Log #139 - Gentle Nighthawks

This week I take in an early and oft overlooked album from Tom Waits - his 1975 outing Nighthawks At The Diner - an atmospheric whole greater than the sum of its insignificant parts. Eccentric English prog rockers Gentle Giant are given short shrift with their most famous album Octopus. 

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The Alan Parsons Project Tales Of Mystery And Imagination
Tom Waits Nighthawks At The Diner
Fennesz Endless Summer

Tord Gustavsen Trio The Other Side

Emilie Simon Vegetal

Gentle Giant Octopus

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Oh, what can I say? It’s a shame to write off a whole band’s career in a short paragraph but I’m afraid it’s gonna happen here. 

I was made aware of Gentle Giant through some positive reviews on a Facebook forum I follow. I was also aware that one or two of their album covers were Roger Dean designs - most famously the Octopus one below which is the subject of this brief review - the album, their 4th, indeed entitled Octopus.

The music is incredibly busy, taking in elements of Genesis, Traffic, ELP, Atomic Rooster (lots of piano) and Yes. It's a real prog rock soup with all sorts of vegetables thrown in but they aren't liquidised very well and, despite the obvious instrumental chops of the band, it's all a bit of an unpalatable stew.

In fact the group's stated mission statement was to:

Expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular.

Perhaps this is why, in their decade of existence (1970-80), they never achieved the fame, fortune and admiration bestowed on many of their contemporaries.

I'm not a massive Tom Waits aficionado but feel that (like a lot of artists) he had a 70s phase, and an everything afterwards phase (not that I'm aware of much that he has done since the 80s). When he started out he sang conventional ballads and love songs - some of the tracks on the early albums like The Heart Of Saturday Night are beautiful. Even the singing was tuneful.

Then something happened around the turn of that decade. Waits went industrial. His music became dominated by clanking rhythms and gravelly barking vocals. The main album I was aware of that demonstrated this new sound was Swordfishtrombones. Actually this makes perfect sense. Waits had changed labels, his initial label Asylum dropping him for "failing to move beyond cult status". Swordfishtrombones was released in 1983 - his first album for the new label Island and his 7th overall.

This album was doing the rounds when I was a Uni student. There was even a track on the jukebox at our main drinking hole, the Red Cow in Exeter. How many jukeboxes have Tom Waits on them? Not many but this was no ordinary jukebox, and the Red Cow was certainly no ordinary pub (sadly no longer there). The track was the drunken sing-a-long In The Neighbourhood and would be aired nightly.

As a fan of hard rock Tom Waits remained a bit of a mystery to me (I was much more acquainted with the AC/DC numbers on said jukebox). But eventually I got the album, and followed it closely with Frank's Wild Years, Raindogs, Small Change, The Heart Of Saturday Night, Foreign Affairs, Big Time, One From The Heart and my favourite, Blue Valentine, which I think perfectly bridged the two types of Tom Waits.

Note not much from the late 80s on. This is an oversight on my part yet to be rectified - as indicated by the ranking below (Waits' output is so consistent it is hard to find a consensus for such a list - maybe one for me to tackle in the future?).

https://www.ranker.com/list/best-tom-waits-albums-list/reference

Also interesting to note that Waits lags behind other celebrated singer-songwriters (Young, Dylan, Morrison etc) in my overall frequency rankings with just the 5 to date.

Tom Waits tops my bucket list of artists I want to see live.

To be fair the gravel vocals came first and were already in place before the industrial clanking which coincided more with the powerful barking delivery which has remained in place ever since those 80s albums. When Waits recorded Nighthawks At The Diner it was only his 3rd album and he was only 26 although his voice sounds like a weary old man of 62 who has seen it all.

The album is set up like a live recording made in a seedy jazz basement. Actually it was set up, literally. The recording was made in a LA studio in front of a small audience of select guests, friends and record executives. Backed by seasoned jazz session musicians Waits slurs his way through a series of down tempo cabaret numbers interspersed with spoken asides, banter and his trademark humour, playing the role of the barfly troubadour to the max.

As the album goes, and the songs within, it's certainly not his best work, and doesn't reach the heights of the similarly jazzily improvised Astral Weeks. But despite its contrived origin, it does have a tremendous smoke filled atmosphere you could cut with a knife, and reminds me why the tour shy Tom Waits tops my bucket list of artists I want to see live. There is very little chance of this happening unfortunately.

Edward Hopper's famous 1942 depiction

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Log #138 - The Other Sides Of Jazz

A couple of new jazz albums in the player this week. Quite different.

Firstly Kamasi Washington who seems to be a bit of a poster boy for the "new jazz revival". His latest album Heaven and Earth is of epic proportions, as was his previous release, the appropriately entitled The Epic. In fact it topped many "best of" lists for 2018. For me, I've tried to get into it, but so far I've been left slightly cold by the myriad of different tones which include samba beats, stage show numbers, soul, gospel, vocals and, most disturbingly, 80s style electronica. Kamasi seems a big personality and this is big music. I must try harder.

Much more my tea at the moment is a beautiful album from Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen which I discovered by chance after overhearing the track Re-Melt at a Brighton Festival Open House (I stood transfixed by the speaker unable to move until it was over). Fittingly from the ECM label The Other Side is Gustaven's eighth album.

The Alan Parsons Project Tales Of Mystery And Imagination
Tom Waits Nighthawks At The Diner
Fennesz Endless Summer

Tord Gustavsen Trio The Other Side

Emilie Simon Vegetal

Kamasi Washington Heaven And Earth

In contrast to the Washington album this is gentle minimalist jazz all about the subtle ebbs and flows and the space in between. Gustavsen explains:

There is this idea in the title of the way the trio plays as being the other side of virtuosity, a kind of paradoxical virtuosity where you don’t play all the notes you can but merely the notes that are really needed. It’s about subordinating your ego to the flow of the music – and that takes a kind of ‘radical listening’ – listen more than you play. That’s a passion the three of us share.

Indeed the trio display admirable restraint through twelve modestly lengthed tracks of sparse beauty. The piano playing is melodic and recalls the Debussy preludes - the classical influences are confirmed with three arrangements of Bach pieces. The piano leads but is backed by perfect double bass and drum accompaniment. 

Although potentially verging on the Keith Jarrett type easy listening stylings the album's sheer beauty, perfectly encapsulated in the lilting opening track The Tunnel (below), overcomes any accusations of "imperceptibility" as levelled at The Cinematic Orchestra last week.

Easily my album of the week, I've pretty much had this little gem on repeat play all weekend.

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Log #137 - At The Dawning of a Neu! Age for Invention and Imagination

The Alan Parsons Project Tales of Mystery and Imagination

The Cinematic Orchestra Ma Fleur

Fennesz Endless Summer

Neu! Neu!

Manuel Göttsching Inventions for Electric Guitar

Ashra New Age Of Earth

The Alan Parsons Project album was another one of those albums that was knocking around my latter school and early uni years, but wasn't one I ever possessed or recall fully hearing. I knew Alan Parsons became well known after engineering The Dark Side Of The Moon and also, less so, The Year Of The Cat. He then, evidently by accident, went on to record a number of his own albums (11 up to 1990 and a comeback one in 2014) beginning with Tales Of Mystery And Imagination in 1976:

"We never expected the Alan Parsons Project to become the name of an act. The phrase was designed to describe the identity of the album you are now holding in its orginal form. We would never in our wildest dreams have thought that at least ten albums would follow, performed by this anonymous outfit that never played gigs!"

Alan Parsons writing in the sleeve notes to the remastered release of Tales... in 1987.

Ah, the sleeve notes...at first glance on this CD release they are impressive and comprehensive (so few artists even bother at all these days) - Parsons (I assume they are his words) says himself sleeve notes have fallen out of fashion but then the annoyances creep in. There are obvious typos and a particular reproduction clanger which unfortunately renders the notes disjointed, inconsistent and repetitive. I have no idea how this is allowed to happen. Even when I produce a crappy throwaway  spreadsheet for work, which will be read by hardly no one and confined to the recycle bin within a few weeks, I proof read it 100 times. But this stuff is there forever. I don't get it. Such an easy thing to get right.

The music is so-so. Yet to really form an opinion on it. There is a range of music from rock to prog to classical. It reminds me a little of Meatloaf in the more bombastic moments, and Supertramp in the softer rock numbers. Apparently there was some kudos to having no synthesizers in the original recording of Tales... (I remember this was stated on Queen albums up until the 80s after which time they certainly made up for it!). For this reissue synthesizers have been allowed.

Much more immediately appealing are the Manuel Gottsching albums. Gottsching was the main man behind Krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel and the follow up group Ashra. In fact this album, his first official solo release in 1975, is subtitled Ash Ra Tempel VI thus doubling up as the sixth and final album under the Ash Ra Tempel name. After Inventions For Electric Guitar Gottsching formed Ashra and recorded the landmark New Age Of Earth album in 1976.

Inventions is a fascinating record with 3 long tracks, each of significantly differing atmospheres. For its time the heavily flanger and echo treated electric guitar loops must have been very groundbreaking, and it still sounds fresh and original today. The style is reminiscent of Steve Reich (particularly his Electric Counterpoint for guitars) and Steve Hillage (particularly Rainbow Dome Musick) and even Alex Lifeson (La Villa Strangiato) and John Martyn (Small Hours) with the long sustained notes that build and fade.

New Age Of Earth is essentially another solo album. This one veers off into more Tangerine Dream-like sequencer territory. It's different but equally beautiful and melodic and has been frequently nominated as one of the most influential ambient albums of all time:

Göttsching’s style of looping notes into sequential echoes has inspired a generation of musicians to mimic this process, but in this recording you hear the master at play.

Matt Howarth

These two albums together make a very pleasing pairing. In fact they would have made a masterful double album, and are prime candidates for a 2 on 1 CD release.

I orginally had the Alan Parsons cover as my head shot for this blogpost but to be honest it was a bit dull and the Ashra cover above is awesome! Before looking closely I thought this was a sunrise over a mayan temple or pyramid. A homage to the sun god if you like. It's actually something even cooler. A sunrise over a derelict block of flats set in wasteland and against barbed wired fencing. Like the urban monoliths in High Rise or the shocking tragedy that was Grenfell. The ultimate juxtaposition of nature and man (Led Zeppelin did something slightly similar (but less striking) on the cover of their IV album). I have found no information on the actual location for the Ashra cover shot.

The album title too, potentially overblown in some contexts, is entirely fitting with the cover and the music.

The 4 tracks are entitled:

Sunrain
Ocean Of Tenderness
Deep Distance
Nightdust

Neu! were another German krautrock band from the 70s. As revered as the likes of Can but much less prolific although founding members Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother (both ex-Kraftwerk) were involved in other bands including Harmonia and La Düsseldorf. They only produced 3 proper studio albums Neu!, Neu! 2, and Neu '75, although an unoffical Neu! 4 was later released as Neu! '86. Their debut album is probably the one to start with for beginners and contains the celebrated Hallogallo and Negativland tracks - spacey melodic explorations over driving motorik beats so influential to Hawkwind.

As regular readers will know I chanced upon a whole raft of excellent experimental ambient music towards the back end of last year. I discovered a wide range of new artists and immersed myself in a number of albums. 6 months on it is interesting to see what has resurfaced from the deluge. The favourite to date seems to be the fascinating Fennesz album, Endless Summer, which I keep returning to. A correspondent likened the sound of this album to that of the dying of a distant star. A brilliant and entirely apt description. It is out of this world.

Well I may aswell. Nearly covered all 6 albums in the player this week so here goes with The Cinematic Orchestra. This album is simultaneously beautiful and slightly, dare I say, boring? It's so down tempo it is rendered almost imperceptible. Yes, that's the word...

Maybe this is far too harsh and within the lilting jazz piano and dreamy singing there are hidden depths but I've had this album for years so it's time for it to reveal itself. I'm seeing the group at a festival this summer so it will be interesting how they reproduce their music live.

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Books! Books! Books! There so much to read! I've got 3 on the go at the moment, with a bunch stacked in the queue. I'm cruising slowly through Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas. This is all about the lyrics and is a take on why Dylan is as important as the ancient classical writers. I think the author is making a case for his degree course on the subject.

More fun is Julian Cope's twin autobiographies Head On (the trip from zero to hero and back to zero again with The Teardrop Explodes in the matter of only 2 or 3 years) and the follow up Repossessed which promises "shamanic depressions" in the 80s wilderness years.

And finally I've just started the impressive Electric Eden by Rob Young - a lengthy tome on the history of English (folk) music from Vaughan Williams through to Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band, and all that Joe Boyd stuff. 100 pages in and it seems to be a cut above the usual surface music writing.

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