nickhoorwegmusic

Yesterday I heard an incredible new CD, one that has come out in the last week. Michael Jackson ‘The Stripped Mixes’ is one of the more interesting albums I’ve heard in a long time!

The idea behind the CD is to highlight some of Michael’s wonderful singing when he was a young kid at Motown. Each track is mixed very sparsely, with the vocal track brought right to the front, accompanied by the bass track and (in the case of the Jackson 5 tracks) vocal harmony tracks. Occasionally there’ll be a string part, vibraphone part or minimal rhythm section as well but for the most part this album is vocals and bass. So as well as highlighting the vocal parts, the bass parts are highlighted too.

As a bass player who is a student of the Motown bass style, I find this especially fascinating! Wilton Felder’s bass lines on ‘ABC’ and ‘I Want You Back’ were among the first songs I ever learnt to play on the bass, and here they are on the CD sounding so fat and full. I can hear nuances here that I couldn’t pick out on the original mixes.

The biggest bass lesson is the mix of ‘Darling Dear’, a song from the Jackson 5’s ‘Third Album’ - bass part by the late James Jamerson (as I may have mentioned elsewhere, Jamerson is probably the biggest influence on how I play bass). Jamerson’s bass line on ‘Darling Dear’ is transcribed in the ‘Standing In The Shadows of Motown’ biography/transcription book and it’s one of the most difficult lines in there. I nearly had a heart attack when I heard the mix of this song! Hearing it side-by-side with Michael’s vocal part shows off Jamerson’s talent for countermelody, his incredible forward motion and flow, and his incredible funkiness. This track is worth the whole disc.

The idea of highlighting Michael Jackson’s vocals from this era is executed perfectly on the CD, because by the end of it the overwhelming feeling is that here was an exceptional talent. It doesn’t feel right that a child so young should be singing with such conviction, deep feeling and emotion about topics that hadn’t been part of his life experience yet. It’s hard to believe what you’re hearing but the tracks don’t lie; it’s all there.

I can’t wait to see what else is going to be released over the coming months! I hope it’s all as good as this.

Nick 

It’s funny how if you mention The Meters and The Neville Brothers to most music fans, they assume that basically the first band became the second band. While this isn’t strictly true (since it’s not as if the band stayed the same and just changed the name), it is almost true. Allow me to explain; let’s start with what we know:

The Meters are/were a legendary and highly influential funk combo from New Orleans. They were the house band at Seasaint Studios and played on tons of sessions produced by Allen Toussaint. The Meters made 8 of their own albums between 1969 and 1977. There were two Nevilles in the band, Art (keyboards/vocals) and Cyril (percussion/vocals). Art was there from the beginning, Cyril joined in the early 70’s. The band split up in 1977.

The Neville Brothers are a legendary and highly influential soul/rhythm & blues/funk combo from New Orleans. They made their first album in 1978. There are many Nevilles in the band (Art, Aaron, Cyril, Charles and Ivan), but apart from Art and Cyril, there are no former Meters.

So, it should be obvious from this that while there are a couple of common elements (two Nevilles), the bands are not interchangeable.

What is interesting, however, is the pairing of both groups on the album ‘The Wild Tchoupitoulas’. The album featured the Wild Tchoupitoulas ’Mardi Gras’ Indian tribe, which was led by George ’Big Chief Jolly’ Landry. Landry was a Neville uncle, rather than a Neville brother. Apart from the indian tribe calls, the vocals on the record are by the Neville Brothers. The rhythm section is The Meters. You could almost see it as the point where The Meters stopped and the The Neville Brothers began, since the Meters broke up in 1977, The Neville Brothers made their first album in 1978, and the Wild Tchoupitoulas album was made in 1976. 

To throw some further pepper into this confusingly tasty gumbo of Meters, Neville Brothers and Neville uncles is the fact that the man who produced the Tchoupitoulas album (along with many many many great New Orleans records), Allen Toussaint, used to write songs using his mother’s name as his psuedonym - Naomi Neville!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this abridged history of The Meters and The Neville Brothers!

Nick

Once in a while as a musician, you hear someone that totally changes the way you play music and your instrument. The longer you play for, and the more music you hear, the amount of times that it happens gets less and less frequent, but probably more profound each time.

Viktor Krauss is one such musician for me. It was a revelation for me, coming from a jazz background on the double bass, to hear a double bass player that isn’t a jazz player, and one whose style I could really relate to. Viktor has been the bassist with Lyle Lovett for many years and is basically a Nashville guy; his sister is singer Alison Krauss AND he is one of Bill Frisell’s regular bassists… which means that he’s a great ’song’ bass player - one who is all about providing the best accompaniment for the song, no matter the setting - and can be very comfortable in an improvising, song based setting like Bill’s. His sound and time feel are incredible and he’s very funky too.

Every day for about six months, a little while ago, I played along with Bill Frisell’s album ‘Gone, Just Like A Train’, and doing that totally changed my bass playing for the better (I think so, anyway). Viktor’s bass playing on that record is great; solid, simple, supportive, unobtrusive and so strong. By trying to cop all the bass parts on the album, I found I developed a different sound and attack on the instrument, and it made me think much simpler. I also found that my feel for playing ghost notes on the double improved. Ghosting on the electric was something that always came naturally, but it frustrated me that I couldn’t get it to feel as natural on the double. Because it’s a part of Viktor’s style, and very apparent on ‘Gone, Just Like A Train’, after that six months of playing along, I got it!

Since then, I’ve managed to amass quite a Viktor Krauss collection - every album he’s on with Bill (plus a stack of bootleg concerts), some Lyle Lovett stuff, two great albums by a quirky and wonderful violinist named Casey Driessen, albums with Gabriela, Jerry Douglas, Alison Krauss, as well as his own two solo albums. Across all of these recordings, I’ve only heard Viktor play about 7 or 8 solos, and at least three of those are on a Lyle Lovett DVD. Frisell mentions in the liner notes to ‘Gone, Just Like A Train’ that Viktor has scary, monster chops but you’re likely never to see them. Absolutely correct! Unbelievable chops… The best example is on the song ‘Go Jake’ on Frisell’s ‘Nashville’ album - bass solo is seriously happening. 

Hearing Viktor Krauss inspired me to stop trying to be jazz musician and just be a bass player. I’ll be forever thankful to him for that!

Nick

I love it when you rediscover an album you’ve owned for a long time but haven’t listened to in ages. Today I played Parliament’s ‘The Motor Booty Affair’ for the first time in years, and wondered why it’d been so long.

‘Motor Booty Affair’ was the first Parliament CD I ever bought, and having since acquired all their other albums, I’ve decided that it’s one of the best, up there with ’Mothership Connection’.  It doesn’t have any hits (unlike the album that preceeded it, ‘Funkentelechy’, which contained the monster funk classic ‘Flashlight’), but there isn’t a weak track on the album, and every song contributes to the ‘plot’.

Most Parliament albums follow some sort of concept and story; this one was originally going to be the soundtrack for a P-Funk movie set underwater in the lost city of Atlantis. Everybody’s getting ready to party but the bad guy from the ‘Funkentelechy’ album, Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk shows up to spoil the fun, aided by his sidekick Rumpofsteelskin. The story is pretty well intact on the record but unfortunately the movie never got made - what a wild, acid and cocaine drenched piece of celluloid madness and wonderment that would’ve been!

‘Mr Wiggles’ introduces us to the concept of the ‘Motor Booty Affair’. This song is basically a vamp designed to give George Clinton room to deliver a series of bad puns about fish and water - AWESOME! After this you’re prepared for anything that may follow. Bernie Worrell plays keys on this song but seems to be absent from most of the rest of the album, I think Bootsy Collins may be playing drums. Bootsy plays drums on quite a lot of Parliament stuff.

Parliament-Funkadelic at this time was very heavily influenced by a new member, the very brilliant Junie Morrison (known on this album as J.S. Theracon), who is all over this album and the Funkadelic album ‘One Nation Under A Groove’. Junie started out in the Ohio Players, leaving after their first three albums, and also made three solo records on the Westbound label. Junie’s solo albums are truly solo - he sings and plays every instrument except strings and horns, and even then did the arrangements for those. Unfortunately his killer seventies albums are out of print; there is a best of which is kinda hard to get a hold of, but well worth it. On ‘Motor Booty Affair’, Junie can be heard playing bass on the title track, and possibly on ‘Rumpofsteelskin’, keyboards on virtually every track, and can be heard singing lead on ‘Motor Booty Affair’ and the album’s ballad ‘(You’re A Fish And I’m A) Water Sign’.

One should always remember with Parliament that the main idea is fun; don’t go looking for any allegorical subtext on an album like this! Just put it on, have a laugh and get funky. And when you get to the track ‘Aqua Boogie’, don’t forget to sing along with ’psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop’! 

Nick

Some funky YouTube that’ll get you groovin’ for the weekend!

This clip is a short, late 70’s video of James Brown demonstrating some dances, including the camel walk, boogaloo, mashed potato and the best version of the robot I’ve ever seen. Way to go JB! Even though late 70’s James Brown wasn’t classic James Brown, he could still dance like a demon and still had a few great grooves and songs, not to mention the fact that during the seventies one of his many self-penned nicknames was ‘Minister Of The New New Super Heavy Funk’. What a genius!

The song in the background of the clip is ‘If You Don’t Give A Doggone About It’, from the 1977 album ‘Mutha’s Nature’. Oh, and dig James’s awesome threads! Pretty hip stuff, and remember that he’s in his mid forties here - you can see a little paunch starting to happen already. Classic, awesome stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zdz88MBWomo (in case of bad embedding)

Many thanks to the uploader for sharing this piece of seventies gold!

Nick

I’ve just read a short piece on the internet today that I found a little bit disturbing. One of the major chain stores here in Australia has decided to stop selling CD singles completely, citing very poor sales - figures as low as 350 for a number one selling single nationwide.

Obviously this is a direct result of downloads. The equivalent download figures for the poorly performing physical counterpart number in the thousands. I’ve always thought that the market that will be most affected by downloads will be the pop/top 40 market, and it looks like it’s happening. What concerns me is the current trend among record companies and distributors in treating all genres the same way.

During the 3-4 years I worked in the CD store, which was a jazz specialist, I noticed things going that way. The first to go were the reps; over time every rep from every distributor including the majors, was let go, so we longer had anybody coming round to tell us what was new and what was coming out in the months ahead. The companies were downsizing, first with the people and now with the media. Why keep pressing CDs when you can put it all in bytes and let the customers deal with it? There’s no pressing plant to deal with, no shipping companies to take the stock out of the warehouse, no distributor to deal with, no returns - from their point of view it makes sound economic sense, and we have to remember that the music business is a business. It always has been and always will be.

My greatest concern is that the death of the CD single also forecasts the death of not only CD albums but also some genres. It’s already hard enough to get a jazz album, so what happens when they all get moved to download? My guess is that most of the people that buy jazz and some other genres aren’t interested in downloading music. That seemed to be the way with most of the customers I used to deal with. Sure, independent labels can keep recording new music and releasing CDs, but what about all the great catalogue stuff that’s owned by the majors? What happens when they put those up for download, and no one buys them because it’s aimed at the wrong market? Will they stop making them available? Where will we be then, hmm?

Dark days ahead, my friends…

Nick

I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of those musical anecdote books, where a whole lot of musicians contribute various stories with varying degrees of interest and humour. They are usually pretty hit-and-miss affairs, to be honest, often you have to search through a couple of hundred dreadful stories for one good one.

I read a couple of jazz anecdote books a few years ago that were a cut above the rest. One featured a whole series of anecdotes about 1920’s-30’s violinist Joe Venuti, who had a reputation as being somewhat of a prankster. Supposedly he once sent a massive, elaborately wrapped gift to Wingy Manone, the one-armed trumpet player. It took Wingy fifteen minutes to unwrap the huge unwieldy box and find Joe’s present - one cufflink. Venuti also once nailed a horn player’s shoe to a bandstand because he was tapping his foot out of time.

My favourite Joe Venuti story is the one where he called up thirty seven different double bass players and to each one said ‘I’ve got a gig for you, meet me on such-and-such a corner with your bass at two o’clock and I’ll give you a lift’. Thirty seven bass players showed up with their basses at the appointed time and location, creating a huge block in the footpath. Venuti just drove around the block in his car, laughing at them. To his credit, he paid each bassist a regular gig fee! An expensive practical joke but worth it.

Without doubt my favourite story from those books was one about Art Blakey. According to a few of his bandmates, Art went through a period where he would tell anyone he was talking to about jazz, the positive virtues of it, how it was an important, crucial art form, how it was developing etc etc. The story goes that one day while on tour, the band bus stopped in a small town. Across the street from where the bus stopped was a cemetary, with a funeral in progress. Art Blakey wandered over and joined the crowd at the funeral, just as the minster asked ‘Does anyone have any words to say about the deceased?’ After a brief silence, Art piped up and said ‘Well, if no one has anything to say about the deceased, does anyone mind if I say a few words about jazz?’

Our father, thou Art Blakey.

Nick 

A mondegreen is a misheard lyric, although the term applies to all speech. The word comes from author Sylvia Wright’s mishearing of the words ‘and laid him on the green’ as ‘lady mondegreen’ in a Scottish ballad. There are some wonderful and very funny mondegreens; here are a few of my favourites…

Probably the three most famous are: 

‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy’ instead of ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky’ - Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.

‘The ants are my friends’ for ‘the answer my friends’ - Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan.

‘There’s a bathroom/baboon on the right’ instead of ‘there’s a bad moon on the rise’ - Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

My favourite two are:

‘The girl with colitis goes by’ instead of ‘the girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by The Beatles.

‘I’m looking for a lover who won’t blow my brother’ for ‘I’m looking for lover who won’t blow my cover’ - Take It Easy by The Eagles

Possibly one of the funniest I’ve ever heard (because it’s so stupid) is ‘I got no towel, I hung it up again’ for ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again’ by Chumbawumba

For thirty years, my father thought ‘tonight you’re mine, completely’ was ‘tonight you’re mine, come fiddlin” in Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow by The Shirelles. I don’t what he thought the next line must’ve been - ‘you give your love, so sweedlin’?

Two friends of mine had a couple of good ones: one friend heard ’I see red, I see red, I see red’ by Split Enz as ‘aussie bear, aussie bear, aussie bear’; the other friend heard ‘cheap wine and a three day growth’ by Cold Chisel as ‘cheap wine and a three legged goat’.

My own contribution is from Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones. When I was a kid I used to think the words ‘if you start me up’ were ‘yeah pistachio’….

Send me some of your favourites too!

Nick 

A little doo-wop song from Frank Zappa. This one features the original Mothers Of Invention on BBC tv from 1968. I saw it the first time a few years ago on a show called ‘Sounds Of The Sixties’, a series that was basically a compilation of great BBC music clips. If I remember rightly, on the show this clip was preceeded by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band doing ‘Canyons Of Your Mind’, and then followed by The Small Faces doing ‘Song Of A Baker’. I wish all music television was that hip!

It’s great seeing Jimmy Carl Black on the drums here, and Roy Estrada on bass and the ridiculous falsetto lead. As far as I can tell, this song doesn’t appear on any Zappa studio albums - this may be the only performance. It’s listed as ‘In The Sky’ or ‘Oh In The Sky’, but I’d swear the lyric is ‘Who Is This Guy’. Have a listen and tell me what you think.

Frank’s comments at the end of the song are pretty right on….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swgWNM_4eNk (in case embed doesn’t work)

Thanks to the uploader for sharing this one!

Nick 

There’s nothing quite like an old Fender bass. They rumble, roar and shake a room like no other instrument. I’ve always been a fan of the precision bass over the jazz bass; that fat, woolly tone is what a bass should sound like, as far as I’m concerned

I’ve played a handful of old Fenders and they really were amazing. The earliest I’ve played was a ‘62 jazz bass - it hadn’t been set up for years, the strings were old and dead, the whole instrument was filthy… Bliss! Unfortunately for me, the guy knew EXACTLY what he had, so there was no way he was going to part with it. I wanted to have my own version of the story I’ve heard so often it makes me sick: ‘Well this guy said he had an old bass under his bed that he wanted to get rid of, so I bought it for $500. He didn’t know he’d sold me a ‘65 p-bass in beautiful condition’. Or when someone tells you that their uncle gave them the bass he used to play when he was a kid, which turns out to be a ‘59 p-bass….

The absolute worst, without exception, is when someone says they or someone they know have bought an old Fender bass and are too scared to play it, and it lives up on the wall or in it’s case. What the hell’s the point of that!? These instruments are made to be played, and they get better with age. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars on something just to hang it on a wall, get a great painting instead.

Every now and then I have a look for vintage Fender basses on Ebay. I’d love to have an early 60’s p-bass one day, but the prices just keep going up and up and up, and I doubt I’ll ever have the dough to get one. Although I have noticed a few more around for sale recently (economic crisis?), so maybe my dream will come true after all. A 1963 precision bass, sunburst with a red tortoise shell pickguard - is that too much to ask?

Having said all that, I love the bass I’ve got. It’s a Fender Squier p-bass, made in China. I got it in 1998 for $300, to learn on. It’s since paid for itself I don’t know how many times over. It’s filthy, hasn’t been set up for years, has old dead strings, records incredibly well, feels great and sounds beautiful!  

Maybe I don’t need a vintage fender after all  

Nick