Sunday Morning Vinyl

Record: All of You
Artist: Ahmad Jamal
Released: Argo Records, 1962

I had never heard of Ahmad Jamal before flipping through these records a few months ago as I started thinking about this project, and this record stood out, not just because the artist was unfamiliar.

Look at young Mr. Jamal gracing the cover of the album, sitting confidently in a mid-century modern chair that my wife would die for, nattily dressed with a tie I wouldn't mind wearing to work. There's something striking, not just about his pose, but the entire composition of the photo. Jamal couldn't be more self-assured, but he seems to be holding something back. His eyes don't quite meet ours, and the blurred foliage in the foreground seems to be keeping us at a bit of a distance. "Give me all of you," he seems to be saying, "but you can only have some of me." Some is enough.

As with a lot of these albums, I had never heard All of You before dropping the needle on the record this afternoon, so I had no idea what to expect. It took me about three or four bars before I fell in love.

This isn't usually the case for me. Typically I have to immerse myself in a new album, and plenty of my favorites grew on my over time. It's hard for me to imagine now, but the first time I listened to the Cure's Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me it felt a little abrasive, as did Nirvana's Nevermind. Not until I had studied the lyrics of Springsteen's Nebraska did I fully appreciate its genius, and it took several listens to wrap my head around Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Sometimes listening has to be intentional, not casual.

But once in a while a record will meet you right where you are, whether it's at a particular time in your life or a moment in time. For me, some of these were Led Zeppelin's first album, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and even a self-titled debut album from an obscure Scottish band, Glasvegas. 

There's no explaining why, but it was like that with All of You. It turns out Jamal is only the headliner, the pianist in the Ahmad Jamal Trio, and the opening track, "Time on My Hands," highlights his skills on the keyboard in the most beautiful way. I was only a minute or two in before I was reminded of a similar jazz pianist I had discovered on my own when I was in college. Marcus Roberts burst on the jazz scene in 1989 with his debut album, The Truth Is Spoken Here, at the age of just 26. (Here's my favorite track from that album, a Duke Ellington cover, "Single Petal of a Rose.") He had already been playing with some of the greats at an even younger age. (When I first heard him he was playing with Wynton Marsalis.)

Roberts has always been known for his appreciation of traditional jazz and the greats who came before him. His third record, Alone with Three Giants, features his interpretations of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Jelly Roll Morton, and he later recorded tributes to George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, and Nat "King" Cole. It shouldn't have been a surprise that I heard similarities between Jamal and Roberts, but I was still pleased (and admittedly proud) when a Google search for "Ahmad Jamal and Marcus Roberts" returned several articles. In 2009, for example, the Village Voice declared that Roberts "has more than a little Ahmad Jamal in him." So I wasn't the only one who heard it. It was validation for my ear.

I've just flipped the record again, listening to the second side for at least the third or fourth time, and I'm struck again by the emotional aspect of the quest I've been on. Certainly I enjoy listening to the music, whether it's familiar or new, and I love the unpredictable paths I wander as I learn about each record, thinking about things as surprising as mix tapes one week and cover art the next, a demolished department store last Sunday, and today a band from Scotland. 

But all of that is diversionary. At its heart, this project will always be about my father. I pull him closer with each Sunday that passes, with each record I play. I learn something about who he was by listening to the music he treasured. Sadly, it's like catching smoke in your hands. It's temporary. Every wisp of truth brings along pangs of regret. I so wish that I could have had this conversation with him, that he and I could have listened first to All of You and followed it with something from Roberts. That we could have shared interpretations or argued about opinions. Or just sat together and listened.

Side 1
Time on My Hands
Angel Eyes
You Go to My Head

Side 2
Star Eyes
All of You
You're Blasé
What Is This Thing Called Love

Record: Focus
Artist: Stan Getz
Released: Verve Records, 1962

I hadn't heard this record before this morning, and even though I'm only on my second listen as I write this, I have to admit that it's already one of my favorite albums for a handful of reasons.

First, it's absolutely beautiful. Stan Getz's tenor saxophone is melodic and sonorous as it pours into every nook and cranny of Eddie Sauter's composition, layering atop the delicate strings of the arrangement and lingering in empty spaces before quietly fading away. It's soothing and hypnotic at times, like on "I Remember When," the opening track on side two, but there's also the pulsating frenzy of "I'm Late, I'm Late" on side one. There's a song here for every mood.

It only took me a few minutes to realize why this was one of my father's favorites. His jazz collection leans heavily towards the big band era, but that's not this. This isn't one horn player fronting a band, this is Stan Getz front and center, with each composition highlighting his tenor sax and giving him room to dance. There are any number of records like that, but what makes this one unique, what must've appealed so much to my father, was the merging of his two musical loves, classical music and jazz. As Getz explained while describing the songs Eddie Sauter wrote, "...more than anything, they show quite clearly that the legitimacy of the past 300 years and the soul of our modern times can be put together and be beautiful."* Indeed.

There are more than a hundred classical records in my father's collection and notebooks filled with musings on the masters. He no doubt appreciated what Getz and Sauter were doing, blending his two loves into something new.

"What I wanted to do," explained Sauter, "was write like a string quartet with space to move things." Incredibly, all Sauter did was write for the strings; he left Getz on his own with the idea that he'd simply improvise over the written material. Obviously it's Getz's improvisation that elevates this record from a good idea to something closer to genius.

The art form of jazz is built on improvisation, which often means one musician is stepping forward to explore some musical ideas for a minute before retreating into the fold. You can see that at any high school jazz concert, but when elite musicians come together the improvisation becomes more of a communal call and response as a riff is floated by one, echoed by another, punctuated by the drummer, then reimagined by the originator. In many ways it feels like music in its highest form.

Years ago my wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary at a Harry Connick, Jr., concert at the Hollywood Bowl. He was playing with a large band, and while the music was amazing, what stayed with me as we walked away was the absolute joy that had flowed from the stage that night. Connick is a showman, and he was obviously there to entertain us, but there were moments when the audience didn't matter. He and his band were all in their element, discovering new nuances in tunes they had played hundreds of times, and when a song would end to thunderous applause, the band members didn't look to us. Instead they first looked to each other, nodding and smiling, a bass player acknowledging something the drummer had done, the piano player appreciating a tangent the saxophonist had just explored. Only after they had celebrated each other would they turn to us and accept our applause. We were clearly secondary, just lucky to be there.

It's this ephemeral nature of jazz and improvisation that has always proved difficult to capture on vinyl. If you watch a band over the course of a few nights, the same song might go in different directions from one show to the next, and the same thing can happen in a studio. Nothing was written here for Getz, so this album is just a record of the musical journeys he took during the three sessions it took to complete the work. In fact, the opening track of the album is significantly longer than any of the others precisely because of the vagaries of improvisation. "The only two takes were judged to be so fresh and so different that, rather than scrap one, they were tacked together to form a single take."

The choice to combine those two takes echoes the larger choice to combine these two genres. I'm sure that some of the records I write about here will go back into their sleeves and rarely if ever see the light of day again. My father was right about this one, though. It'll stay in the rotation.

* All quoted material comes from the text of the liner notes written by Dom Cerulli.

Side 1
I'm Late, I'm Late
Her
Pan

Side 2
I Remember When
Night Rider
Once Upon a Time
A Summer Afternoon

Record: Sinatra-Basie
Artist: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie
Released: Reprise Records, 1962

I bought my first true stereo in the summer of 1990, and few purchases before or since have given me as much pleasure. Until then my music had come from single-speaker clock radios, cassette tapes played through a boom box, or the CD players of college roommates. 

But when I gladly parted with six hundred dollars of my summer earnings and came home from Rogers Sound Labs with a receiver, a five-disc CD changer, and a set of speakers, everything changed. Suddenly I needed to have every song I'd ever loved in my CD collection, and even some that I didn't love just because someone else might want to hear it.

If only my twenty-year-old self had known about the world of streaming that was just a few decades away. Today I can stand in my kitchen and ask Alexa to play any song ever recorded, and within seconds I can be singing along while dicing an onion. It's a brave new wonderful world, but one thing we've lost is the joy of the search and the thrill of discovery.

During that first summer I had a detailed list of CDs that I wanted (needed) to add to my collection. Most weekends I'd spend a few hours with a likeminded friend scouring the racks at a used record store, searching for nuggets hidden in the stacks. The CDs were organized alphabetically, but only loosely, so the only method was to flip through -- flip through them all.

That rhythm of the cases clicking together as my index and middle fingers walked up the stack was hypnotic, and I don't have to look too deeply into my memories to hear the sound of the plastic click, click, click, clicking. And then you'd find one. Sometimes it was a CD you'd been searching for for weeks, but sometimes it was even better -- a CD you didn't even know existed. A bootleg recording of a live concert or the European edition of a CD you already owned. (You'd buy it anyway because it might have different artwork and an extra track.) I miss the search. I miss the discovery.

It wasn't immediately that I connected my love of music with my father's, nor my growing CD collection to his vinyl, but that would come. When I wanted to expand my jazz collection, I looked to my father for guidance and opened his record chests with intent. It was similar to my Saturday CD runs. Some of the names were familiar, but others were brand new. I flipped through the records, pulling one album out at a time, and I added titles to my list.

This record, Sinatra-Basie, was one of the first to show up in my collection, and it's still one of my favorites. I don't remember for sure, but I'm guessing I was drawn to it because of Frank Sinatra, who was one of my mother's favorites, probably her only favorite. 

My whole life was in front of me when I was in my early twenties and first listening to this record, and no track spoke to that like the fourth song on the first side.

"Lookin' at the world through rose-colored glasses
Everything is rosy now
Lookin' at the world and everything that passes
Seems a rosy hue somehow..."

If my life had been a movie, I imagined, this was the song playing in the opening credits. A few scenes later, when life took its first turn, there would be Sinatra again with a track from side two, "Learnin' the Blues," this time gently explaining the pain of lost love. He gently croons,

"When you're at home alone, the blues will taunt you constantly.
When you're out in a crowd, those blues will haunt your memory."

People often refer to one album or another as being the soundtrack of their lives, and I think that's telling. Music speaks to us, and great music speaks to all of us. What Sinatra and Basie have done here is combine Basie's orchestra with Sinatra's singing, and the result is a record the must've spoken to by father sixty years ago, certainly spoke to me thirty years ago, and still swings today. That's genius.

Side 1
Pennies from Heaven
Please Be Kind
(Love Is) The Tender Trap
Looking at the World thru Rose Colored Glasses
My Kind of Girl

Side 2
I Only Have Eyes for You
Nice Work If You Can Get It
Learnin' the Blues
I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter
I Won't Dance