The elephant and the giraffe
Mar. 29th, 2015 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotPosted this on Mark's KIND OF BLEUGH thread:
Feeding off the other discussion, I want to say here, right now, that when it comes to token jazz albums, you guys don't know shit! I, Frank Kogan — or I, Frank Kogan, back as a teenager — penetrate to the essence of the token jazz album. Listen, Kind Of Blue is for the serious jazz dabbler. I mean, you guys (I mean, the guys who bought Kind Of Blue without followup), bought it because it topped some poll, right? Or because it was recommended to you, or something? Whereas I, as the pure token of tokenism, got jazz not even because it was jazz, but because it was the cutting edge of whatever it was the cutting edge of (the Revolution? Well, it was on Columbia Records) (followed on by the cutting edge of what used to matter, also on Columbia, iirc):
First jazz album bought by me: Miles Davis Bitches Brew
Second jazz album bought by me (if I even knew it could be classified as "jazz," which I may not have known): some Billie Holiday 2-LP compilation covering the early years, possibly called The Early Years (the label was confusing things by releasing multiple 2-LP and 3-LP sets with overlapping material: this one perhaps begins with "Miss Brown To You" and has the banana-bananah song and perhaps "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (so the alb becomes my intro to the Gershwins, too, but maybe "Can't Take That" was on one of the 3-LP sets) and "Swing, Brother Swing," which was my favorite for rocking hardest*).
Got a token blues album too, the second Robert Johnson compilation (the one with "Love In Vain").
Except, to discombobulate my classic tokenism, prior to this, or these, "jazz" albums, and inexplicably (I don't know how it got in the house, probably bought by my parents, who at the time didn't listen to jazz at all — and the Billie comp was a revelation to my mom, too, because she knew most of the songs from her childhood but had never heard Billie's versions — we'd had a long-playing record player when I was five, but it died, then when I was nine, in the summer or fall of 1963, a month or two after I and my brother had stopped listening to top 40 (except it now comes out that in secret he still was) they got another record player, this one stereo, along with two folk albums because they knew we liked folk: the first Joan Baez album (which I hated because of her voice, but the songs nonetheless are stuck in my head ineradicably, "Banks Of The Ohio" and "Long Black Veil"**) and the Weavers At Carnegie Hall, which didn't thrill me either (my real love was the Kingston Trio's "MTA," on the At Large alb, which I soon bought or my brother bought or they bought) but sometime after that — who knows why? had someone given it to them? or when? (I think it was '63 or '64, but may have even been '66)), a contemporary jazz album ended up in my collection, a bunch of jazz pianists — don't remember who all, think there were four of them, one was Ellington, another was Earl "Fatha" Hines, a third, possibly, was Willie "The Lion" Smith, though maybe I'm just mixing him in because the quotation marks around "Fatha" associate with quotation marks around "The Lion," and let's stick Mary "Lou" Williams in there too, as long as this is degenerating into guesswork, and the sound was this strange tinkly plinky pointillism, it seemed, all these high notes in a haze while piano interplayed with piano — I'm sure this was a colossal mishearing on my part, but for several years afterwards jazz in my mind was a high-pitched, drizzling mist.
Btw, Tommy Mack's brother is right. "If you just put on Bitches Brew it’ll make no sense." I remember reading a jazz interview at the time, some musician who hated Bitches Brew describing it as program music gibberish, "Here's the giraffe. Here's the elephant," which is how it sounded to me, too. Didn't play it much. Not until eight years later, at least, after I'd heard Pangaea, in which the trumpet (and keybs?) sounded like Miles was staging interventions on his own albums, spraying forth bold lines of paint to restructure all the jamming and vamping going on underneath (possibly also a mishearing, but a more interesting one), was I, with my ears readjusted, able to hear Bitches Brew as a weird hostile Louis let loose in the abstract expressionist exhibit, splashing broad brushstrokes and rearranging sky and ground, while the sidemen tore up the joint. And here's the giraffe! And the elephant!
*An intriguing moment in "Swing, Brother Swing" is when Billie sings "Red indigo, and there ain't nobody gonna hold me down." How in the world can you have red indigo? (Turns out it's "Rarin' to go.") [EDIT: Correctly punctuated, the song is "Swing! Brother, Swing!" with 1 comma and 2 exclamation points.] [UPDATE: The albums must've been in a box under another box in a closet back on Arkansas Street and I wasn't feeling Jack LaLanne enough to lift them up. Anyhow, in the bright land of Records Now In A Cabinet, I see that the 2-LP set is The Billie Holiday Story Volume I (followed perhaps by other 2-LP sets with the word "Volume" in the title?) while the 3-LP set is Billie Holiday "The Golden Years" Volume II. It's "Golden Years" Volume II that contains banana-bananah ("Let's Call The Whole Thing Off"), while Story Volume I includes "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and begins not with "Miss Brown To You" but with "Your Mother's Son-In Law." "Miss Brown To You" instead opens the Lady Day LP — Lady Day being the album that true aficionados of token jazz albums would choose as the Billie Holiday album, but I was young and didn't know what I was doing.]
**[UPDATE: Which means, thanks discogs, that they actually bought Joan Baez, Vol. 2, but let me say in my defense that the "vol. 2" was printed in really small letters — it's the one with "Banks Of The Ohio" — and then later my brother got me (complicated story; I hadn't requested it but I walked in on a birthday or Xmas surprise wrapping session and saw Janis Ian and assumed it was for me so to preserve a surprise Richard gave me Joan Baez instead — isn't it absurd we took "surprise" so far? — and later I bought myself a Joan Baez album I actually liked, from the art-folk late '60s, joan (more small letters), the one with the great "Saigon Bride" and no murder ballads but it's got "Annabel Lee" which might as well be about murder; and somewhere Farewell Angelina entered our home as well) Joan Baez In Concert Part 2, and that's the one with "Long Black Veil"!]
Feeding off the other discussion, I want to say here, right now, that when it comes to token jazz albums, you guys don't know shit! I, Frank Kogan — or I, Frank Kogan, back as a teenager — penetrate to the essence of the token jazz album. Listen, Kind Of Blue is for the serious jazz dabbler. I mean, you guys (I mean, the guys who bought Kind Of Blue without followup), bought it because it topped some poll, right? Or because it was recommended to you, or something? Whereas I, as the pure token of tokenism, got jazz not even because it was jazz, but because it was the cutting edge of whatever it was the cutting edge of (the Revolution? Well, it was on Columbia Records) (followed on by the cutting edge of what used to matter, also on Columbia, iirc):
First jazz album bought by me: Miles Davis Bitches Brew
Second jazz album bought by me (if I even knew it could be classified as "jazz," which I may not have known): some Billie Holiday 2-LP compilation covering the early years, possibly called The Early Years (the label was confusing things by releasing multiple 2-LP and 3-LP sets with overlapping material: this one perhaps begins with "Miss Brown To You" and has the banana-bananah song and perhaps "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (so the alb becomes my intro to the Gershwins, too, but maybe "Can't Take That" was on one of the 3-LP sets) and "Swing, Brother Swing," which was my favorite for rocking hardest*).
Got a token blues album too, the second Robert Johnson compilation (the one with "Love In Vain").
Except, to discombobulate my classic tokenism, prior to this, or these, "jazz" albums, and inexplicably (I don't know how it got in the house, probably bought by my parents, who at the time didn't listen to jazz at all — and the Billie comp was a revelation to my mom, too, because she knew most of the songs from her childhood but had never heard Billie's versions — we'd had a long-playing record player when I was five, but it died, then when I was nine, in the summer or fall of 1963, a month or two after I and my brother had stopped listening to top 40 (except it now comes out that in secret he still was) they got another record player, this one stereo, along with two folk albums because they knew we liked folk: the first Joan Baez album (which I hated because of her voice, but the songs nonetheless are stuck in my head ineradicably, "Banks Of The Ohio" and "Long Black Veil"**) and the Weavers At Carnegie Hall, which didn't thrill me either (my real love was the Kingston Trio's "MTA," on the At Large alb, which I soon bought or my brother bought or they bought) but sometime after that — who knows why? had someone given it to them? or when? (I think it was '63 or '64, but may have even been '66)), a contemporary jazz album ended up in my collection, a bunch of jazz pianists — don't remember who all, think there were four of them, one was Ellington, another was Earl "Fatha" Hines, a third, possibly, was Willie "The Lion" Smith, though maybe I'm just mixing him in because the quotation marks around "Fatha" associate with quotation marks around "The Lion," and let's stick Mary "Lou" Williams in there too, as long as this is degenerating into guesswork, and the sound was this strange tinkly plinky pointillism, it seemed, all these high notes in a haze while piano interplayed with piano — I'm sure this was a colossal mishearing on my part, but for several years afterwards jazz in my mind was a high-pitched, drizzling mist.
Btw, Tommy Mack's brother is right. "If you just put on Bitches Brew it’ll make no sense." I remember reading a jazz interview at the time, some musician who hated Bitches Brew describing it as program music gibberish, "Here's the giraffe. Here's the elephant," which is how it sounded to me, too. Didn't play it much. Not until eight years later, at least, after I'd heard Pangaea, in which the trumpet (and keybs?) sounded like Miles was staging interventions on his own albums, spraying forth bold lines of paint to restructure all the jamming and vamping going on underneath (possibly also a mishearing, but a more interesting one), was I, with my ears readjusted, able to hear Bitches Brew as a weird hostile Louis let loose in the abstract expressionist exhibit, splashing broad brushstrokes and rearranging sky and ground, while the sidemen tore up the joint. And here's the giraffe! And the elephant!
*An intriguing moment in "Swing, Brother Swing" is when Billie sings "Red indigo, and there ain't nobody gonna hold me down." How in the world can you have red indigo? (Turns out it's "Rarin' to go.") [EDIT: Correctly punctuated, the song is "Swing! Brother, Swing!" with 1 comma and 2 exclamation points.] [UPDATE: The albums must've been in a box under another box in a closet back on Arkansas Street and I wasn't feeling Jack LaLanne enough to lift them up. Anyhow, in the bright land of Records Now In A Cabinet, I see that the 2-LP set is The Billie Holiday Story Volume I (followed perhaps by other 2-LP sets with the word "Volume" in the title?) while the 3-LP set is Billie Holiday "The Golden Years" Volume II. It's "Golden Years" Volume II that contains banana-bananah ("Let's Call The Whole Thing Off"), while Story Volume I includes "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and begins not with "Miss Brown To You" but with "Your Mother's Son-In Law." "Miss Brown To You" instead opens the Lady Day LP — Lady Day being the album that true aficionados of token jazz albums would choose as the Billie Holiday album, but I was young and didn't know what I was doing.]
**[UPDATE: Which means, thanks discogs, that they actually bought Joan Baez, Vol. 2, but let me say in my defense that the "vol. 2" was printed in really small letters — it's the one with "Banks Of The Ohio" — and then later my brother got me (complicated story; I hadn't requested it but I walked in on a birthday or Xmas surprise wrapping session and saw Janis Ian and assumed it was for me so to preserve a surprise Richard gave me Joan Baez instead — isn't it absurd we took "surprise" so far? — and later I bought myself a Joan Baez album I actually liked, from the art-folk late '60s, joan (more small letters), the one with the great "Saigon Bride" and no murder ballads but it's got "Annabel Lee" which might as well be about murder; and somewhere Farewell Angelina entered our home as well) Joan Baez In Concert Part 2, and that's the one with "Long Black Veil"!]
Found it on Discogs
Date: 2018-06-26 02:42 pm (UTC)*As opposed to my memory from, say, yesterday.