Music

Imagine a John Le Carré thriller — one of the Cold War ones, not the tedious lefty morality tales — in which we meet Moisey Vainberg, a Polish Jewish composer who defected to Russia in 1943 while the rest of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust. He dresses like a mid-level bureaucrat and seems nervous about drawing attention to himself. That’s sensible, given that under Stalin he was thrown into jail for ‘Jewish bourgeois nationalism’. Then he’s rehabilitated, his music enjoys a brief vogue, he’s performed by Rostropovich, Shafran, Gilels, Kogan and the Borodins — but he never boasts or promotes himself. A few recordings reach the West, but the critics wrinkle their noses.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans was the title of one of the great jazz pianist’s early albums, but it wasn’t always clear that he dug himself, at least if you consider his turbulent personal life. There was, first and foremost, the lifelong drug habit, culminating in his death in 1980, which one friend deemed the ‘longest suicide note in history’. There was also the introspective streak that prompted Evans to doubt his own prowess even after he had become famous. But there is also the spellbinding music that casts as powerful a spell as ever. Small wonder that a cluster of purveyors of fine music, including Craft Records, Electric Recording Company and Acoustic Sounds, have rushed to reissue his works on CD and LP.

Fifty years ago this midsummer, a ramshackle convoy of vehicles — cars, minibuses, motorcycles and the odd hippie caravan — could be seen wending its way through the western counties of England in search of a patch of agricultural land near Shepton Mallet called Worthy Farm. There had already been several Sixties-era tribal gatherings in the fields beyond Michael Eavis’s now legendary homestead, but this iteration, widely advertised in the countercultural press, came billed as the very first Glastonbury Festival.

The history of late-20th-century Japanese pop music can seem like an impenetrable forest to western minds. But stare past the trees and there is light from a parallel universe. The Japanese Group Sounds records of the mid-Sixties (the Spiders, the Tempters and er, the Mops) were heavily influenced by the original moptops’ Budokan Temple show of 1966 and surf bands such as the Ventures. The university campus hard rock of Tokyo’s late-Sixties freak scene — Les Rallizes Dénudés, Flower Travellin’ Band, Speed, Glue and Shinki — and the lysergic rock soundtracks to Shuji Terayama’s revolutionary theater plays by the great J.A.

‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ Maxwell Scott announces in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Something like this seems to have occurred with the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Other members of the West Coast jazz scene such as the great saxophonist Art Pepper were often in dire straits, but Baker has come to personify the romantic figure of the tragically doomed jazz artist. Once heralded as the ‘prince of cool’, Baker’s self-destruction was lucidly chronicled by Bruce Weber in the 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. Even his album covers, where he gazes broodingly at the viewer, underscore his vulnerability. His meditative, halting solos formed the antithesis of the frenetic bebop movement emanating from jazz haunts on the East Coast.

When a young singer and pianist named Charles Brown was hired in 1944 to play at Ivie’s Chicken Shack, the legendary jazz singer Ivie Anderson’s nightclub in Los Angeles, he was instructed to play ‘nothing degrading like the blues’. It wasn’t an admonition that he heeded very long. The blues didn’t degrade him. He elevated them. After Brown died in 1999, Bonnie Raitt, who toured with him starting in 1987, deemed him ‘the most extraordinary piano player I’ve ever heard’, noting that he ‘led the West Coast blues explosion’. Indeed he did.

The Beatles never had a proper Christmas number one, only seasonal number ones with unseasonal bangers: ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘We Can Work It Out’/‘Day Tripper’ (1963-65) and ‘Hello Goodbye’ (1967). Though they never made a traditional Christmas record, the Fabs loved Yule — and you know you should be glad. Between 1963 and 1969, they recorded an album-worth of charming Christmas nonsense. Welcome to the semi-secret hinterland between the legal and bootleg worlds: the Beatles’ Fan Club Christmas flexi discs. The flexis have only had one official release since their private circulation to the ravenous Brit-Beatle fan club.

Pop music is tribalist by nature and divisive by desire. It was always the Beatles or the Stones, mods or rockers, burn the Beatles’ records or ‘hang the DJ’ and, most important of all, Bob Marley or Big Youth? (The answer is Big Youth.) Only one man transcended this nonsense: Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert. Anyone who has heard Toots but doesn’t dig his mighty soul skank should be cast into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights of good, hard thinking. Toots died on September 11 in his native Jamaica. He was 77, allegedly the victim of complications from COVID-19. The man may have gone, but his vibrations will live on as long as mankind has ears to listen and feet to dance.

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed pianist New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983, aged 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness, and attended by legends of delinquency lurid even for a New Orleans piano ‘professor’. Though he had appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages, Booker had recorded only three studio albums in his lifetime. Classified, recorded in October 1982 and now re-released on vinyl, was the last of them. It might not be the best of them, but it shows why Booker was one of the greats. The studio was booked for three days, but Booker had a breakdown the week before and couldn’t get a good take down in the first two days.

There is a moment in the first episode of Dolly Parton’s America when you think the sainted songstress may have made the worst mistake of her career. ‘Do you think of yourself as a feminist?’ asks host Jad Abumrad. ‘No, I do not,’ Dolly says. There is a pause as wide as the gap between those who have four-year degrees and those who don’t. After Dolly says she thinks feminism means hating men, Abumrad cuts to an interview with feminist, Heartland author and Dolly superfan Sarah Smarsh. They grasp for a reason why Dolly would think so non- progressively. The interview starts to feel like a wake.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in late September, he depicted Brazil as a victim of colonialism. ‘The United Nations has played a fundamental role in the suppression of colonialism,’ he said, ‘and we cannot allow this mentality to return to these rooms and corridors at any pretext. We cannot forget that the world needs to be fed.’ Foreign countries, Bolsonaro alleged, have ‘an interest in keeping indigenous people living like cave men’.