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Music

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (1734)

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The Christmas Oratorio (Weihnachtsoratorium) was one of three oratorios written by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1734 and 1735 for major feasts, the other two being the Ascension Oratorio and the Easter Oratorio. The Christmas Oratorio is by far the longest: in full, it is nearly three hours long but it is made up of six parts, each cantata being intended for performance on one of the major feast days of the Christmas period.

The first cantata would be played on Christmas Day, and describes the Birth of Jesus; the second, for 26th December, describing the annunciation to the shepherds; the third (27th December), the adoration of the shepherds; the fourth (New Year’s Day), the circumcision and naming of Jesus; the fifth (the first Sunday after New Year), the journey of the Magi; and the final one (Epiphany, on 6th January), the adoration of the Magi.

Bach wrote his pieces in his role as musical director for the city of Leipzig, where he was responsible for church music for the four churches there, and head of the internationally known boys’ choir, the “Thomanerchor”. The oratorio was incorporated into the services of the two main churches, Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche, during the Christmas season of 1734. That would have been some Christmas service to behold!

The part I’m highlighting here is the first aria from Part I, featuring oboes d’amore, violins and an alto voice, and known by its opening line, Bereite dich, Zion, mit zärtlichen Trieben (“Make yourself ready, Zion, with tender desires”). It is here performed exquisitely by this choirboy and soloists from Munich’s Tölzer Knabenchor, and conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. A more haunting piece of music fit for this season would be hard to find. Grab a mince pie and listen to this. Merry Christmas!

Bereite dich, Zion, mit zärtlichen Trieben,
Den Schönsten, den Liebsten bald bei dir zu sehn!
Deine Wangen
Müssen heut viel schöner prangen,
Eile, den Bräutigam sehnlichst zu lieben!

Music

Louis Jordan’s A Man’s Best Friend Is A Bed (1953)

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My daughters’ piano teacher, Chris, is a gifted pianist who plays in a band called Louis Louis Louis. They specialise in jazz, swing, big band, boogie-woogie and jump blues, focusing (as their name suggests) on the three great Louis’s: Jordan, Armstrong and Prima. Sadly, the time constraint of the piano lesson window (along with the girls’ mortification at any conversation initiated by me going beyond normal pleasantries) precludes me from proclaiming to Chris: “I love Louis Jordan!”. Yet it’s true: I discovered the marvellous up-tempo jump blues and rich vocal tones of Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five many years ago, specifically from this compilation album here called Out Of Print:


Jordan had started his career in the big-band swing era of the 1930s, being a member of the influential Savoy Ballroom orchestra, led by drummer Chick Webb, in New York’s Harlem district. He specialised in the alto sax, but also played tenor sax, baritone sax, piano and clarinet. He was also a great songwriter, a consummately good singer, and had a wonderfully comic and ebullient personality that soon made him stand out from the crowd. This was the same period that a young Ella Fitzgerald was coming to prominence and she and Jordan often sang duets on stage.

Jordan would soon have his own band, pared down to a sextet, and a residency at the Elks Rendezvous club, down the street from the Savoy on Lenox Avenue. Their style was a dynamic, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of earlier genres which became known as “jump blues” and was an instant hit with the audiences. His band, the Tympany Five, started recording music with Decca records in December 1938, and throughout the 1940s they released dozens of hit songs, including Saturday Night Fish Fry, the comic classic There Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens, and the multi-million seller, Choo Choo Ch’Boogie.

From July 1946 to May 1947, Jordan had five consecutive number 1 songs, and held the top slot for 44 consecutive weeks, an amazing testament to his popularity at the time. It’s true to say that history has given him a raw deal, since his name is not as widely known as it should be, given the above stats (outside sophisticated circles such as our own, of course!).

I’ve selected a song (from many candidates) that is typical of Jordan’s wit and charm: 1953’s A Man’s Best Friend Is A Bed. As well as being a jumping tune, the song extols the comforts of the bed, and on cold mornings like today, who can’t relate to that?

Listen to Louis: 

I want a great big comfortable bed, so I can really spread out, and all that
Take it from me Ed, A man’s best friend is a bed

I want a big fat pillow that’s softer than a billowy cloud, for my head
Take it from me Nat, the best head piece ain’t a hat

Yes, a friend will ditch you, a horse will pitch you
A car will give you lots of grief
A dog will bite you, your wife will fight you
But if you want some genuine relief

Just get a great big comfortable bed, where you can really spread out, and all that
Take it from me Ted, a man’s best friend is a bed

When you’re in trouble, worries double
And everybody’s talking back
Just take your shoes off, you’ll shake the blues off
If you would just let go and hit the sack

In a nice cool comfortable bed where you can really spread out, and all that
Take it from me Ted, a man’s best friend is a bed

Ask any soldier, marine or sailor
Or anyone who’s been without, what do they miss most,
What thought is foremost? No Sir, you’re wrong!

It’s just a great big comfortable bed, where you can really spread out, and all that
Take it from me Ted, a man’s best friend is a bed

Yeah, if you dig me Jack, you’ll hit the sack
This ain’t no junk boy, hit that bunk
Take it from me Ted, a man’s best friend is a bed

Louis Jordan
Music

The Everly Brothers’ Cathy’s Clown (1960)

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The Everly Brothers were first-generation pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll’s first golden era, but they always stood apart from many of their contemporaries due to their roots in rural Southern white music traditions rather than the blues and R&B that drove Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard et al. Bob Dylan was a fan (“We owe those guys everything; they started it all”), whilst John Lennon and Paul McCartney modelled their own vocal blend on Don and Phil’s tight harmonies. Simon & Garfunkel were clearly inspired, as were the Byrds, the Hollies, and the Eagles who all acknowledged their debt to the brothers’ unique sound.

They were born (Don in 1937 and Phil in 1939) into a family already steeped in country music. Ike Everly, their father, was a well-respected guitarist who landed a show on radio station KMA in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 1944, and he moved the family there. Shortly after that, Don and Phil began appearing on his program, and by 1949 they were regulars on the show, lending their angelic harmonies to traditional mountain tunes popularized by the likes of the Blue Sky Boys, the Stanley Brothers and the Louvin Brothers (there were a lot of family-based groups in those days!).

In 1953, the family moved to Kentucky, and the following year Don and Phil got their first break when a family friend, guitarist Chet Atkins, picked one of Don’s early compositions for Kitty Wells to record. Atkins further convinced the brothers to move to Nashville to try to break into the business as a duo, and they were soon picked up by Archie Bleyer, the owner of New York label Cadence Records, who was suitably convinced by what he’d heard to make a record with them.

The first song Bleyer cut with the Everlys was Bye Bye Love, recorded at RCA Studios in Nashville on 1st March 1957. It became an instant national smash and over the next six years, the Everlys would land a staggering number of tunes on the upper reaches of the charts — including Wake Up Little Susie, Bird Dog, and All I Have to Do Is Dream (all written by husband and wife songwriting team, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant), as well as a handful penned by Don or Phil, such as (’Til) I Kissed You, When Will I Be Loved and Don’s lovely paean to teenage romantic angst, Cathy’s Clown.

By the time the Everlys recorded Cathy’s Clown in early 1960, their recording style was already very well-established. As always, the recording session was live with no overdubs, and the instrumentation was simple: acoustic and electric guitar, Floyd Cramer on piano, Floyd Chance on bass and Buddy Harman on drums. Released on 4th April 1960, it hit number one and remained there for five weeks.

For the next three years, the Everlys scored more hits, but by the end of 1964 the British Invasion was sweeping America and the brothers’ look and sound started to seem a bit dated; their staggering success began to subside. Nevertheless, the Everly Brothers’ place in pop history is secure, and this song remains a fabulous reminder of their wonderfully complementary vocal harmonies.

Phil Everly, left, with brother Don
Music

Vincent Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night (1888)

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Vincent Van Gogh remains perhaps the most representative, in the public imagination, of the “tortured genius”. Never successful as an artist in his lifetime, he suffered from bouts of psychotic delusions and mental instability, including that notorious episode in which he took a razor to his left ear. Ultimately, he took his own life: in 1890 he shot himself in the chest with a revolver and died from his injuries two days later. He was 37. But my, what an artistic legacy he left, and what tremendous global fame he would achieve, posthumously…if he had only had an inkling!

Today, when we think of Van Gogh, a number of his paintings spring to mind. There is his Sunflower series (take your pick, there are many different versions), painted in 1888 and 1889 with the gusto, in Vincent’s own words, of a “Marseillais eating bouillabaisse”. There is The Starry Night (famously name-checked in the opening line of Don McLean’s song, Vincent), painted in 1889 and depicting the view from Vincent’s room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. There are his many self-portraits (over 30, with and without bandaged left ear). Or perhaps his wonderfully (and deceptively) child-like Bedroom at Arles.

There is one of Van Gogh’s paintings in particular, however, that appeals to my imagination the most, and that is his Café Terrace at Night. Depicting a late-night coffee house in the Place du Forum in Arles, it brings together all the elements of Van Gogh’s talents in one wonderfully evocative scene. Bathed in the light of a huge yellow lantern, the café looks like the perfect place to spend a warm summer’s eve, doesn’t it? I could wile away an hour or two there, watching the world go by, no problem!

An intense yellow saturates the cafe and its awning, and projects beyond the café onto the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge. The street leads away into the darkness under a blue sky studded with larger-than-life stars. Dashes of green from the tree in the top-right and the lower wall of the café, along with the orange terracotta of the café floor, add to the satisfying palette of this painting. Van Gogh wrote that “the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day”, and on the strength of this piece I can see what he means.

Music

Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues (1955)

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The stock market crash that happened in the United States on 29th October 1929 (“Black Tuesday”) precipitated the 20th century’s longest and deepest recession known as the Great Depression. To compound the financial collapse, three waves of severe drought throughout the Thirties reduced the Great Plains to a “dust bowl”, causing widespread poverty and famine in states such as Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas. This was the world into which Johnny Cash was born. He was born in 1932, and lived with his family in one of F D Roosevelt’s New Deal colonies in Dyess, Arkansas. From age five he worked with his family in cotton fields, and experienced their financial and personal struggles throughout drought and flood. If a deprived background leads to authenticity in music, then Johnny Cash was surely authentic!

He was also incredibly gifted musically, with that amazing bass-baritone voice of his, and after being discharged from the US Air Force in 1954, he launched a career that would turn him into one of the bestselling artists of all time and a country music icon. His other defining characteristics were his tendency to misdemeanour as a result of alcohol and drug abuse, and his natural compassion for the underdogs of society. The former led to many setbacks from which Cash had to bounce back, whilst the latter led him to activism on behalf of Native Americans as well as a series of concerts in high security prisons.

Of his many comebacks, the biggest was undoubtedly the 1968 live album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Recorded in front of an audience of nearly 2000 convicted criminals, in Folsom’s Dining Hall 2, it cemented his outlaw reputation and status as champion of the downtrodden, and it shot him back into the big time. Containing definitive versions of many Cash classics, it’s a masterpiece that’s sold consistently ever since. He began, appropriately enough, with Folsom Prison Blues, the song he had first recorded back in 1955.

Cash had been inspired to write this song after watching the movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951) whilst serving in West Germany in the US Air Force. The song combined two popular folk styles, the “train song” and the “prison song”. It was recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee in July, 1955, produced by the legendary Sam Phillips, and the musicians were Cash (vocals, guitar), Luther Perkins (guitar), and Marshall Grant (bass). Here is a great performance of the song by Cash and the Tennessee Three on the Jimmy Dean Show in 1964.

I hear the train a comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend
And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when
I’m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on
But that train keeps a rollin’ on down to San Antone

When I was just a baby my mama told me, “Son
Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns”
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry

I bet there’s rich folks eating in a fancy dining car
They’re probably drinkin’ coffee and smoking big cigars
Well I know I had it coming, I know I can’t be free
But those people keep a-movin’
And that’s what tortures me

Well if they freed me from this prison
If that railroad train was mine
I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line
Far from Folsom prison, that’s where I want to stay
And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away

Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
Music

The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (1965)

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In April 1965, the Rolling Stones embarked on their first headlining tour of the United States. They had already had two US top ten hits (Time Is On My Side and The Last Time) but in terms of the British invasion they were still a notch or two below bands such as Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five. One song, written during this tour, would soon change that.

The story behind that song is enshrined in rock folklore. Midway through the tour, in a motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night with a tune in his head. Fumbling in the dark for his cassette recorder, he hit the record button and played the eight-note guitar riff. He also mumbled a lyric – “I can’t get no satisfaction” – and then fell asleep. In Richards’ own words: “On the tape you can hear me drop the pick. The rest is me snoring”.

Richards didn’t think his riff would turn into anything commercial; nonetheless, Mick Jagger was inspired to flesh out the lyrics and when the band’s tour took them to Chicago just three days after Richards’ nocturnal ramblings, they dropped into Chess Studios (home to their heroes Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters) and laid down the song.

This first attempt was actually an acoustic, folksy version of the song, sounding nothing like the swaggering stomp it would turn into. It didn’t take long for that transformation to occur, however: just two days later the band re-recorded the song, this time in RCA Studios on Hollywood Boulevard. Richards had just acquired a Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal, Charlie Watts put down a different tempo, and the band gave the song a far more aggressive feel.The song was released as a single in the United States in June 1965. It was a smash hit, giving the Stones their first US number one and setting the band on their trajectory to become the “Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World”. Here’s a suitably electrifying performance delivered by the band and filmed during a quick tour of Ireland a few weeks after the song hit number one.

Music

Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no. 5 in G-minor (1869)

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According to influential conductor Hans von Bülow, the German composer Johannes Brahms was one of the “three Bs” of musical composition along with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven (an accolade that Brahms himself would probably have rejected given his personal veneration for both those composers). He was a virtuoso pianist and a prolific composer of symphonies, chamber music, piano, organ and choral works throughout the second half of the 19th century. However, it’s his early experiences leading to his series of Hungarian dances that interest us here.

By the middle of the 19th Century, scores of Hungarian immigrants and refugees from throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire were flooding into Austria – mostly to Vienna, but also to many other towns including Brahms’s hometown of Hamburg. As a young musician at the beginning of his musical career, Brahms had to play light piano music at taverns to make money. He would also occasionally get hired as an accompanist for a touring musician, and on one evening he had the good fortune to meet one of Hungary’s great touring violinists, Eduard Reményi. Brahms thus learned gypsy music in the intimate musical company of the greatest gypsy violinist of the time.

Forever after cherishing gypsy music, Brahms would go on to publish two sets of Hungarian Dances for two pianos, 21 pieces in all. To this day, however, Hungarian Dance No. 5 is probably the most beloved of his Dances. And rightly so, with its enchanting first theme in a minor key, evoking the swagger and gravitas of a mustachioed Slav lover. The first orchestration of No. 5 was not done by Brahms himself but by Martin Schmeling, but it was this orchestration of Brahms’s transformation of gypsy music that helped it become one of the most treasured pieces in Western music’s repertoire. Enjoy this suitably rousing version, appropriately enough by the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra.

 

Johannes Brahms

Music

The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five (1959)

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There were two main sub-genres of jazz to emerge in post-war America, morphing out of the big band swing era that had dominated in the 1930s and 1940s: they were bebop and cool jazz. Now, whereas bebop was “hot,” i.e. loud, exciting, and loose, cool jazz was “cool,” i.e. soft, more reserved, and controlled. In bebop, the emphasis was on improvisation; in cool jazz, the emphasis was on arrangement. Bebop was East Coast, nightclub-oriented; cool jazz was West Coast and took jazz out to the college campuses. For bebop, think Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk; for cool jazz, think early Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Dave Brubeck.

Dave Brubeck was one of the most active and popular musicians in the jazz world from the late 1940s forwards. Having served in Patton’s army in Europe during the Second World War, he enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California to study composition with French composer, Darius Milhaud. It was Milhaud who encouraged him to pursue a career in jazz and to incorporate jazz elements into his compositions, and this cross-genre experimentation with like-minded Mills students led to the formation of the Dave Brubeck Octet in 1947.

It was, however, the smaller incarnation formed in 1951 that would become the “classic” Brubeck outfit – the Dave Brubeck Quartet – featuring Brubeck on the piano, the legendary Joe Morello on drums, Eugene Wright on bass, and long-time Brubeck collaborator Paul Desmond on alto sax. In 1959 they released the album Time Out, featuring the song that would become a jazz standard and the biggest-selling jazz single ever, Take Five. Written by Paul Desmond, Take Five rapidly became Brubeck’s best-known, and signature, tune, famous for its distinctive, catchy sax melody and use of the unusual 5/4 time from which its name is derived. It’s been used in countless movies and television soundtracks, so if you think you don’t know it, I’m pretty sure you will!

Here’s a wonderful recording of the quartet playing Take Five live in Belgium in 1964. Enjoy these master musicians on top of their game…it’s cool, man!

Music

Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904)

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Last year my family and I went to see Puccini’s Madama Butterfly performed at the Royal Opera House. I should mention I suppose that it was the live streaming we attended, at Leeds’s Cottage Road Cinema, rather than the actual event, lest you think your blogger can actually afford to ponce about in the capital, with family in tow, and attend operas at £175 a ticket. Anyway, attend the live streaming we did, and a comfortable and relatively uncostly affair it was.

Operas are not exactly unknown for their exploration of tragic themes, but you would be hard pressed to find a more perfect example of tragedy as expressed in music than Puccini’s masterpiece. Indeed, it was a personal favourite of the composer himself who described it as ‘the most felt and most expressive opera that I have conceived’. This production was directed by Antonio Pappano (who first appeared on my radar in 2015 when I caught his excellent TV series about opera singers, Classical Voices) and featured Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho in the starring role.

Madama Butterfly is set in Japan at the start of the twentieth century, and tells the tale of the teenage geisha Cio-Cio San (“Butterfly”) and her doomed marriage to Pinkerton, an American naval lieutenant. To Pinkerton, the marriage is one of convenience and shortly after the wedding he leaves Japan. Three years later, Butterfly is still waiting for him, and despite her maid Suzuki endeavouring to convince her that Pinkerton is not coming back, Butterfly won’t listen…and just that dogged belief alone, against all rationale, is enough to break your heart. We know only too well, as does Suzuki, that he’s not coming back.

Actually Pinkerton does come back, but not to Butterfly. Instead, he is – cruel blow! – with his new American wife, and from this point on, Puccini focuses ever deeper on the heartache that culminates in Butterfly committing suicide.

I have selected the electrifying Un bel dì vedremo (One fine day we’ll see) to showcase Ermonela Jaho’s (and Puccini’s) formidable artistic skill. Jaho, as Butterfly, delivers this ravishing and pathos-filled solo from a deep well of emotion. As she steadfastly sings of her belief that Pinkerton will return to her, we can hardly watch, knowing that tragedy awaits! It’s a great performance…

 

 

Ermonela Jaho

Music

Jimi Hendrix performs the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock (1969)

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In August of next year we will reach the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock Festival, that three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) involving lots of sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and mud, and which became an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. Held at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York State, the Woodstock Festival, billed as “three days of peace and music”, featured a roll-call of big acts of the day: Joan Baez, Santana, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Jimi Hendrix (it’s interesting to read the roll-call of cancelled acts and declined invitations too, but that’s another story).

When Hendrix stepped onto the stage, it was 9 o’clock on the morning of the fourth day – technical and weather delays had caused the festival to stretch into Monday morning. The organisers had given Hendrix the opportunity to go on at midnight, but he opted to be the closing act (by 1969 he had earned the traditional headliner’s position). The morning light made for excellent filming conditions, which may be part of the reason this particular Hendrix performance is so well known. In any event, Hendrix embarked upon an uninterrupted set lasting nearly two hours, one of the longest performances of his career. It concluded with a long medley that included the solo performance of The Star-Spangled Banner that would become emblematic not only of Woodstock, but of the 1960s themselves.

When most people think of Hendrix and Woodstock, it is this performance of the national anthem that comes to mind. It was not the first time Hendrix had performed it (in fact, there are nearly 50 live recordings of Hendrix playing it, 28 made before Woodstock) but no other version is so iconic. The idea of incorporating the sounds of bombs and jets and cries of human anguish into his country’s national anthem was brilliant. As a protest against the Vietnam War it was unambiguous and powerful: raw, jarring, soaring, and discomforting in equal measure (though in fact performed in front of a relatively small crowd since so many people had left Woodstock to return to work or college that Monday morning!). So 49 years on, and from the comfort of your mud-free armchair, here is Hendrix’s guitar-torturing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. It’s not comfortable to listen to, frankly, but its cultural impact is clearly understandable. It’s followed by an interesting snippet of Hendrix discussing the performance on the Dick Cavett chat show a year later.

Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock