Music

101 of my favourite recordings – 1

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It occurred to me that, before I die, I should, having spent a large part of my life listening to them, actually document the greatest recordings ever made. This will, of course, be a purely personal subjective listing and, as such, be uncontroversial and yet definitive 😉 I will catalogue them on a separate page but for now….in no particular order:

Hands Off by Jay McShann with Priscilla Bowman.

I think it was John Walters, the producer of John Peel‘s radio programmes, who observed that lyrics were superfluous to a great song; they could be replaced with “rhubarb and custard” and it would still be a great song. Hands Off certainly passes that test.

Vee Jay Record label for Hands Off

With the relentless drums and bass driving ever forward, occasionally punctuated by the horns, and the whole thing topped off with McShann’s piano intertwined with Bowman’s understated vocals and the extended fade out – like finding the ice cream goes right to the bottom of the cornet; it was unsurprisingly a big hit in December 1955 staying at number one on the Billboard R & B charts for three weeks.

Publicity shot of Jay McShann
Jay McShann

Jay McShann was a mostly self taught pianist. His thirteen piece big band in the 1930s had included the teenage Charlie Parker. It was while touring with McShann’s band in the early 1940s that Parker acquired the nickname ‘Yardbird’ from them. By the mid 1940s McShann set up a smaller band as was the trend at the time. In 1949 they had a hit with the band’s vocalist Jimmy Witherspoon‘s recording of Ain’t Nobody’s Business.

Witherspoon was replaced in the early 1950s by Priscilla Bowman. She had come from a church based background (her father was a minister) and, as a teenager, performing in local nightclubs where she adopted the popular styling of Ruth Brown‘s 1951 hit Teardrops from My Eye and the like.

Priscilla Bowman singing with microphone.
Priscilla Bowman

In 1955 McShann’s band were signed to Vee Jay Records where they recorded Hands Off. Unable to replicate the success Bowman was signed to Vee Jay as a solo artist in the late 1950s. Again failing to achieve any great success although in 1958 she was the first to record Brook Benton‘s song A Rockin’ Good Way before Benton and Dinah Washington had a hit with it in 1960.

Although Vee Jay was commercially successful with many hits, even releasing the early recordings by The Beatles in America after Capitol Records had said they were not interested (they would soon change their mind) financial mismanagement meant that they filed for bankruptcy in 1966.

Preston Foster was ‘inspired’ by Hands Off to write Got My Mo-Jo Working which was recorded by Ann Cole in 1956. The following year Muddy Waters would adapt the song for his own version.

Elvis Presley would perform both Got My Mo-Jo Working/Hands Off mashed together.

Recordings mentioned: (links to: Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube)

Jay McShann with Priscilla Bowman – Hands Off (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Jay McShann with Charlie Parker (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Jimmy Witherspoon – Ain’t Nobody’s Business (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Ruth Brown – Teardrops From My Eyes (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Priscilla Bowman – A rocking Good Way (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Brook Benton and Dinah Washington – A Rocking Good Way (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Ann Cole – Got My Mo-Jo Working (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Muddy Waters – Got My Mo-Jo Working (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

Elvis Presley – Got My MoJo Working/Hands Off (Apple Music,  Spotify, YouTube)

 

More Cowbell

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Heardle #74

🔊🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️

Today’s Heardle should not be too tough for people of a certain age; inevitably leading to this again… (Spoiler alert: Video reveals the answer)

https://vimeo.com/425939085

Ten Years After

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Rummaging around in here I discovered I still had a YouTube account, from the days before it became the quagmire of advertising and tracking it has become, which lead me to this old post from a decade ago:

http://blog.duncanmoran.net/archives/2437

The iPad was a mere one year old at the time but was already showing signs of its potential for making interesting noises. I suspect the missing video was for an, alas short lived and no longer available, app called Konkreet Performer which was an early attempt at new ways to interact with sounds on iPads:

A 2011 Konkreet Performer promotional video

Things have evolved over the years and today you have AudioBus to pump sound between apps, AUM to connect and mix instruments and effects and countless apps like TouchScaper and SoundScaper and even some that are not called somethingScaper. Although Smule still have some apps available their MadPad has also vanished; as has the Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra.

The other video in that old post was a young Frank Zappa performing on a bicycle during the Steve Allen TV show in March 1963. Many years ago I read about this but who could imagine that decades later and thousands of miles away you can sit on a sofa with an iPad watching the video and also learn how, in late 1962, the young Zappa would hang out in Don Preston‘s garage improvising soundtracks to various film clips. Preston had a range of junk percussion ‘instruments’ he used including a bicycle.

The Zappa Movie

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Once upon a time long long ago there was a Kickstarter Project to digitise the archive of material that Frank Zappa had created during his life – known as The Vault. Once digitised some would be used to create a movie about Zappa and his work. After delays and set backs (all that 2020 stuff) it looks like the project is coming to completion (click image for trailer)…

Zappa Movie Poster

One can only wonder what he would have thought of America today.

Too many distractions

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On TV quiz shows one frequently see old people explaining that now they are retired there is so much to do they wonder how they ever found time to go to work. Despite my best intentions to spend my retirement catching up with all the stuff I have never really got to grips with – half understood software, half learnt programming languages, books that were purchased but never read etc. – the torrent of new stuff continues to overwhelm. I should draw a line and say no more… but

The update to Logic looks exciting and Arturia’s extended free licence for Pigments and Analog Lab shouldn’t be wasted. And I am already way behind on the Tidal training sessions. Not to mention the endless opportunities to explore the musical backwaters available to stream.

And then I am about to throw out the sourdough starter I started a few days ago when the weather was warm but abandoned when the weather turned colder – my home is not warm enough ordinarily to sustain the beast, but, I think, ‘it does smell like a good starter’, so I gave it a feed and a drink and it has been bubbling away all day; so the weekend will be spent cultivating some bread.

Not to mention being on fox cub watch…

There is no time for this 100 day nonsense…

Yadit #100DaysToOffload

Vinyl-y

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Finally (after 25? years) got around to seeing if the dusty old record player still works. It does!

Apparently you connect it to something called Analog In these days. Alas my record collection is somewhat reduced from thousands to just four – which would have been four too many if it had not worked. This is a Thorens TD 321. It replaced a Garrard 301. I cannot recall what happened to the 301 – perhaps it just died from exhaustion. But I do still have the manual and test sheet.

The 301 replaced a Garrard SP 25 which had served well during my teens.

While I can appreciate the charm of old (and new) gramophone records I don’t think I will be in a hurry to acquire anymore anytime soon. Today’s streaming services are perfectly fine. There is a lot of nonsense talked about the pleasure of listening to music pressed into a plastic disc but I am not buying it. If there never had been any vinyl records and someone came up with the idea today would anyone be saying “What a great idea!” or , after they stopped laughing, would they point out that the discs are easily damaged, bulky, heavy, difficult to store etc.?

For the record: The pictured disc is The Mothers Of Invention‘s Cruising With Ruben & The Jets on the Verve label which, in the UK, was distributed by Polydor in the mid 70’s as opposed to the original 60’s issue which had been distributed by EMI – there was a time when this stuff was interesting and important.

You can listen to it here:

Apple Music

Spotify

YouTube

Yadit #100DaysToOffload

Conway’s Life as noise

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To the ever-growing list of names of people that have been so familiar (almost as if we actually knew them) but are now no more we must add John Conway. Many who dabbled with programming on old computers will have implemented a version of Conway’s Game of Life which determined if a cell should live or die by following a set of rules:

  1. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.
  2. Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
  3. All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.

There is a version implemented within the wonderful Xynthesizr which allows for some random generative noise. We add a few cells, which live or die by the rules, and then let it evolve by itself – never quite reaching a stable state.

It uses a Messiaen scale. There was a nice tribute by XKCD too…

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The award for best song title for the weekend goes to Machine Woman for…

Have You Been To Salford Shopping Centre, Have You Seen Argos?

But it was only the second best tune of the weekend.

The fascinating story of Nancy Dupree

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The Vinyl Factory blog listed a BBC Essential Mix by the Australian group The Avalanches. Their mix included a couple of pieces by Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fischer so I had a (brief) listen. One of the tracks was a strange piano and children singing piece about James Brown credited to Nancy Dupree…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzWAylk7G5Y

Intrigued one turned to the Interwebs to find out more….

Nancy Dupree
Nancy Dupree

Nancy Dupree was a music teacher in New York in the 1960s. Seeing that the children had no interest in the official bland and boring curriculum she encouraged them to start writing their own songs related to their lives while introducing them to the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone et.al…

She even persuaded the likes of B B King, Muhammad Ali and Roland Kirk to visit the school and talk to the children.

They produced enough songs to record a whole album which they called Ghetto Reality. Encountering Moses Asch she badgered him into releasing the album on his Folkways Records label.

She was eventually sacked from the teaching job, ostensibly for refusing to wear the required high heels, and was alarmed to see the school call the police to remove the children protesting about her departure.

She subsequently worked in various jobs, made recordings of her poetry, associated with the Black Panthers, wrote a play and died of leukaemia at the age of 44.

More…

The Guardian

The recordings are available from:

Folkways

Apple Music

Spotify