Greville St Bookstore

THE BLUE MOMENT
by Richard Williams
hb $39.95

This year celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, one of the most significant recordings of 20th century music. Commonly cited as the best selling jazz album of all time, it’s also the jazz album most likely to be found in the collections of non-jazz listeners. As for the rest of us, how many copies have we purchased over the years, on vinyl and CD, up to and including this year’s Collector’s Edition box set? Dignity prevents me from a full confession.

Richard Williams began his book — subtitled ‘Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Making of Modern Music’ — a few years back, but put it aside when he got wind of Ashley Kahn’s 2001 book on the same subject. A few years on, Williams has come to realize that he’d always intended to write a very different book to Kahn — not so much about the making of the album, but instead about the cultural milieu that led up to its recording, and how it went on to influence so much that followed it.

Kind of Blue was recorded in quick time over two days in March and April 1959, at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York, a deconsecrated Armenian Orthodox church. Even today, it remains almost comprehensible how half a dozen musicians could lay down these pieces — most in a single take — within that timeframe. But it’s Williams’ contention that it didn’t happen in isolation, that numerous prior forces came together to bear upon that moment. He casts a wide net in looking at the cultural mix that impacted upon Davis in the years leading up to the recording, including Davis’s friendship with composer and arranger Gil Evans, which resulted in the influential Birth of the Cool sessions in 1948-49; the rise of Third Stream music; and the theoretical writings of George Russell, whose ideas underpinned the rise of modal jazz, so critical to Kind of Blue. But equally Williams looks to Davis’s visits to Paris, where he met Jean-Paul Sartre, the godfather of existentialism, and recorded film music for director Louis Malle — the latter a wildly improvised score that, for the first time, elevated mood over composition. Williams also looks to the place of the colour blue in modern art — Picasso and Yves Klein — and the lonely outsider heralded by the Beat generation. These were just some of the surrounds that coalesced in the lead-up to 1959.

For Kind of Blue, Davis drew on the immense talents of his fellow musicians, in particular John Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans. The genius of Davis’s musical sketches lay in their open-ended structure, requiring the musicians to improvise on a series of modes instead of chord progressions. At its heart, the music was as much informed by Gil Evans’ love of French impressionist composers, such as Fauré, as it was by non-western musical traditions. In its totality, which “speaks to some profound ideal of the human condition”, it is music that stretches to infinity, without beginning or end. Kind of Blue is one of the earliest concept albums — a series of haunting sketches meditating on the colour blue – that speaks to us across the ages.

So far so good. But when Williams gets to his second major theme — the influence of Kind of Blue on music that came after — things begin to go a bit awry. Some of his examples are well documented — John Coltrane’s modal explorations, the Bill Evans trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, Joe Zawinul’s compositions for Cannonball Adderley and later Davis albums, such as In a Silent Way, Duane Allman’s improvisatory solos, through to James Brown’s ‘Cold Sweat’, based on a riff from Kind of Blue’s lead track ‘So What’. But Williams has an unfortunate tendency to see the hand of influence everywhere, from John Cale’s work with the Velvet Underground, through to Eno’s ambient experiments. In particular, he overly focuses upon minimalist composers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young. It makes for good reading, but there’s a sense he’s drawing a long bow.

It’s in his final chapter that Williams hits upon what is possibly Kind of Blue’s greatest offspring — Manfred Eicher’s ECM label. It’s arguable that Eicher has founded an entire aesthetic of recording based upon the languid moments of silence to be found on Kind of Blue — the spaces opening out between the players and their instruments, and the otherworldly sound of Miles’s trumpet. Williams ends his book paying homage to Australian band the Necks, in whose music he hears a direct lineage to Kind of Blue. With their “slow accretion of harmonic information and rhythmic intensity”, the Necks “exploit the spaces that were opened up for them all those years ago; spaces in harmony, rhythm and melody, but also spaces in the mind”. And therein lies the immortal legacy of Kind of Blue.

—reviewed by Des

VAGABOND HOLES: DAVID MCCOMB & THE TRIFFIDS
edited by Chris Coughran & niall Lucy
pb $35.00

It seems unjust that David McComb is not around to reap the rewards that would no doubt have come his way on the strength of the recent re-issue program of the Triffids’ back catalogue. Some ten years after his death, at age 36, his reputation as one of our finest songwriters continues its ascendancy.

This book is not a biography of McComb, but instead a loose collection of writings by friends, musicians, poets and academics. The editors state they were trying for an Exile on Main Street sort of book — baggy and sprawling — a vagabond collection, full of holes. Within its covers can be found brief memoirs by Nick Cave. Robert Forster, and Mick Harvey, alongside those of fellow Triffids Alsy MacDonald, Phil Karkulas, Graham Lee and Robert McComb. There are diary extracts from Steve Kilby, poetry by Laurie Duggan and John Kinsella, and essays on McComb’s lyrics and influences, both musical and literary. Taken together, it doesn’t quite add up to a portrait, but more a jumble of jigsaw pieces that can be assembled by readers in multiple ways.

In likening their book to an eclectic ‘mix tape’, the editors virtually acknowledge that its intended audience will comb through it for what they like, sifting the contents for the jewels therein. It’s a well-designed book, littered with photographs and drawings, and its very existence is further testament to the restoration of McComb to his rightful place in the pantheon of local songwriters. My only beef is that it tells us too little of his life story — for that we’ll have to await Bleddyn Butcher’s forthcoming biography from UK press Helter Skelter. As an added extra to Vagabond Holes, publisher Fremantle Arts Press have also seen fit to separately release a slim volume of McComb’s poems: Beautiful Waste, again edited by Coughran and Lucy, with introduction by fellow West Australian poet John Kinsella.

—reviewed by Des

REVOLUTION IN THE AIR: THE SONGS OF BOB DYLAN VOL 1: 1957-1973
by Clinton Heylin
HB $45

No matter how big the corpus of writings on Dylan grows, it seems that each year brings us a weighty new tome that challenges or expands our perceptions of his career to date. Clinton Heylin is no stranger to Dylan, having published several previous books, including the classic Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades – Take Two. But he’s maybe outdone himself with this new project, the first of two books that will look at every song that Dylan has written, beginning with ‘Song to Brigit’, rumored to be the first ever song Dylan wrote circa 1956-57, through to 2006.

This first volume recounts the stories behind 300 songs Dylan wrote from his earliest days up until Planet Waves. Heylin goes to great lengths in his introduction to distinguish his book from others, in particular his decision to set out the songs in the order in which they were written rather than recorded. He includes every song Dylan is known to have written, including those never recorded, and for the latter, where possible, he tracks down original manuscripts of lyrics rather than relying on transcripts from live concert recordings. For each entry or song, Heylin provides the story, the context, the background, stylistic or other influences, and provides data on first performance, first recording, and prior publication of the lyrics. Song entries run from half a page to half a dozen pages.

It is probably fair to say this is not a book for reading cover to cover, certainly not in a single sitting. Heylin’s research is meticulous and exhaustive, and probably best approached whilst listening to the songs on a particular album, perhaps with a copy of the 1985 or 2004 collected lyrics to hand. But for anyone making the effort, there is much new information to be found here, Heylin’s aim being nothing less than “providing an authoritative history of the most multifaceted canon in twentieth century popular song.”

There are few artists who warrant this sort of attention. In last month’s Rhythms, Brian Wise spoke about a friend who’d lashed out on a Blue Ray DVD player, just so as to spend the next few months rooting around in Neil Young’s Archives Vol I. So too does Dylan deserve that special attention, perhaps more than any other popular recording artist. The more we listen, read and learn, the more we uncover, which is the sign of any great artist. In what is an increasingly crowded marketplace, Heylin’s new book rightfully takes its place on the shelf as one of the dozen essential books on Dylan’s remarkable career. As Dylan said in a 1985 interview: “It’s not for me to understand my songs… they make sense to me, but it’s not like I can explain them”. Thankfully, we have Heylin for that.

AND A VOICE TO SING WITH: A MEMOIR
by Joan Baez
pb $34.95

For better or worse, it has been Joan Baez’s lot in life to have her name indelibly linked to that of Bob Dylan’s. I imagine this must grate at times, given their personal relationship was nearly half a century ago and lasted little more than three years, up until his triumphant tour of England in the spring of 1965. Of her first meeting with Bob, she remembers: “I first saw Bob Dylan in 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. He was not overly impressive… He spat out the words to his own songs. They were original and refreshing, if blunt and jagged. He was absurd, new and grubby beyond words”. She was soon in love, introducing him at her shows, promoting his genius to whoever would listen; a favour not returned once his own career took off.

Baez proffers at the outset her gratitude to have been born gifted with a remarkable singing voice, a soprano pure as the driven snow. To that we could add her striking good looks, the product of Scottish and Mexican ancestry. Given her somewhat lower profile these days, it’s easy to forget just how big she was at the dawn of the sixties, debuting as a nineteen year old at the Newport Folk Festiv
al in 1959, selling out concert halls in New York and Boston by 1961, featuring on the cover of Time magazine in 1962, and eventually seeing the decade out in style at Woodstock. (Oh, and she tells us her name is pronounced more like “Bize”, rather than “Buy-ezz”).

Joan Baez first published her memoir in 1987, and my only complaint with this re-issue is that it hasn’t been updated to account for the past twenty years. However, that said, there’s more than enough living in her book to account for half a dozen lives. She is candid about her years with Dylan, and the pain he caused her, including her return match as part of Bob’s mid-seventies Rolling Thunder review, which saw her perversely dress up and perform onstage as his twin. She details other relationships, in particular her first husband David Harris, who was in prison for draft dodging at the time Baez performed at Woodstock, and her sister Mimi, wife of talented novelist Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcar accident in 1966.

But perhaps Baez has been defined more than anything else by her commitment to non-violence and politics. So po-faced and unwavering is she in pursuit of justice for all, that it’s easy to see why comic artist Al Capp felt impelled to poke fun at her by creating the character of Phoanie Joanie in his sixties strip Li’l Abner. Baez recounts her opposition to the Vietnam War, her visit to Hanoi, her role in Amnesty International, her support for mothers of the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina, her concerts in post-Franco Spain. She lectures and cajoles her audience from the stage between songs that, well, pretty much carry a political message anyway. Some of her personal memories, su
ch as her friendship with Martin Luther King, remain moving; others, such as her wide-eyed admiration for the walrus-mustached Lech Walesa, seem, with hindsight, past their use-by-date.

To its credit, Baez’s memoir goes out in style, as she performs in the circus that was Live Aid. Believing it to be the Woodstock for an eighties generation, she hitches herself to Sir Bob Geldof’s bandwagon. In reality, it turns out to be anything but, as rampant egos fight it out for best dressed and access to the ‘red mike’ during an all-in rendition of ‘We are the World’. She knows that the best of her career is behind her, and that, unlike Dylan, she’ll be forever relegated in people’s minds to the ghetto of sixties folk music. But she’s happy to be there, to be part of it all still, singing hand in hand with Chrissie Hynde, whilst eyeing off the “charismatic hunk of maleness” that is Don Johnson, having stayed true to her beliefs, and to the gift that she was born with.

—reviewed by Des Cowley