#2Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)
After Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the most popular musician and bandleader in jazz is almost certainly bassist/pianist/fucking genius Charles Mingus. Mingus operated within the same post-bop space as most other big names did in the late 50s and early 60s, but from his background in big band jazz, he could bring to it a flair for groove and swing, a precisely arranged tumultuousness, and a greater sense of tight, planned composition. In most jazz pieces, a vibe is established at the outset and the solos roll forth from there. Mingus songs could twist and turn, a mass of voices could enter and leave throughout the song at his whim. The man also had an uncanny sense for the avant-garde, and a strange sense of humour, which emanates throughout his music.
The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is Mingus’ magnum opus. In his own words, “throw all other records of mine away except maybe one other…. This is the first time the company I have recorded with set out to help me give you, my audience, a clear picture of my musical ideas…” Its four tracks are one massive forty minute suite, a great slab of experimental big band. Themes are cumulatively established and then recur and are used in new ways and taken in new directions across all four tracks. By the end of the album, they are coming so thick and fast, they are overlapping and running into each other, yet the whole thing is meticulously crafted, like a symphony being played by a jazz band.
How different is The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady from other jazz? If you look at old jazz albums, they normally came with liner notes like this and this, a comprehensive review and breakdown of the album by a jazz critic, frequently printed right there on the back sleeve of the album. At Mingus’ request, Black Saint’s liner notes include a review written by his psychiatrist, Edmund Pollock. Mingus famously had a fiery temper, and suffered from periods of depression, which inspired the music on this album.
Bold claim: this is the most emotionally charged and riveting album in the jazz canon. Like Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto, it can move from gorgeous bliss at one moment, to agonising, heart-rending despair the next.
It’s hard to speak of favourite parts in such an interconnected work as this. There are countless moments of an ilk you won’t hear on any other album, and their power comes from their context not just within the track, but the suite overall.
So I will just post a link to the whole thing. However, the album culminates in the end of the last track, where all previous themes are dropped cold and one new, last great expression of pain and defiance is screamed out over and over for the last four or five minutes - the closest thing I can compare to it is the ending of Opeth’s Deliverance – before the album comes full circle, returning to the beginning, and expires with one more cry of anguish from the saxophone.
#1The Grateful Dead - Live/Dead / Fillmore West 1969 (recorded 1969, first released in 1969, second in 2005)
Way back in the list, I described how Scenes From A Memory was the single most transformative album I ever listened to, that it took my narrowing musical taste and led me to look again at all rock and metal and further, into a vast array of genres. There was a clear and distinct Before SFAM and After SFAM. That album was like a rebirth, the real beginning of my taste in music.
In that sense then, I view my discovery of Live/Dead and The Grateful Dead as being the other bookend, an ending of sorts. Few keen voyagers of the seemingly endless sonic landscapes would like to admit that one day, their lust for a new mountain range might expire, they might have travelled to every country that they’re going to enjoy traversing, that they may find an exciting new village or two in places already dear to them, but their wanderlust will have ceased, if they haven’t simply exhausted their possibilities. It feels like The Grateful Dead was one last great vista I laid my eyes upon and whose heights I scaled before my enthusiasm for exploring largely fell away, perhaps directly as a result of finding them. As the years have passed since, I now doubt I’m going to regain that enthusiasm, but I feel no regret or sadness about it, because of the sheer unfathomable brilliance of that last place I found myself.
Who are the Grateful Dead then? If you haven’t looked into them much, you probably know them as that hippie jam band who did some folky songs (and maybe you’re familiar with Touch of Grey, their 80s hit).
The Grateful Dead are the nexus of a huge number of genres. In their thirty years of music, you can find at least moments of: psychedelic rock, both a breezy form and a miasmal swampy heavy kind; folk, country and bluegrass; blues rock; rock and roll; jazz and fusion; space rock, heading into avant-garde and the roots of noise rock; funk and reggae and disco moments; there are even a few prog-inflected tracks in there. I once saw them described as the culmination of all Americana and American music, at least up until the mid-70s, and it's really not that much of a stretch to say that.
The appeal of the band is largely in their live music, and a pretty good majority of the 2,250 odd shows they played are out there, as audience recordings and/or soundboard recordings made by the band and then slyly distributed to the masses by their archivist of mixed loyalties in the 90s, Dick Latvala. The band’s live sound constantly evolved. You can listen to them in 1969 and 1970 and you’re listening to a different band. Hell, with time, you can listen to shows a few months apart and your ear will pick up their subtle evolution. The band changed up their songs a lot, and there were a few that the band had no fixed way of playing whatsoever, where every performance was a new adventure.
The closest you'll get to a consensus amongst Deadheads is that the best year for live performances is one of 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1977, 1989 or 1990. Their first peak then, and possibly their greatest, is documented on
Live/Dead and Fillmore West 1969.
Both of these live albums are taken from a run of four concerts in San Fran in 1969. The band’s sound throughout the preceding few years had been a slow perfection of a steamy, heady, wild, often quite heavy psychedelic rock, and it finally reached an apex in these shows.
Live/Dead opens with the band’s signature song, the indefinable metamorphosing deep space bliss of
Dark Star. This 23 minute performance is one of the best the band ever pulled off, and is a nice introduction to where the song and the band are capable of going – to use an infamous quote, “their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists”. Want to know the scale of this song?
Here's a jazz pianist breaking down and analysing this performance of Dark Star - for ninety minutes. And need I reiterate that this is ONE take of a song that varied vastly performance to performance.
They then go on to the more conventional, but still strange
St. Stephen, before the full throttle reckless kaleidoscopic attack of
The Eleven, which curves around to
Turn On Your Lovelight. This band had a variety of personalities across its history, and a major one of the early years is keyboardist and horny bluesman caricature Pigpen, whose crowning moment in the band is probably Lovelight. Next is the much more subdued, blues-ey, but lyrically dark
Death Don’t Have No Mercy, before eight minutes of the band composing with screaming feedback, and then they sing goodnight a capella.
This 75 minute album is the merest sampling though. For a fuller look at the band’s music during those four shows, there’s the three and a half hour companion
Fillmore West 1969 (there’s also a ten disc boxset out there with every minute of all four shows). Highlights are the nuclear doom epic
Morning Dew, another jawdropping Lovelight, heartrending psychedelic folk piece
Mountains of the Moon, a very different reading of The Eleven; and the entire third disc, with one of the band’s other signature jam pieces, the hard-rocking
That’s It For The Other One, and a 55 minute continuous run though Alligator, Caution, Feedback and And We Bid You Goodnight.
Topic: Fluffy's Favourite Albums (currently #2 > #1) (Read 12661 times)
