Sunday Morning Vinyl

Record: Big New Herd at the Monterey Jazz Festival
Artist: Woody Herman
Released: Atlantic Records, 1960

For the second week in a row I'm writing about a live performance recorded at a jazz festival. Last week it was Duke Ellington at Newport, and this week it's Woody Herman at Monterey. The Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals are unquestionably the biggest and most storied music festivals in America, so it's no surprise that so many of the greats have released recordings of their performances at one event or the other, and also no surprise that so many of those recordings are in my father's collection.

There's essentially zero chance that I'll ever make it to Newport, Rhode Island, and even though it's possible that I could head up the coast one summer to Monterey, the event I'd truly love to check out is the Detroit Jazz Festival, held annually on Labor Day Weekend. I've even got a cousin who sometimes performs there, so there's really no excuse not to make the trip. Someday. 

But back to Woody and his band. Herman had taken to referring to his orchestra as a "herd" rather than a band, due in part to the fluidity of such groups. For this festival the herd included many of its usual members, but they also added a few guests from the nearby San Francisco Symphony. According to Ralph J. Gleason's liner notes, Herman remarked, "I wish I could take this band on the road!"

The result is some of the most listenable jazz you could ever find. It's not bland background music -- there's plenty of substance here -- but it isn't challenging. That's hardly a criticism. 

We choose our music with a purpose in mind, creating a soundtrack to fit the moment. In my early twenties, when I was regularly making the six hour drive between L.A. and the Bay Area, for example, I had a playlist of CDs designed to keep the energy up during an otherwise monotonous trek. Some genres work well as the background for a study session, while something else might fit for an evening with friends. 

There are even differences within genres. Charles Mingus demands your attention; Woody Herman says, "Don't mind us. We'll just be over here having fun if you want to listen." And it's the fun that shines through in this live recording. As one solo is passed to another, all the expected instruments have their moments -- a trumpet here, a saxophone there. But there's also Woody's clarinet as well as Vic Feldman's vibraharp, a warmer relative of the xylophone. Because it's a live performance -- and not just remixed versions of what was played that afternoon and evening in Monterey -- we can often hear the band members shouting encouragement to one another. (Gleason also writes that we can even hear a plane buzzing the crowd at various points, but I can't quite make that out.)

Gleason closes his notes by explaining that "Monterey was a gas for musicians and fans alike." We spend the time and money to go and see our favorite bands in concert precisely because "it's a gas." Cuing up the music and singing along at home to our favorite tracks is one thing, but being part of a crowd waiting for something unexpected to happen is something completely different.

Sometimes the venue matters. My wife and I went to see one of her favorite bands, the Shins, in a small club several years ago. There might've been five hundred people there, and the setting was so intimate that we could hear conversations between the bandmates between songs and comments from some of the superfans who predicted upcoming numbers based on which guitar the lead singer grabbed before heading back to the mic. I remember seeing the English Beat with a friend in an even smaller venue on the Sunset Strip; the crowd was so small that frontman Dave Wakeling opened the stage for any of the women, soccer moms all, to come up and dance as he played "Tenderness." 

But somehow that joy of the performance isn't lost when the venue gets larger, it only changes. There's nothing like the collective explosion as an arena crowd hears the opening chords of a favorite song or sings along with the chorus. I saw U2 at the Rose Bowl several years ago, and even though our seats were roughly 200 yards from the stage, there was still a connection as one hundred thousand of us shared our voices with Bono as we sang the songs we'd been singing alone in our cars for the past twenty-five years. It was magic.

There might not have been any dancing on the stage on October 3, 1959, in Monterey, but there's no doubt the crowd that afternoon and evening arrived with the same expectations of concert and festival goers anywhere. Perhaps that's why we see only Woody Herman's silhouette on an album cover that's dominated by the crowd, row upon row of fans that say something significant about the era. Many of the men are wearing dress shirts and ties, and a few are even in suit jackets. There are hats everywhere with a few programs serving as makeshift visors, and those who aren't wearing sunglasses are squinting into the sun. If it were Woodstock or Lollapalooza or Coachella there'd likely be a lot more skin showing, but on some level a festival is still a festival. 

The panorama of the crowd does bring up another issue that I've written about before. There might be two hundred faces in the photo, but only four of them appear to be Black. Granted, this was Monterey, California, and a picture like this taken in Chicago or New York or Detroit might've looked a bit different, but this was still 1959, a time when jazz musicians, both Black and white, were playing for predominantly white audiences like this one. So maybe this was more like Coachella than we might think.

Side 1
Four Brothers
Like Some Blues Man
Skoobeedoobee

Side 2
Monterey Apple Tree
Skylark
The Magpie

Record: Nice 'n' Easy
Artist: Frank Sinatra
Released: Capitol Records, 1960

I was only a few weeks into this project when I began thinking about upgrading to a new turntable. The record player I've been using only occasionally for the past fifteen years is one of the nostalgia driven models you typically see in your local big box retailer. It looks like a small suitcase, complete with a suitcase handle so you can carry it from room to room. It's fine for spinning a record a few times a year, but as I've begun to listen more regularly, I've realized the limitations, specifically of the built-in speakers.

And so I've been researching for the past month or so, trying to find a turntable that would fit my needs. First and foremost, since I don't have a full stereo system anymore, I needed a turntable with Bluetooth capabilities so that I could listen with either my wireless speakers or my headphones, but I didn't want it to be ridiculously expensive. (As you can imagine, you can spend whatever you want to spend, well into the thousands of dollars.)

After reading a dozen or so "best Bluetooth turntable" articles and several detailed reviews of a few different models, I settled on one from Audio-Technica, then spent another couple weeks wondering about it. Did I really need it? Would I really notice a difference? And then last week we were out shopping in Santa Monica, and we wandered into Urban Outfitters, a store that caters to fashion-conscious hipsters.

When we walked out and headed to dinner, I casually mentioned to my daughter that Urban Outfitters had had the turntable I was thinking about buying.

"Is it the Audio-Technica?"

As she explained, all the cool kids (TikTokkers) were buying Audio-Technica turntables. When vintage vinyl started becoming popular again, mainstream artists -- Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and all the rest -- began releasing new albums (and their back catalog) on vinyl. In 2021 there were actually more records sold in the United States than CDs, the first time in thirty years that vinyl outsold plastic, and it was a trend driven not by nostalgic baby boomers but by precocious kids who wanted to be able to hold their music.

"I just think it's cool that music can be permanent, that it can be yours," said my daughter. As someone once said -- on vinyl -- the kids are alright. And so when those social media influencers outgrew their entry level record players, they turned to Audio-Technica, just like I did. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but there it is.

My new turntable arrived this week, which meant that I had a serious decision to make. I still remember the first disc I played in my car stereo, a Sony pullout that I absolutely adored. It wasn't accidental. I chose Ghost in the Machine by the Police because it was the first CD I had ever bought and they were one of my favorite bands. It felt right.

So the first spin here had to have some significance. I thought about thumbing through the entire collection and finding a record that felt significant, something that would match the significance of the occasion, but since the order of the journey thus far has been left to chance, I decided to see which record was on deck -- and it was the right choice.

I think there are at least twenty Frank Sinatra records in my father's collection, and I've always known that he held Sinatra in the highest regard, filing him in the classical section as an indication of the timeless nature of his vocal talent. Sinatra is also my mother's favorite, so it all made perfect sense.

If I'm being honest, I have to say that this particular record isn't my favorite of his. As the title suggests, it feels like soothing background music. There's nothing dynamic here unless you count Sinatra's legendary voice. He's backed by an orchestra, not a big band, and both Sinatra and conductor Nelson Riddle are comfortable with the situation. Neither pushes the other, and maybe that's okay.

It's obvious, however, that my father did love this album. The slip case is worn, and masking tape holds it together on the top and the bottom, making it clear that the record was in heavy rotation. Even better than that, the record is worn. The hissing, popping, and crackling that people get so romantic about when remembering the favorite records of their youth? It's all here. The first sixty seconds of the opening track are slightly obscured by static so strong that Sinatra's voice fades in and out a bit. And for the first time, an actual skip! I called my daughter into the room to listen as the closing verse of "Dream" repeated itself over and over. "When the day is through... is through... is through..." When I told her that it would keep going like this forever if I didn't lift the needle over the skip, she looked at me blankly as if I were speaking a foreign language. In a way, I was. An archaic language from the distant past.

But she was right when she talked earlier about the lure of physical music. There's a note from Capitol Records on the back of the album cover: "This monophonic microgroove recording is playable on monophonic and stereo phonographs. It cannot become obsolete. It will continue to be a source of outstanding sound reproduction, providing the finest monophonic performance from any phonograph."

It really is quite amazing. I'm sure all of that seemed true back in 1960 when my father bought this record, but who would have believed it in the 1970s when 8-track tapes burst on the scene? What about when cassette tapes dominated the '80s? When I complained to an employee at Wherehouse Records in 1986 or '87 that the CD section was getting bigger as the LP section was shrinking, he told me that soon the records would be gone.

"But what if I don't even have a CD player?" I asked.

"Well, you better get one."

They told us that CDs would be forever. They were the perfect format for storing music because they would never degrade, but they only seemed perfect because none of us could imagine a time when every song ever recorded could be ours in an instant, just with the tap of a button on phones we'd carry in our pockets.

But the folks at Capitol Records were right about this record after all. "It cannot become obsolete." Even though records disappeared and became hopelessly archaic decades ago, they've survived, and they still sound beautiful.

Side 1
Nice 'n' Easy
That Old Feeling
How Deep Is the Ocean
I've Got a Crush on You
You Go to My Head
Fools Rush In

Side 2
Nevertheless
She's Funny That Way
Try a Little Tenderness
Embraceable You
Mam'selle
Dream

Record: Not Now, I'll Tell You When
Artist: Count Basie & His Orchestra
Released: Roulette Records, 1960

I wish I had the musical expertise to better describe this record. Any casual jazz fan knows Count Basie and the Count Basie Orchestra. I'd put myself in that group, certainly. I pulled this record, the first step of my journey, from a small subset of my father's collection. 

Twenty years ago my wife gave me the most thoughtful gift I've ever received. What struck me first was the weight, but the weight made sense when I unwrapped it and found a small carrying case holding twenty or so records. At first I didn't know why my wife was giving me a case of old records, but then I quickly recognized them as my fathers. By itself, it was beautiful, but then she explained. "These are your father's records, some of his favorites."

My mother hadn't yet given me his collection, so it still sat in her house in two record cabinets. They were actually matching chests with upholstered lids that could serve as seats when closed but then open to reveal the vinyl they held within. My wife wanted to buy me a record player, specifically so I could listen to those records. And so she and my mother went through the collection one record at a time so that my mother could pull out twenty or so titles that my father listened to most often. His favorites.

I've never talked to either of them about their actual process that afternoon, but I've replayed the imagined scene in my mind hundreds of times. I see my mother lifting one album after another, each one a time capsule of sorts holding memories from another lifetime. I watch as her eyes play across the images on a cover and the music begins to play in her mind, no needle required. Tears begin to collect in her eye lashes, and she hands a record to my wife. "This one," she says. "He liked this one."

I like this one, too. Piano player Basie was the king of bebop, and as you listen to this record it isn't hard to imagine him leading his orchestra on stage with dozens of spinning  couples on the dance floor in front of them. This title was released in 1960, a couple decades after the height of the Big Band Era, and even though people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane were beginning to take jazz in new directions, there's something special about these songs.

I don't know if it's my time playing saxophone in middle school and high school, but I've always been a sucker for horns, especially when they find their way into pop music. Few people in history have sold more albums than Phil Collins, whose legacy is largely defined by the greatest drum fill in the history of pop music and a string of songs that play well in grocery stores, but his liberal use of a horn section on his first two albums is what I'll remember. I've been a casual reggae fan since I went away to college and started hearing Bob Marley's Legend coming out of every dorm room on the hall, but what I really love is reggae's precursor, British ska with its stabbing horns.

All of that, in one way or another echoes back to bepop, echoes back to the Count. Basie is known for jazz classics like "Fly Me to the Moon" and "One O'Clock Jump," but you won't find those tracks on this record. It's a bit more obscure, but I think I like it more because of that obscurity. I listened to it for the first time this morning, and I'm quite sure today was the first time it had been out of its sleeve in more than fifty years, the last time my father's hands set it on a turntable and set the needle on the grooves. 

Side 1
Not Now, I'll Tell You
Rare Butterfly
Back to the Apple
Ol' Man River

Side 2
Mama's Talkin' Soft
The Daly Jump
Blue on Blue
Swinging at the Waldorf
Sweet and Purty