songs that are on a list of mine entitled: Devastatingly Great Songs. The title phrase, “Wrestling With The Angel,” is my paraphrase of a line from a poem by Herman Melville called Art. You can read the complete poem in my archived post of November 4, 2011: The Source.
The only live performances of New Orleans/Traditional Jazz that I’ve had the pleasure of hearing were back in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. The group that I had the very good fortune to hear was made up of some of the best Jazz musicians from around New England. They were known as The Tommy Gallant All Stars.
Tommy Gallant was a Jazz pianist, teacher, colleague and a friend.
Besides being a deceptively brilliant, delightfully swinging and always entertaining player, he was, throughout his long career, a tireless promoter and supporter of Jazz in the seacoast New Hampshire area and beyond. His music and his work have been memorialized and perpetuated in the annual TommyGallant Jazz Festival, which celebrated its 17th season this past summer as part of the Prescott Park Arts Festival in Portsmouth, NH and in the Tommy Gallant Memorial Jazz Concert held every Spring at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH.
Tommy taught Jazz piano and directed the Stage Band at Phillips Exeter from 1968 to 1998.
Thanks to the kindness of Mr. Charlie Jennison, President of the Seacoast JazzSociety, I have been given permission to share with you the only commercially-released recording (that I know of) of The Tommy Gallant All Stars.
This recording is taken from a 2002 CD entitled: Tommy Gallant and Friends – Live at the Press Room, Volume 1. It was put together by the Seacoast JazzSociety to raise funds for the Tommy Gallant Scholarship Fund.
All of the eight recordings on the CD were recorded live at the Press Room, the legendary (and still going strong) music venue located on Daniel Street in downtown Portsmouth, NH. TheTommy Gallant Trio was the house band at the Press Room most Sunday nights for many years. Besides their own extraordinary, bring-the-house-down performances, they provided first-rate accompaniment to a long list of locally distinguished and nationally known guest artists.
The members of the Tommy Gallant All Stars on this February 18, 1996 recording are: Dick Creeden, cornet; Jerry Fuller, clarinet; Don Doane, trombone; Tommy Gallant, piano; Jim Howe, bass; and Les Harris, Jr., drums.
Click on the blue link below for six minutes and thirty-five seconds of pure joy.
As much as I find New Orleans or Traditional Jazz to be among the most smile-inducing music ever made, my LP/cassette tape/CD/iTunes collection contains only four volumes of this remarkable genre of music.
I own Volume 1 & Volume 3 of the Columbia/Legacy CD series compiling the complete recordings of Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five and Hot Seven. The yellow sticker on the outside of the plastic jewel box for Volume 3 proclaims that these recordings are “THE MOST IMPORTANT RECORDINGS IN THE HISTORY OF JAZZ.” I can’t say it any better.
(If you want to add some of Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans Jazz to your music collection and only want to spring for one CD, purchase the Columbia/Legacy album Louis Armstrong: Best Of The Hot 5 & Hot 7 Recordings.
The one bit of vinyl in this group is a copy of the 1968 Coral Records LP by clarinetist Pete Fountain called Walking Through New Orleans. Pete Fountain – born July 3, 1930 in New Orleans – is considered by some to be the greatest living New Orleans-style clarinet player and was once a featured member of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. (My parents loved Lawrence Welk and used to watch his nationally broadcast television show quite often, much to my teenage chagrin.)
The most recent addition to my miniscule collection is a quite remarkable CD on the RCA/Bluebird label with the long title of Jelly Roll Morton: Birth Of The Hot – The Classic Chicago “Red Hot Peppers” Sessions.
The first track on the Jelly Roll Morton CD is “Black Bottom Stomp,” written and arranged by Mr. Morton. It was the first piece recorded by Morton’s Red Hot Peppers in a session that was held on September 15, 1926 in the Webster Hotel, in Chicago, Illinois, for Victor Records.
You absolutely have to listen to this.
Isn’t that something?
The members of the Red Hot Peppers on that track are: Jelly Roll Morton, piano; George Mitchell, cornet; Kid Ory, trombone; Omer Simeon, clarinet; Johnny St. Cyr, banjo; John Lindsay, bass; Andrew Hilaire, drums.
The Peppers had four more recording sessions over the next nine months, all held in Chicago, Illinois, with the last one held on July 10, 1927.
Jelly Roll Morton was born Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (Lemott? LaMotte? LaMenthe?) on October 28, 1885 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He passed away on July 10, 1941.
What do the Stephen Foster song “Oh! Susannah,” master fingerstyle guitarist Leo Kottke and the single version of The Beatles’ song “Love Me Do” all have in common?
They were all (kinda, sorta) born on September 11.
“Oh! Susannah” had its first public performance in Pittsburgh. PA on September 11 in 1847.
Leo Kottke was born in Athens, Georgia on September 11, 1945.
The version of “Love Me Do” that was released as the first single by The Beatles was recorded on September 11, 1962.
For more detailed information about these three historic events, please visit my blog archives for September, 2010 and find the September 11 post titled “On This Day In Music History: A Triple Header.”
My wife Andrea and I recently returned from a truly delightful and action-packed Labor Day weekend visit with our son, our daughter and her fiance`in Washington, D.C. With overnight stops to see family and friends in New Jersey on both the way down and the way back, this road trip took eight days and added 1218 miles to the odometer of our trusty, dark red, Ford Taurus station wagon.
Now, to me, on a long trip, conversation is the best stimulant. However, putting together the right collection of music CD’s, for those times when the conversation wanes, is one of the most essential parts of preparing for such a journey.
The first and foremost requirement for any disc that makes it into our zippered, black and silver, “Honda”-emblazoned, CD travel case is that it must contain music that both Andrea and I enjoy. Driving music also needs to be energizing, invigorating and endowed with a high degree of something I call “sing-along-ability.” I don’t think there’s anything that can make driving the New Jersey Turnpike enjoyable, but belting out “Spirit In The Night” or “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” as you cruise on past Newark certainly elevates the experience.
The CD’s that passed muster for this trip were: So Far by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2; Greatest Hits Volume One The Singles from The Goo Goo Dolls; and Volumes 1 & 2 of Motown 1960s from the 20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection series.
Complementing those six albums were four carefully compiled mix CD’s containing a wide variety of classic tracks that also easily fit the bill. There was a two disc set entitled “Songs To Be Sung” and another two disc set simply called “Rockers.” These collections included songs by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, John Hiatt, Bonnie Raitt, The Doobie Brothers, The Band, Jackson Browne, James Taylor and a stellar list of many more of our favorite artists.
Thus prepared and finally packed, off we drove.
From Southeast New Hampshire to Northern New Jersey: RiverVale and Washington Township; then to central NJ: Chatham and Cherry Hill; finally arriving in Washington, D.C.: Connecticut Ave., NW, just above Dupont Circle. While based there, we paid visits to Arlington, VA; Potomac, College Park and Silver Springs, MD; the White House and the Watergate, to name a few.
We talked.
As usually happens, Andrea and I found many topics to discuss and we never listened to all the music we brought. The discs by U2, CSN&Y, The Goo Goo Dolls and one each from the Songs to Be Sung set and the Rockers set did find their way into the disc player and all served their purpose admirably.
We sang.
With our voices raised to the strains of “Slide,” “Our House,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Beautiful Day,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “The Weight” and many more incredible songs, we happily passed the time and covered the miles, rolling down that long ribbon of east coast highway. At the start, eagerly anticipating the sight of our children’s smiling faces and then, as we headed home, longing for a good night’s sleep under our own roof and together in our own bed. Home, sweet home.
Even though this song is related to “Lord Jamie Douglas,” a Scotish ballad from 1776; and that ballad uses a tune, known as “Waly, Waly,” that is English and dates back to the 1720’s; and that tune is related to another English ballad from the 1660’s, “The Water Is Wide” was virtually unknown to Folk music lovers in America until Pete Seeger recorded it on one of his American Favorite Ballads albums for Folkways Records in 1958.
I first heard “The Water Is Wide” on the soundtrack album to the TV show thirtysomething released in 1991. The gorgeous version in that collection was recorded by Karla Bonoff and originally released in 1979. Also in 1991, James Taylor added his rendition of “The Water Is Wide” to his album New Moon Shine.
Finally, the first acoustic guitar instrumental version I heard was done by Ed Gerhard on his exquisite 1996 CD Counting The Ways.
I decided to take a shot at an arrangement of my own a few years after hearing Ed’s. For the guitarists out there, my arrangement is in the key of C – Ed’s is in the key of D – and played with my guitar tuned a bit below standard pitch (for reasons I cannot explain) and capoed at the third fret.
Click on the blue link below to give a listen. I hope you enjoy it.
It was a lunchtime session, four days after Ringo officially became a Beatle.
Granada Televison, based in Manchester, England, sent a camera crew to the popular music spot appropriately called The Cavern Club to film a live performance of The Beatles for a program called Know The North.
The Beatles played and sang two songs for the cameras: “Some Other Guy” and “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey!” Only the film of “Some Other Guy” was deemed to be suitable for broadcast and that didn’t happen until November 6, 1963 on the Granada Show Scene At 6:30.
“Some Other Guy” was originally recorded in 1962 by American singer Richie Barrett and co-written by Barrett with Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller.
Just for the record, in the film you’re about to watch (I hope), George, starting on the left, is 19 years old; Paul is 20; Ringo is 22; and John, on the right, is 21.
I’d like to dedicate this post to my good friend and former bandmate, Les Harris, Jr., who turned me on to this song and with whom I shared lead vocals when our band, Merseyside, would rock out on “Some Other Guy” a long, long time ago.
In my small-but-carefully-selected collection of Jazz guitar albums, I have only one by Jimmy Raney.
The LP is called Momentum. It showcases Jimmy in a trio with Richard Davis on bass violin and Alan Dawson on drums. Judging by the fact that Momentum was released in 1975, I’m guessing that I heard about Jimmy Raney from either an article or a review in Guitar Player magazine, which I had started subscribing to at about that time.
In the liner notes on the record’s jacket, vibraphonist Terry Gibbs is quoted as saying that “Jimmy was one of the first to grasp the Charlie Parker lyricism and turn it into long, flowing lines of his own. He’s a spontaneously melodic player.”
In The All Music Guide to Jazz, Scott Yanow writes: “Jimmy Raney was the definitive cool Jazz guitarist, a fluid Bop soloist with a quiet sound who had a great deal of inner fire.”
The last cut on the album is the trio’s take on the 1931 John Klenner & Sam Lewis composition “Just Friends.” Here it is.
Jimmy Raney was born on this day, August 20, in 1927, in Louisville, Kentucky. He passed away on May 10, 1995.
I first heard about singer/songwriter/guitarist John Hiatt thanks to the well deserved praise and publicity that he received upon the release of his eighth album, Bring The Family, in 1987.
As much as that album made me a fan of John Hiatt, my favorite album of his is his 1990 release, Stolen Moments.
I purchased Stolen Moments on cassette and listened to it over many months, rocking my way to and from work, thanks to the tape deck and excellent speakers in my beloved 1997 Honda Accord.
My favorite song from Stolen Moments is “Child of the Wild Blue Yonder.” It’s one of those “I must learn how to play and sing this” songs that I eventually did learn how to play and sing, but in a decidedly different way than John Hiatt does.
Here’s the original.
John Hiatt was born on this day, August 20, in 1952, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Happy Birthday, John.
In 1959, he was the drummer with Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, the biggest of all the groups in Liverpool, England at that time.
But it wasn’t until October and November of 1960 when Rory Storm & The Hurricanes played alternating sets, seven nights a week, 6 to 8 1/2 hours a night, for eight weeks at a club called TheKaiserkeller in Hamburg, West Germany with another Liverpool group called The Beatles, that John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison really got to know Ringo Starr.
Back home, throughout 1961 and into 1962, John, Paul and George maintained their friendship with Ringo. He was the first one they’d call to fill in when drummer Pete Best couldn’t make an engagement. One such date was Monday, February 5, 1962. On this day, Ringo played two shows: lunchtime at The Cavern Club in Liverpool and an evening gig at the Kingsway Club in Southport.
In June of 1962, when The Beatles – John, Paul, George and Pete – auditioned for Parlophone Records, producer George Martin liked everything he heard, except Pete’s drumming. So, in early August, after much discussion, The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein got the very difficult job of telling Pete that he was out. Two years and three days after he’d joined the band known originally as The Silver Beetles, Pete Best played his last performance with John, Paul and George at The Cavern Club on the evening of Wednesday, August 15, 1962.
Brian Epstein also got the job of calling Ringo Starr and offering him the position as full-time drummer for The Beatles.
When Brian called, Ringo was not only still playing for Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, he also had two other offers on the table. King Size Taylor & The Dominoes wanted him to play drums for them and Gerry & The Pacemakers wanted Ringo to be their bass guitar player (even though he had never played bass guitar!).
But Ringo loved playing with John, Paul and George and, as he later said, “We were pals!” Ringo also knew that The Beatles were on the verge of getting a record deal with EMI and to him, “a piece of plastic was like gold, was more than gold.”
And, The Beatles offered him the highest salary, £25 a week, to start.
So, shaving off his beard and getting his hair cut in the style worn by his new bandmates, Ringo said, “Yes.”
On Saturday, August 18, 1962, after a two-hour rehearsal, The Beatles – now officially John, Paul, George and Ringo – took the stage at Hulme Hall in Port Sunlight, Birkenhead, England as the headlining act of the Horticultural Society’s 17th annual dance.
Fifty years ago today.
P.S.: While in Hamburg, on Saturday, October 15, 1960, John, Paul and George along with Ringo and Walter Eymond (aka Lou Walters), bassist for The Hurricanes, gathered at a small recording studio called The Akustik (located behind the city’s central railway station) and recorded a version of the George Gershwin/Dubose Heyward song “Summertime.” Only one copy of the nine, 78-rpm discs that were cut is known to still exist.
Information for this post was gathered from The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992) by Mark Lewisohn; The Beatles Anthology (2000) by The Beatles; and The Love You Make – An Insider’s Story of The Beatles (1983) by Peter Brown & Steven Gaines.
One of the best parts of summer here in Southeastern New Hampshire is the Prescott Park Arts Festival. Prescott Park is located between Portsmouth Harbor and the historic Strawbery Banke Museum district in downtown Portsmouth. Every year since 1974 the Prescott Park Arts Festival has brought live music, community theater, food festivals, dance performances and movies to its outdoor stage.
(I played the PPAF in 1991, “The Cornerstone Season,” doing a 6 pm TwilightSeries concert on Saturday, July 20th.)
This past August 4th was the date of the PPAF’s 15th Annual Folk Festival. The five-hour event started off with The Coloradas, a Maine-based quintet, and then segued through sets by singer/songwriter/guitarist Aoife O’Donovan and the high-energy, very eclectic quartet, The David Wax Museum. The headliners were the Grammy-award winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.
On this appropriately warm and humid evening, the Carolina Chocolate Drops were a quartet: Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, Hubby Jenkins and Leyla McCalla.
From the opening raucous salvo of “Black Annie,” featuring Ms. Giddens on fiddle and lead vocals, Carolina Chocolate Drops performed with an impressively high level of skill in constantly changing combinations of acoustic guitar, 4 and 5-string banjo, violin, cello, mandolin and bass drum. The hour-long set was an extremely entertaining, informative and dance-inspiring journey through American string band music both old and new. The Chocolate Drops even made stops along the way to pay tribute to Woody Guthrie (“Goin’ Down The Road”) and Alan Lomax. They encored with a four voice, a cappella rendering of “Read ‘Em John,” a traditional song from the Georgia Sea Islands and found on the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ 2012 CD, Leaving Eden.
Now, the last time I attended a concert where both Woody Guthrie and Alan Lomax were mentioned, I was the performer. Hearing someone else talk about the history behind the music and songs being played was quite exciting, to say the least. But, had I picked up the August 1 – 7 edition of The Wire, an excellent local arts and entertainment newspaper, I’d have known that entertainment and education are equally important to Carolina Chocolate Drops.
In a concert preview/interview entitled “The Roots Show,” author Matt Kanner wrote that “The Chocolate Drops have always made a point of educating their audience about the roots of American Music.” In Kanner’s conversation with Rhiannon Gibbons, Ms. Gibbons explained the band’s reasoning behind this approach: “We are really committed to that, because we’ve learned all this stuff about the music, and it’s just stuff that’s so not known in the general public. It’s like, we can’t not at least talk about it a little bit.”
“Hallelujah,” I say. “Hallelujah!”
At the close of Mr. Kanner’s article, Ms. Gibbons says in regards to how Carolina Chocolate Drops hope their audience responds to their shows: “I think the best reaction to hope for is the people who want to sit and listen can enjoy the intricacy of the stuff we put on, and the people who just want to dance their butts off can dance their butts off.”
On the evening of August 4th at the Prescott Park Arts Festival’s 15th Annual Folk Festival, I think that both the performers and the audience got exactly what they were hoping for.
Here’s the best video I could find on YouTube with Carolina Chocolate Drops in the line-up that performed at Prescott Park. The song, “Milwaukee Blues,” is not on any of their albums.
Left to right in the video that’s Leyla McCalla, Dom Flemmons, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins.
Five days later, on Wednesday, August 8 (my birthday!), I returned to Prescott Park for the seventh show of the PPAF’s River House Restaurant Concert Series to see and hear singer/songwriter/acoustic guitarist Suzanne Vega.
Not long after Suzanne Vega emerged on the scene – her first album came out in 1985 and her second, Solitude Standing, was released in 1987 – her songs became very popular with my female, high school-aged guitar students. (One young lady performed five Suzanne Vega songs in her March of 1999 senior recital.) Thanks to a very well done book of transcriptions and Ms. Vega’s gorgeous recordings, I spent many a pleasant guitar lesson teaching eager fingers to master the chord changes and fingerpicking patterns to several of these superbly written songs.
On a perfect New Hampshire August evening, Suzanne Vega and her accompanist, the brilliant and ever-dazzling electric guitarist Gerry Leonard, had the Prescott Park stage to themselves. The duo performed two sets of songs drawn from the entire span of Ms. Vega’s twenty-six year recording career.
It was an immense pleasure to sit beneath the stars with my wife and several friends and listen to Ms. Vega sing and play “Gypsy,” “Luka,” “The Queen & The Soldier” – those older, wonderful “teaching songs” – mixed in with a host of more recent, equally wonderful and even brand new compositions.
Here’s an exceptional clip of Suzanne Vega, with Richard Thompson on back-up guitar (!), explaining and performing “Gypsy.”
A similarly stunning recording can be found on Suzanne Vega’s 2010 CD Close-Up Vol. 1, Love Songs.
August is not even half over and there are several more shows of the Prescott Park Arts Festival penciled in on our calendar. Here’s to hoping that those artists live up to the level set by Carolina Chocolate Drops and Suzanne Vega.
sixstr stories 