Sunday Morning Vinyl

Record: Lady in Satin
Artist: Billie Holiday
Released: Columbia Records, 1958

When you listen to Billie Holiday, are you listening to jazz? On this particular record, her first recorded with Ray Ellis and his orchestra, it seems at first that you aren't. Ellis's orchestra is what you would expect from the label -- there's a full string section with ten violins, two violas, and two cellos, and there's even a harp. If you were to remove Ms. Holiday's vocals, the tracks left behind would certainly never be classified as jazz.

But with Lady Day? Irving Townsend addresses the question in his liner notes. "Is this jazz? And the answer must be: Yes. It is jazz because Billie Holiday sings jazz, no matter what the accompaniment is, no matter what the song is." And so I will defer to Mr. Townsend. Jazz it is.

But obviously it's decidedly not jazz, at least not if you listen in a vacuum. Maybe it's easy listening, maybe it's R&B or even neoclassical, but the music itself is not what we think of when we think of jazz. It simply isn't.

In today's world we often hear that hip-hop is not just music but a culture, something that influences and infuses fashion, language, sports, and more. Today's biggest starts aren't selling albums, they're selling a lifestyle that comes with a soundtrack, and that's what's going on with Billie Holiday.

She rose from the night clubs of Harlem to become one of the first star vocalists of the jazz era, so it would be wrong to classify her music -- and we could have a much longer conversation about our need to classify art -- as anything but jazz. Really, we should just listen and be thankful for the gift she's given us.

Side 1
I'm a Fool to Want You
For Heaven's Sake
You Don't Know What Love Is
I Get Along without You Very Well
For All We Know
Violets for Your Furs

Side 2
You've Changed
It's Easy to Remember
But Beautiful
Glad to Be Unhappy
I'll Be Around
The End of a Love Affair

Record: Somethin' Else
Artist: Cannonball Adderley
Released: Blue Note Records, 1958

If you were to look at any list of the greatest jazz albums of all-time, "Somethin' Else" would rest comfortably in the top ten or twenty, and for good reason. It's nearly perfect.

It all begins with the personnel. This is Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's show. He was only thirty years old when he sat for these recordings in the spring of 1958, and only four years before that he had been earning his living as a band director at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His lilting alto saxophone weaves in and out of the tracks here, just as comfortable on the Side 1 standards as on the original compositions of Side 2.

And who's that on trumpet? Miles Davis. It's hard to come up with an analogy for this. I've written before in this space about the collaborative nature of jazz and the willingness of legendary artists to share billing with each other in pursuit of something beautiful. Perhaps it's something similar to what we see now in the NBA with superstars gravitating towards one another as they pursue not just championship rings but the opportunity to play alongside fellow geniuses.

Miles was already a superstar in 1958, with the landmark album Birth of the Cool behind him, and just a few weeks after this session he'd record Milestones; a year later he would reunite with Adderley and a handful of other legends to record his greatest record, Kind of Blue. (I will accept no argument on this.) 

On drums we've got Art Blakey, who tops many lists as the greatest jazz drummer ever to hold a pair of sticks. The point, I suppose, is this -- the people on this record can play.

We've seen teams of great individuals that can never seem to get things together on the court, but that isn't the case here. As difficult as it might be to believe, as great as the parts are, the sum is still greater. There are countless sub-genres that make up the spectrum of jazz, and this record represents a merging -- or at least a meeting -- of two of my favorites, bebop (Adderley) and cool jazz (Miles) . In his typically thorough notes on the back of the album cover, Leonard Feather points out that "Both Cannonball and Miles agree that there has been far too much labeling of jazzmen, that there is an almost limitless degree of overlapping between schools, and that what counts is not the branding of the music but the cohesive quality of their concerted efforts." Indeed. Whether you want to call it cool or bebop or even cool bebop, there's no denying the greatness of this record.

All of which brings us to the physical record that I pulled from the sleeve this week. There's a great internet source that I've discovered called Discogs that allows me to catalogue my collection and learn about the myriad different editions of these records that were printed. (I can't imagine I'll ever sell any of these records, but the site also provides a rough valuation of any collection a user creates.)

According to information gained from Discogs and a few Google searches, I'm fairly confident that my father purchased this record in 1959. The original was released in mono format in 1958, but this is the stereo version. (If you're interested in following me down the rabbit hole, here's a deep dive into the verification process for a collector's item like this. Near mint copies of the original 1958 release sell for thousands of dollars; I'm guessing my copy is probably worth a couple hundred.)

But there is no price tag for this record, either figuratively or literally. Some of the albums in my father's collection still carry a sticker in the corner, usually showing a price of around $4.99. You could tell the same story about a baseball card or a painting or a Ford Mustang, but I still can't imagine that my father could ever have imagined that a circular piece of vinyl in a large cardboard envelope purchased for five dollars in 1959 would one day be worth so much. I'd also guess that there's no way back then he'd ever have guessed that it would be worth even more to his son.

Side 1
Autumn Leaves
Love for Sale

Side 2
Somethin' Else
One for Daddy-O
Dancing in the Dark

Record: Newport 1958
Artist: Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
Released: Columbia Records, 1958

The idea of composing music of any kind is completely magical to me. I can understand DaVinci dipping a brush into his oils and producing the "Mona Lisa" or Dante spinning his Divine Comedy, but how, I ask, can a composer conceive an original work, imagine the different instruments that might contribute to its overall tapestry, and finally bring the entire piece to fruition? People sometimes speak of a hypothetical room full of monkeys and typewriters eventually producing the works of Shakespeare, but we've never heard any speculation about monkeys and pianos. That genius can never be attributed to the hand of chance. Whether it's John Lennon and Paul McCartney sitting down to write "Eleanor Rigby" or John Coltrane creating "A Love Supreme" or a deaf Beethoven writing his 9th Symphony, there is an element of the divine. It's no wonder the Ancient Greeks spoke of muses inspiring their artists. How else to explain miracles like these?

Duke Ellington is one of these geniuses, a songwriter beyond compare, and this won't be the last time one of his records shows up here. This particular record has an interesting history. The Newport Jazz Festival is one of the oldest and most important gatherings of musical talent in the United States, and the 1958 edition featured dozens of legendary musicians aside from Ellington. Like Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Mahalia Jackson all later issued "live" albums, each titled Newport 1958.

As was common at the time, Ellington's record isn't completely live, even though the album jacket claims that it was "recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival." Ellington and his orchestra did perform all of these songs at Newport, but those live recordings aren't preserved here. Dissatisfied with the performance -- several of these tracks were played for the first time at the festival -- and possibly the limitations of the live audio, Ellington took his band into the studio to record the songs again for the record. Crowd noise from the festival was dubbed in, so perhaps the subtitle on the jacket isn't completely wrong.

This is the story behind the original record from my father's collection, but by the time I was searching for the CD to add to my own, an expanded two-disc version with many of the original live recordings had been released, so that's the one I've always listened to. It was fun to listen to the vinyl this morning, filled mainly with polished versions of the tracks I had heard, but the genius was still there.

Side 1
Just Scratchin' the Surface
El Gato
Happy Reunion
Multicolored Blue
Princess Blue

Side 2
Jass Festival Jazz
Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool
Juniflip
Prima Bara Dubla
Hi Fi Fo Fum