Music

On Sunday, November 10, 1991, the band Tin Machine played a gig at Brixton Academy in south London. Brixton then was far from the gentrified area it has become; it remained a hotbed of simmering social and racial unrest. The notorious riots of a decade before were still a recent memory, and those who ventured to the Academy did so in the knowledge that fights and aggravation were highly likely, especially after alcohol had been consumed. But if on-street scuffles were a price that gig-goers had to pay to see their musical idols, the world of Tin Machine was a much less happy one. At the beginning of the Nineties, David Bowie had to consider, for the first time since the success of the single “Space Oddity” in 1969, that he might be a spent force.

The New York Times recently started a new series about introducing a friend to jazz in five minutes with a tribute to Duke Ellington. In many ways, Ellington is a sound choice. He was the bandleader par excellence, a brilliantly inventive composer who formed much of the modern jazz vocabulary. But matters can’t rest there. In any assessment of jazz’s founding fathers, Louis Armstrong has to stand as the most influential figure. Both his trumpet and voice are simply inimitable. A recent visit to his modest home, which is now a museum, during a trip to New York with my family offered a reminder of the magnetic attraction Armstrong continues to exert.

Have you tuned in to a country radio station the past few years? You might have been surprised at some of the sounds coming through your speakers. A famous old-school Webb Pierce tune is chopped and screwed into an up-tempo hip-hop beat. Lyrics about an Applebee’s milkshake are accompanied by a booming bass. P!nk and Justin Bieber croon alongside Country Music Award winners. You’d be forgiven for thinking that all mainstream country really has to offer is saccharine, trope-filled pop music with a Southern accent. Nashville’s stranglehold on country radio has given the genre a bad rap (sometimes literally — here’s looking at you, Lil Nas X).

After I saw the Canadian band Arcade Fire on tour in London in late 2010, I began my review of the gig by quoting Psalm 98: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” My abiding memory of the evening was that it was fun. Despite the apparent solemnity of many of the act’s songs — several of which had been taken from their debut album, Funeral, and revolved around death and despair — the concert had a celebratory and upbeat aspect. It concluded (as virtually all of their shows had done) with a euphoric singalong of what has become their signature song, the cathartic “Wake Up.” A decade later, matters have changed. The world is in a considerably more anxious state than it was.

"All the Things You Are” is an essential jazz standard, but in 1960 the bassist Charles Mingus gave it an update: “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to peek under the hood of this composition. Like many Mingus tunes, the loose adaptation is fairly bipolar, picking up and dropping off in fits and starts, alternating between vacuum-tight swinging sections and meandering, tempo-less squabbles between members of the four-piece band. Mingus isn’t for the faint of heart, but on the centenary of his birth it’s worth confronting his life’s work, which surely places him among America’s most important composers.

When Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers visited Japan for a two-week tour in 1961, they were among the first Western groups to tour the country. It didn’t take much for the locals to get the message. The legendary drummer’s band contained what might be his strongest lineup ever — Lee Morgan on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass — and they were greeted by elated fans upon landing at Haneda Airport on New Year’s Day. “It was like a florist’s shop,” Blakey recalled. “They wanted me to make a speech but I couldn’t. I just cried.” For the band members, this maiden voyage was a deeply moving experience. Back home, they had been relegated to playing, more often than not, in smoky jazz clubs.

When it comes to music in the classical era, central Europe — or, to put it is where most of the action has taken place. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms are, in a sense, the Big Five, commanding the limelight, with the likes of Mendelssohn and Mahler bringing up the rear. But if geography has somehow played a key role in the development of modern classical music, then another region has been gradually nudging its way into view. Names from northern Europe such as Kalevi Aho, Leif Segerstam, Per Nørgård and Vagn Holmboe must figure prominently in any tally of leading composers who have expanded the boundaries of musical expression.Take Holmboe’s brilliantly imaginative Concerto No. 11 for trumpet and orchestra.

Gigs. Remember them? They were awful. You’d get to some dump of avenue, in a bad part of town (if a small capacity) or out in some apocalyptic wasteland (if an enormo-dome). You’d arrive too early and have to try and dodge some mediocre support band (who’d bought their way on to the tour) or queue for seven hours for a beer in a plastic cup. If you dared to speak while some awful act was plodding away, some goody-goody would hold a finger up to their lips, glare and shoosh you. An hour and a half later in the back of the venue, you’d stand gratefully nearer to death’s beckoning cold hand. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Yes. When Covid rampaged through the world like a Viking raid of death-cult realtors, the world was suddenly shorn of live music.

There is a long tradition in jazz of duets between trumpeters and pianists. It’s a mercilessly revealing format, one that allows for no hiding on the part of either performer. But the payoff can be big. Consider the recording of the song “Weather Bird” by Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines in December 1928. Part of the epochal Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions that announced a new era in jazz, it featured Armstrong ripping up the old New Orleans playbook. Armstrong’s remarkable rhythmic innovations sometimes seem like the musical equivalent of a running back stutter-stepping to fake out his opponent before exploding downfield. He helped ensure that the Roaring Twenties really roared.

The jazz world has seen more than its share of tragic deaths, whether it was the trumpeter Clifford Brown perishing in a car crash at night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the age of 25 or saxophonist John Coltrane succumbing to liver cancer at 40. But perhaps there is no more confounding early demise than that of the bravura trumpeter Lee Morgan. Morgan, who played with the likes of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey as a teenager, was known for his swagger, which he liked to call ‘expoobidence’, (which he deployed as the title for an album for Vee-Jay records in 1960 called Expoobident). It all came to a swift terminus in February 1972 after his common-law wife Helen, a tough cookie if there ever was one, pulled out a .

I must have been about 16 when I got my first Portastudio. The compact home recording unit had first been introduced by Japanese electronics firm Teac in 1979, offering unprecedented multitrack dubbing to the bed-bound amateur musician. For a little less than $1,000, you could record four separate tracks of instrumentation — as much as the Beatles had when making Sgt. Pepper — on an ordinary cassette tape. By the time I got my teenage hands on a four-track machine of my own, that price had come down by an order of magnitude. It was a chunky little unit in pigeon blue with just two microphone sockets and a small handful of mixing dials for volume control and stereo panning.

February 15, 1981, the day after Valentine’s Day. At 11 on a Sunday morning, a man’s body was found slumped in the passenger seat of a beige 1971 Mercury on a residential street in the Forest Hills section of San Francisco. All four doors were locked. A Valium bottle was in the pocket of a coat on the back seat. There was no ID: the body went to the morgue as John Doe #15. The dead man was 37-year-old Michael Bloomfield, a pioneering guitarist who brought blues to the mainstream and set Bob Dylan’s music alight. The cause of death was registered as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. Questions remain unanswered about how he died; why methamphetamine, which he avoided, was in his system; and why he was in a part of town where he knew no one.