Category Archives: Music

Music

Miles Davis’s Soundtrack to Elevator To The Gallows (1958)

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Rolling Stone described him as “the most revered jazz trumpeter of all time, not to mention one of the most important musicians of the 20th century” and it’s hard to argue with that appraisal of Miles Davis (1926–1991) the American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Not to everyone’s taste for sure (and certainly not to the other adult sharer of my household, who pretty much loathes the entire genre of jazz) and challenging at times to even the most willing of new listeners, but he is one of the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz.

Born in Alton, Illinois to a well-to-do family (he was born Miles Dewey Davis III), Miles went to study at the celebrated Juilliard School in New York, but dropped out and sought out, befriended and soon joined saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker’s bebop quintet, collaborating with him from 1944 to 1948. Shortly after, he recorded the ground-breaking Birth of the Cool sessions which would become the defining recording of the “cool jazz” genre, and in the early 1950s he recorded some of the earliest “hard bop”, the funky offshoot of bebop music. Ever innovative, he was always pushing the envelope and inventing genres along the way.

Davis signed a long-term contract with Columbia Records, and recorded the album ‘Round About Midnight in 1955. It was his first work with saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Paul Chambers, key members of the sextet he would lead into the early 1960s and with whom he would rule the jazz world. During this period, he alternated between orchestral jazz collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, and band recordings, such as Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959), the latter recording selling over five million copies in the US.

The piece I have singled out for our delectation today is a piece of cinematic cool, combining Miles Davis’s musical soundscape with some typically moody French art-house aesthetic provided by legendary screen goddess Jeanne Moreau. This scene is from the 1958 crime thriller movie Ascenseur Pour L’échafaud (Elevator To The Gallows), directed by Louis Malle. The soundtrack was recorded in one night, and improvised by Davis and four other musicians while they watched the relevant scenes from the film. Jazz critic Phil Johnson described it as “the loneliest trumpet sound you will ever hear, and the model for sad-core music ever since”.

Miles Davis
Music

Sir Edward Elgar’s Nimrod Variation (1899)

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Both patriotic and moving in equal measure, Sir Edward Elgar’s Nimrod variation is a staple of British patriotic events such as the Last Night of the Proms, the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, and the coronations of Elizabeth II and Charles III, whilst its sombre nature lends itself equally well to the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph, and funerals such as those of Princess Diana and Prince Philip. It is the ninth and best-known variation in Elgar’s Enigma Variations, an orchestral work of fourteen variations on an original theme composed between 1898 and 1899.

Each variation is also a musical sketch of members of Elgar’s family and close circle of friends and contains, in Elgar’s words, “a distinct idea founded on some particular personality or perhaps on some incident known only to two people”. Thus, each variation contains a personal expression from Elgar of an aspect of each subject’s personality, or an event they shared, and the subjects are identified by either initials or a nickname: for example, the first variation is “CAE” (Elgar’s wife, Caroline Alice); others include “RBT” (Oxford classicist Richard Baxter-Townshend), “Troyte” (architect Arthur Troyte Griffith) and so on.

Variation IX (Adagio) “Nimrod” is a portrait of Augustus J. Jaeger, Elgar’s editor and publisher, and close friend. Nimrod is the great hunter of the Old Testament, and the piece is so named through a play on words: Jäger in German means ‘hunter’. This serene variation represents the years of advice and encouragement given to Elgar by Jaeger, when Elgar was suffering depressive episodes and lack of confidence in his work. Jaeger had reminded him that Beethoven had had similar anxieties and yet his music had only increased in beauty; in tribute to this moment, Nimrod’s opening moments evoke subtle hints of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8.

The piece builds through long phrases of swelling dynamics and rippling melody, and the emotional climax comes slowly but surely. Solemn and evocative, Nimrod has everyone reaching for their hankies. Enjoy this version featuring Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra.

Sir Edward Elgar
Music

Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune (1894)

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When I was a boy I got some piano lessons from my grandma, whose creaky piano had been a feature of her back room for as long as I could remember, and although my progress was limited (and permanently arrested at age thirteen when I discovered the guitar), I retain some vivid memories: my grandma singing the music hall favourite Two Lovely Black Eyes in her trademark falsetto, as well as Edelweiss from The Sound Of Music and the military march song Men Of Harlech (after which, for a period, she would address me as Dai Bach, or ‘little David’ in Welsh, as if recalling familial roots that never existed). I would faithfully learn these songs on the piano, whilst leaving the unique singing to her.

Another piece of music I recall practising in those years was Claude Debussy’s Clair De Lune. No doubt every erstwhile piano student does. It’s a haunting and lovely tune, for sure, and later I was to learn that Debussy was a veritable master of the haunting and lovely tune. He had an astonishing ability to translate the natural world into sound for orchestral and solo piano music. Listen to La Mer, for example, one of many pieces Debussy wrote about water: it’s easy to discern the ‘sound’ of the play of light on water. The evocative musical imagery captured so cleverly in such compositions as Rêverie, Images, Préludes, Études and Nocturnes led him to be dubbed the first Impressionist composer, the musical equivalent of Monet, Cézanne and Renoir (he was none too happy with the term by all accounts, but I’d have taken it).

My favourite evocation, though, as a fan of the pastoral and bucolic, is Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. Based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolist poem of the same name, the Prélude conjures up a dream-like world of idyllic woodland thick with summer haze, in which sprawls a lethargic faun, waking from reverie. If you don’t know it from its title, you’ll know it when you hear it from the excerpt below (it’s been used all over the shop). Oh, to be a faun in a mythological Greek summer landscape! Beats working…

Claude Debussy
Music

Cole Porter’s You Do Something To Me (1929)

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There’s a scene in the 1972 movie Sleuth, wherein eccentric millionaire crime writer Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) has invited his wife’s lover, Italian hairdresser Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), to his mansion, under false pretences, and proceeded to shoot him dead in what he believes to be the perfect murder. He struts self-assuredly around his kitchen, busying himself in preparation of a celebratory champagne-and-caviar supper to the strains of Cole Porter’s song You Do Something To Me piped in from a distant gramophone. Now, the movie itself deserves a blog all to itself, since it is a gripping and brilliantly-written piece of drama with bravura performances from the two aforementioned greats of the silver screen, but this is not about the movie but the song.

The song is typical of Cole Porter (1891-1964), American composer and songwriter noted for his witty, urbane lyrics and writer of many a song that would find success on Broadway in the 1920s and 30s, and become part of what we now call the Great American Songbook. His songs trip off the tongue: You’re The Top; Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love; Anything Goes; I Get A Kick Out Of You; Begin The Beguine; I’ve Got You Under My Skin; Let’s Misbehave; Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye; Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? et al. His songs have of course been covered by, well, everyone…and so I attempted to find out which artist had recorded the particular version that we hear in Sleuth (below)…

Surely a straightforward google-able task? But not so: having failed to find the identity of the artist from the obvious sources, I was led instead and circuitously to this forum of musical soundtrack enthusiasts (below). Starting in 2006, one “gloriotski” kicks off the thread with the same question that was on my lips, but “coma” sets the ensuing tone with “I’ve checked all available sources but nobody really seems to know”.

Other amateur musical sleuths, determined to crack the mystery, steam in, with the suggestions rolling in: Fred Astaire, Al Johnson, Mel Tormé, Al Bowlly, Pat O’Malley, Sam Browne (indeed, virtually everyone except Marlene Dietrich)? But the years tick by, and one by one each confident suggestion has been debunked, right up to 2021 when we seem to have got no further:

Perhaps we’ll never know…but I can live with that (in fact, I’m rather glad that the mystery has endured) because in the course of my research I came across this wonderful version recorded by Harry Reser’s Clicquot Club Eskimo Orchestra, with vocals by Harry “Scrappy” Lambert. Enjoy!

Cole Porter
Music

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1824)

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Beethoven’s Ninth (Symphony No. 9 in D minor) was his last complete symphony but it also happens to be regarded by many musicologists as his greatest work and one of the supreme achievements in the history of music. Not bad for a last major work, considering how many artists generally peak at some point earlier in their careers and tail off somewhat towards the end. It was composed between 1822 and 1824 and was the first example of a major composer using voices in a symphony. The final movement features four vocal soloists and a chorus, with words adapted from the poem by Friedrich Schiller, Ode to Joy (lending the tune its famous common name).

There are a number of anecdotes about the premiere of the Ninth, at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna on the 7th May 1824, based on the testimony of some of the participants. There are suggestions that it was under-rehearsed and a bit scrappy, but regardless it was an enormous success. In any case, Beethoven was not to blame, since he was by now deaf and although he was ostensibly conducting so as to be present for the audience, it was actually co-conductor Louis Duport whose baton was followed by the musicians. Violinist Joseph Böhm recalled:

“[Beethoven] stood in front of a conductor’s stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor, he flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.”

When the audience applauded Beethoven was several bars off and still conducting, so contralto Caroline Unger walked over and turned Beethoven around to accept the audience’s applause. According to the critic for the Theater-Zeitung, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause.” The audience gave him five standing ovations; there were handkerchiefs and hats in the air, and raised hands, so that Beethoven, who they knew could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovations.

Here’s an excerpt from the Ode to Joy played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Music

Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 (1888)

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Pretty much all of the classical composers I have written about in this blog so far (let’s see: Brahms, Mozart, Chopin, Mendelssohn, to name but a few) were prolific and complex and noted for being child prodigies for whom an upward musical trajectory was clearly in the offing. Not so this week’s enigmatic composer, Eric Satie (1866–1925). The son of a French father and a Scottish mother, Satie studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and left without even obtaining a diploma (one tutor described his piano technique as “insignificant and worthless”; they didn’t hold back in those days), working throughout the 1880s as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. At this time, however, he would begin composing works, mostly for solo piano such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, that would propel him to an unanticipated renown.

Satie famously employed a minimalist, pared back style of music in contrast to the grand and epic compositions of a Wagner, for example.  In fact, he would influence a whole new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism and towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel (see his Boléro, for example) and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and Arvo Pärt.

Satie was an enigma, for sure, and something of a quirky character. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) (“True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)”, 1912), and Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois (“Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man“, 1913). He never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and later in Arcueil. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly garb, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and another, perhaps his most enduring persona, in which he wore a neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.

If you think you don’t know Eric Satie’s music, think again, as you’re sure to recognise his Gymnopédie No. 1 that you can hear here against some footage of old Paris (I love these old videos, don’t you, during the advent of moving pictures when passers-by would stare or glance at this strange new-fangled gizmo pointing at them, and seeming to connect, albeit briefly, with we the viewer well over a century later).

Eric Satie

 

 

Music

Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman (1970)

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One of the advantages of having older sisters in the early seventies when I was just starting to discover music was the inheritance from them of certain classic albums. In retrospect, I admire their generosity, because it’s not everyone who relinquishes large parts of their music collection to younger siblings (I’m not sure I would have, had I had any). Nonetheless, I came to own and appreciate at a young age such seminal records as David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars, the Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, and Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin II. Oh, and also three classic albums by the subject of today’s blog, Cat Stevens, namely Mona Bone Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman, and Teaser and the Firecat.

These three albums sprung out of what was an impressively rich period of output from Cat: in order, they had been released in April 1970, November 1970 and October 1971. Not that I knew the order of release back then – I wasn’t yet a geek – they were simply records, but records chock-full of warm, catchy folk-pop, occasionally with a Greek tinge in homage to his part-Hellenic heritage (his father was Cypriot, his mother Swedish, and Cat himself – Steven Georgiou – was born in Marylebone, London).

Songs that resonated: Katmandu from Mona Bone Jakon, a lilting, mystical acoustic song awash with flute from a 19-year-old Peter Gabriel, and a paean to all things simple and peaceful, a metaphoric Eden away from Western civilisation. Years later I would be riding a bus into the real Kathmandu in Nepal with this track playing meaningfully on my Sony Walkman.

From Teaser and the Firecat: Peace Train, and its hopeful, anti-war lyrics (Out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train, Oh peace train take this country, Come take me home again). Idealistic, sure, but it certainly struck a chord with me at the time, and if you can’t be idealistic as a young teenager, when can you be (the gimlet eye of experience hadn’t yet been acquired)?

And from Tea for the Tillerman, the beautifully crafted Father and Son, a poignant exchange between a father failing to understand his son’s desire to break away, and the son struggling to articulate the drive he feels to seek his own destiny. I always had travel in my soul, and dreamt of taking off into the wider world, so this spoke to me in volumes, even though I didn’t actually have to deal with any such cultural misalignments with my own dad.

After famously converting to Islam and changing his name to Yusuf Islam in 1978, and dropping out of the spotlight for many years, Cat returned to pop music in 2006 and released an album of new pop songs (for the first time in 28 years), under the name Yusuf. In September 2020, and now under the combinatorial name Yusuf/Cat Stevens, he released Tea for the Tillerman 2, a reboot of the original to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Another great song from that album was Where Do The Children Play? and here is Cat playing a simple acoustic version of it and proving that he’s still got a voice like warm molasses. A shout out to my mate Graham for sending me this and inspiring this week’s blog!

Cat Stevens
Music

Richard Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries (1870)

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There’s nothing quite as Germanic as a Wagner opera, and nothing quite as epic as his magnum opus, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). The full cycle of the four parts of The Ring lasts fifteen hours and although pragmatism these days generally means that just one of the parts is performed, I do like the idea of watching it in its entirety. A bit like reading Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time in its 1.2 million word entirety (see my blog on that here). Neither challenge have I yet undertaken, I should say, but back in 1876, it must have been some spectacle to have attended the famous Bayreuth Festival, when the full cycle was performed for the first time, over four days: Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)

The opera is loosely based on characters from Germanic and Norse heroic legend and centres around the eponymous magic ring that grants dominion over the world and how it is fought over by generations of gods, heroes and mythical creatures, until the final cataclysm at the end of the Götterdämmerung. The complexity of the epic tale is matched by the increasing complexity of the music as it progresses, and Wagner wrote for such a gargantuan orchestra that a special purpose-built theatre was built at Bayreuth.

The piece that we all know is the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, containing that rousing leitmotif as the Valkyrie sisters of Norse mythology (“choosers of the slain”) transport the fallen heroes to Valhalla. The music was used in Apocalypse Now (1979) where it was played on helicopter-mounted loudspeakers during the American assault on Vietcong-controlled villages. And just recently, in the excellent and grittily honest TV documentary film, Our Falklands War: A Frontline Story, it was revealed that it was similarly played loudly over the tannoy as 2 Para were getting into the landing craft in preparation for their first assault on the Falkland Islands.

Here’s a version from the BBC Proms, best enjoyed from a sofa rather than a landing craft.

Cesare Viazzi, Ride of the Valkyries (1906)

 

Music

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)

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Readers of my generation may recognise the following common social trope from teenage gatherings and house parties. As music plays, ring-pulls are released from cans of lager, and friendly banter fills the room, in a dim-lit corner, a long-haired layabout is skinning up a joint on the nearest album cover, which always seems to be Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. It perhaps wasn’t always The Dark Side of the Moon, but as a meme it fits pretty well into this snapshot of thematic memory. Mind you, in the era I was attending teenage gatherings, at the start of the eighties, the album was already getting quite old (it had been released in 1973) but it had turned into an enduring and perpetually high-selling album that everyone (the lads anyway) seemed to relate to.

It was the Floyd’s eighth studio album, conceived and developed over years as a concept album exploring varied themes such as conflict, greed, time, death and mental illness, and largely inspired by the band’s arduous lifestyle and the growing mental health problems suffered by former band member Syd Barrett (who left the group in 1968). Primarily developed during live performances, the band added new material during two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios in London.

It’s highly experimental: the group incorporated multitrack recording, tape loops, analogue synthesisers, and snippets from interviews with the band’s road crew and various philosophical quotations. The engineer was Alan Parsons, and he was responsible for much of the sonic feel to the album (not least by recruiting the singer Clare Torry, who appears on The Great Gig in the Sky). It works extraordinarily well, as a whole as much as its individual parts. This actually takes me back to another teenage meme, that of bodies lying around a darkened room, in a pleasant fug, and listening to the album in its entirety.

Here’s the intro to the album put effectively to video by a fan (credit: Marc-André Ranger)…enjoy! Now, where are those Rizlas?

Pink Floyd
The iconic album cover, by Storm Thorgerson
Music

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman (1968)

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Glen Campbell started his career as a guitarist with the Wrecking Crew, that loose collective of session musicians that contributed to thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de facto house band). The list of artists whose recordings he played on is a who’s who of the American sixties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a successful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a version of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Universal Soldier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gentle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

That last song was written by Jimmy Webb and, buoyed by its success, Glen Campbell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any other “geographical” songs to follow it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one anyway: Wichita Lineman. Webb’s inspiration for the lyrics came while driving westward on a straight road through Washita County in rural south-western Oklahoma. Driving past a seemingly endless line of telephone poles, he noticed in the distance the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:

It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song. I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere – working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’.

Webb delivered what he regarded and labelled as an incomplete version of the song, warning that he had not completed a third verse or a middle eight. Campbell soon nailed the lack of a middle eight section with some of his Wrecking Crew pals (adding a baritone guitar interlude as well as the orchestrally arranged outro known to British Radio 2 listeners as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was surprised to hear that Campbell had recorded the song when he ran into him:

‘I guess you guys didn’t like the song.’

‘Oh, we cut that’

‘But it wasn’t done! I was just humming the last bit!‘

‘Well, it’s done now!'”

And what a lovely song it was, too!

Glen Campbell