#60's jazz

[oopsl]

Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album by John Coltrane, 2018

[swedish-songs]

One of the best things about living in Sweden, are the long, light summer nights. A song that perfectly captures this is Sakta vi gå genom stan (Slowly strolling through town), a free translation by Swedish entertainer Beppe Wolgers of the jazz song "Walkin' My Baby Back Home". The Swedish version is about taking a stroll home through Stockholm on a warm summer night.

It was recorded by one of Swedens most famous jazz singers of all time, Monica Zetterlund, in 1961. Zetterlund was a vaudeville performer, a jazz performer, a stage and movie actress. She also performed with a range of world-famous jazz musicians such as Bill Evans, Louis Armstrong and Stan Getz. Together with Bill Evans, she released the album Waltz for Debbie in 1964.

Sakta vi gå genom stan became a huge hit in Sweden when it was released and has been ever since. Radio Stockholm dubbed it the no.1 song about Stockholm. I found a video of "Amerikanen reacts to svenska klassiker", a Youtube series where youtuber Jonathan Rollins reacts to Swedish hits. The song has been played so many times it almost feels cliché at this point, but watching someone else hear it for the first time made it feel brand new to me!

[thegroovyarchives]

1966 Kenny Burrell Have Yourself A Soulful Little Christmas album

[histonics]

[metalcultbrigade]

The Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money. 04/03/1968

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

The Beat Generation 1992 Beat Poetry / Jazz / Spoken Word / Vocalese / Comedy

The much publicized, ridiculed, and parodied Beat Generation, which started sometime in the late 1940s and was eventually subsumed by the hippie and countercultural movements of the 60s, did not end up producing too much music of its own, but the whole lifestyle and aesthetic that it promoted, along with its iconic literary works from the holy trinity of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, is integral to the history of popular music as we know it. The beatniks themselves worshipped jazz cats like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and plenty of musicians, such as Bob Dylan and The Beatles, drew lots of inspiration from the Beat Generation. Plus, another major figure of the movement, Neal Cassady, was also in The Merry Pranksters, a roving group of folks who ended up bridging the chronological gap between beatniks and hippies, and toured the continental US in a bus while giving out free LSD to people, which was chronicled in Tom Wolfe's famous Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book; and members of the Grateful Dead were in those same Merry Pranksters too.

So what we have here is less a triple-disc compilation of music from the Rhino label—although there is definitely music on it—and more a full-on audio documentation of what made the Beat Generation what it was, which in addition to *some* music, includes a lot of Beat poetry, interviews, news items, and mini-audio documentaries too. Here, you get 197 minutes of Beat material, a solid chunk of which is provided by that aforementioned holy trinity themselves, plus kindred spirits like controversial comedic legend Lenny Bruce, whose righteous battle for the freedom to publicly say whatever he wanted without any repercussion made him a Beat ally, even if he was not in any way a beatnik himself.

But for the music that *is* on here, we've got some of the bebop jazz tunes that the beatniks went totally nuts for, including Charlie Parker's terrific "Cosmic Rays," which is one of many songs that demonstrate just what a deft saxophonist Parker really was. And we've got something from Tom Waits too, who arrived way too late to be a beatnik himself, but was nevertheless fond of the movement, and wound up showing his appreciation with his uniquely gravelly voice on "Jack and Neal / California, Here I Come," in which Jack is Jack Kerouac and Neal is Neal Cassady.

So if you're looking for over three hours of music, you're not gonna find it on this release, but if you want something of a definitive audio document of one of the most important and influential subcultures to have ever been formed in American history, without which where we would be now as a culture and society is completely unknowable, you should definitely check this thing out.

And by the way, there's an acid jazzy mid-90s trip hop tune by a German guy named Jazz Con Bazz called "Wayz of Life" that I've been listening to for years now that samples one of the audio documentary tracks that appears on this release. Really blew my fucking mind when I heard the sample too; like, I felt like Wee-Bey in that famous scene from The Wire that's since been turned into one of the greatest gifs of all time. Holy shit! 🤯

Highlights: CD1:

Nelson Riddle - "Route 66 Theme"

CD2:

Charlie Parker - "Cosmic Rays" Edd "Kookie" Byrnes - "Kookie's Mad Pad"

[dankalbumart]

Underground by Thelonious Monk Columbia 1968 Jazz / Bop / Hard Bop / Post-Bop / Piano Jazz

[nocentis]

If anyone likes oldies, I have a playlist to offer you.

[a-contemplative-soul]

Love the elegant and joyful vibes of this one, I never thought an harp would fit so well in jazz, this is the perfect song to put on the background of a fun meeting of friends in a coffee shop. Song: Games Artist: Dorothy Ashby Year: 1968

[jasonzsongs]

Les McCann - Burnin' Coal (c.1969)

[thedizzyrizzler]

On this date in 1968, @vanmorrisonofficial - 'Astral Weeks' was released.

📈 #6 for 1968, #385 overall

"Astral Weeks feels like listening to literature. Like how when you're so engrossed in a novel, you do not even feel like you're reading it. The story has a hold of you and you are now in its control. Astral Weeks starts playing and you can just float - satisfied intellectually and emotionally - but still in full of surrender of Van and these amazing musicians.

If I could suggest an ideal setting for listening to it, perhaps at dawn or dusk, depending on when you're at your most vulnerable. Alone sitting on a porch, feet up, staring at an orange sky and contemplating everything and nothing in your life. It's good.

Astral Weeks is quiet and as delicate as an eyelash, but strong enough to dictate your temperament like a bag of sedatives. The light plucking double bass line throughout the album is enough to curb the crankiest insomniac amongst us. Just do not confuse Astral Weeks with dull or boring, in fact Morrison's voice alone, bends and stretches so nicely, that an a cappella version of the album would be worthy enough.

Astral Weeks is an album that needs the proper respect to be heard the right way. Background music for cleaning the house, or with the headphones on the treadmill is simply a waste of time. It rewards close inspection and can fight off any interrogation you give it." - RYM user cancon

[mitjalovse]

Session musicians are probably the most obvious candidate for the biggest numbers of credits on platters, but which one could have topped them all? Hal Blaine remains definitely unparalleled here. I think he might have broken the record for him being prolific, though I do regret he didn't do more on his own. True, he remained busy like Carol Kaye, his fellow Wrecking Crew member, so he didn't have a chance to do that many solo albums. However, those who did should be cherished. Psychedelic Percussion, for example, might have a simple title, yet the grooves on the LP should be studied for what they achieve. Sure, the name dates the platter immensely, yet the way he managed to put his own spin on this sonic era? You hear a master session musician at work here.

[i-am-against-being-touched]

does nina simone make any misses???? ever????

[metalcultbrigade]

Frank Zappa / The Mothers Of Invention - Cruising With Ruben & The Jets. 02/12/1968

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Unrehearsed Perfection 1998 Jazz / Bop / Hard Bop / Smooth Jazz / Post-Bop

Some of you folks may find this a bit hard to believe, but as someone who never drinks any coffee themselves, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times in my life that I've actually stepped foot inside of a Starbucks. And yet, through some kind of osmosis, I was still somehow ambiently aware of just how integral music had become to their own business model and brand in the 90s, as they pumped out a constant stream of exclusively-sold CDs that matched what was in rotation over their very own speakers at the time.

And it'd all apparently started at some point in the late 80s, when they were still just a small Seattle chain, and had hired a former record store owner named Timothy Jones, who'd just decided that he needed a change in his own life and was then given the keys to manage his own favorite nearby coffee spot across the way from his old record shop. By the time Jones had arrived, each Starbucks was being sent a different four-hour cassette tape of classical music each month to play, and as someone who'd spent his entire life around music himself, he became the store's curator for those tapes. Without anyone's knowledge, though, Jones proceeded to diversify Starbucks' musical programming, and eventually expanded into jazz, reggae, and blues too. And with this change then came the inevitable question from customers, "do you guys sell any of this music that you play here?"

And at first they didn't, but by 1995, they had started to, with their first ever release, Blue Note Blend, which had initiated their original run of jazz compilations too. Within less than a month, this album had managed to sell 50,000 copies across Starbucks' 500 stores, which then naturally led to the vast expansion of their own serious music hustle that saw them releasing CDs on a consistent basis well into the 2010s.

And there were certainly bumps along the way too. At a certain point, beyond just selling nicely curated compilations of classy coffeehouse ambiance, they'd decided to take things a step or two further, and haphazardly got themselves more directly involved in the record business, which ended up resulting in a lot of anodyne, exclusive, unwanted, contemporary crap from beloved legends who should've known better. Even Sonic Youth put out a song exclusively through Starbucks once 😆.

And eventually, as the returns on CDs continued to diminish, and streaming became peoples' typical avenue for listening consumption, Starbucks dropped their CD-selling angle and their record label antics altogether and decided to partner with Spotify in the mid-2010s.

But as we now go back in time to their late 90s musical heyday, here's one of the greatest classic jazz compilations that they had apparently ever put out, Unrehearsed Perfection, which may've come off as a somewhat random assortment to the casual listener, but as its title indicates, was actually pretty uniquely thematic, as it consisted solely of recordings from the catalog of the legendary Impulse! Records that'd somehow been made in only one, single, miraculous take.

So on here, we've got a whole host of legends: Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, twice—who himself played an integral role in the early success of Impulse! with A Love Supreme—Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, McCoy Tyner, and Charles Mingus.

And while most of these selections seem to match that idyllically cozy, warm, and familial 90s Starbucks aesthetic, it's Mingus' own "II B.S.," off of his classic 1964 album, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, that serves as the big exception here, as it starts from just Mingus' own lonely double-bassline, but progressively expands into a beast of its own making, with sharp, addled lead horn action among an actively large backing band that is surely to take every coffee drinker's focus off of whatever else they're doing and tune their ears to this masterpiece instead 😌.

So, you may not really think about it, but with people digging the ambiance that Starbucks had provided as they rapidly expanded all across the US throughout the 90s and 2000s, they also sort of somewhat quietly managed to become kind of a big pop cultural music staple with their varied litany of CD offerings too. And before today, I had never listened to any of the many compilations that they had put out over the years, but if this CD itself is any indication, then it's easy to see why music became such a focal point of their business, because the selection job that was done by their very own former-Seattle-record-shop-owner-turned-store-manager here, Timothy Jones, was definitely top-tier👏.

Starbucks has kind of grown into a gross, impersonal behemoth like all large, ubiquitous chains more or less inevitably seem to do, but their idea to sell more than just coffee and pastries in that pivotal mid-90s moment definitely went a long way towards endearing themselves to folks in more lasting ways than just being a dime-a-dozen coffee shop ever could. People deriving pleasure from a restaurant business in a way that doesn't actually involve food or drink is not something that seems to organically happen very often, but you have to think that Starbucks' CD venture was akin to what a business like McDonald's had managed to pull off by putting collectable toys in their very own Happy Meals. Get people to think fondly of your business beyond your main selling point, and you've got some serious loyalty!

OK, that's more than enough positive big business spin from me today 😅. Shop local whenever you can so that the money you spend can circulate within your own community for a longer period of time, but don't hate something good that a big business might incidentally end up doing, like putting out quality CDs like this one! ✌️

Highlights:

McCoy Tyner - "Caravan" Duke Ellington - "Limbo Jazz" Johnny Hartman - "Ain't Misbehavin'" Oliver Nelson - "Stolen Moments" Diana Krall - "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" John Coltrane - "Acknowledgement" J.J. Johnson & Kai Winding - "I Concentrate On You" Benny Carter & His Orchestra - "Body and Soul" Charles Mingus - "II B.S." Milt Jackson Quartet - "Paris Blues" Sonny Rollins - "Blue Room"

[heartfeltletters-written]

what do YOU know about music?