The Soul of Stax

Pretty much the only music I listened to in the 1980s was Soul. After the death of Punk in the late 70s there didn't seem to be anything around that had the same kind of passion and honesty. So I went retro. Only 60s Soul did it for me.

I remember hearing Otis Redding's Otis Blue and Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour for the first time on Alexis Korner's BBC Radio 1 Sunday night Soul and R'n'B show somewhere around late 1979. Both albums were recorded at the Stax recording studios in Memphis (though not all the Pickett album was recorded there but the best tracks, like In the Midnight Hour and Don't Fight It, were). The music was powerful. The arrangements were lean. There was absolutely nothing there that didn't need to be there. The rhythm section was tight and funky. The horns punched out lines that responded gospel style to the singer's agony or ecstasy. Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and all the other Stax singers I was later to discover, like Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Mavis Staples, Johnny Taylor... they had voices with enormous power and range that seemed to live the songs, not just sing the words. I was hooked.

Thus began a lifelong Soul obsession. And in the early 80s those original 60s LPs were getting pretty hard to find. There were no cheap CD reissues, box sets or compilations around in those days and you pretty much had to slog it around the second hand record shops to pick up old copies of American imports of Stax, Atlantic, Motown, Hi records... (American pressings were more highly prized because they were mastered from the original tapes and had noticeably better sound quality. I remember some of the UK pressings of Atlantic albums, which in the 60s were distributed by Polydor, sounded really godawful.) So I spent most of the decade pretty much going from one second hand shop to another on the look-out for pristine pressings of Aretha Franklin, King Curtis, Sam and Dave, The Meters, James Brown....  Even around Europe. Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid... never mind the museums and restaurants what were the second hand shops like?

Listened to now, 60s and 70s soul sounds more marvelous than ever. Like the blues there's no arsing about or studio trickery. It's clean. It's real. Recorded more or less live. What you hear is what went down. Great singers. Great songwriters. Great musicians. Soul also had optimism. Fueled on the righteousness of good old gospel and the 60s Civil Rights movement, it had a belief in itself and the future. These were marching songs for changing times. People get ready. A change was gonna come...

The Soul of Stax
The home of Soul music in Memphis, Tennessee was Stax Records. It was founded in 1962 by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton and it went bust in January 1976. Those 13 or 14 years are the classic years of southern Soul music.

The Soul of Stax, a 1994 BBC / French co-production directed by Philip Priestley, tells the the story of those classic years - the first hit with Rufus and Carla Thomas; the rise and international success of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, the Staple Singers; the decline and fall of soul after the loss of optimism in the civil rights movement and rise in anger and militancy after the assassination of Martin Luther King; and finally, Stax's eventual bankruptcy.

It features Stax founders Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, Isaac Hayes, Al Bell, Rufus Thomas, house band Booker T (Jones) and the MGs (Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn) and clips of Sam and Dave, Otis Redding and the Wattstax movie.

"Cool" - BBC Arena documentary

  

 

One of the best jazz films made in recent years. Even if you don't like jazz, you should watch this visually stunning 2009 BBC documentary on 1950s cool jazz. 

"The classic cool combo consisted of 3, 4 or 5 musicians, a rhythm section with the voices supplied by horns and usually a piano. They'd begin with  theme, improvise around it for several minutes and return to it. Young men with a studious air, in well cut suits and slim ties."

Cool jazz was cool for a number of reasons. It was cool music - a relaxed and poised counterpoint to the agitation of Bebop - but it also had attitude and style. It was a precursor of 1960s mod culture with its sharp suits and button down collared shirts.

"If you're good you should be wearing sharp clothes," - Charlie Davidson.

This excellent documentary, produced and directed by Anthony Wall, exudes a certain cool of its own. The narration is minimal and the pace relaxed. The written quotes, archive clips and photos set the backdrop of 1950s America but also compliment the music and let it tell its own story, in its own time.

"As always in jazz, its essence is the tension between improvisation and order, between freedom and discipline" - Time magazine November 1954 (on Dave Brubeck).

If the word "cool" is one of the most overused expressions of the 21st century, watch this and find out about when it actually meant something.

Featuring Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Art Farmer, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac and original incidental music by George Taylor... This is the birth of the cool. 

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry Martini" - Paul Desmond.

Ronnie Scott and All That Jazz

A 1989 BBC Omnibus documentary on Ronnie Scott filmed on the 30th anniversary of the club he founded in Soho, London with tenor sax player Pete King.

The documentary features footage of Zoot Sims, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and interviews with Pete King, Stan Tracy, Mel Brooks and also a couple of young Westminster MPs called Ken Clarke and John Prescott. Both united here in order to show how jazz brings together people of opposing political views, however both claim in the interview is this is the closest is they have ever sat together.

Ronnie Scott often acted as club MC was famous for his repertoire of jokes and one-liners. "Our next guest is one of the finest musicians in the country. In the city, he's crap". Of the club he once said, "It's easy to make a million running a jazz club. Just start with two million". "I love this place, its just like home. Filthy and full of strangers" and "it was very quiet last night, we had the bouncers chucking people IN. A guy rang up and asked 'what time does the show start?' I said, what time can you get here? No but I really love this place, its made a very happy man old."

There is even a blog dedicated to Ronnie's humourous asides here The Ronnie Scott Jokes Page

After Ronnie's death in 1996, Pete King continued to run the club for a further nine years, before selling it in 2005.

Redeeming the 70s - Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth

Redeeming the 70s
The 70s is a much maligned and oversimplified decade. Many will have you believe that the UK was on the brink of anarchy with the whole country on strike for the entire decade, that there were permanent power cuts and that dead bodies were piling up in the streets without anyone to bury them. They will also tell you that there was nothing to listen to except pretentious prog-rock and fatuous disco and that we were all delivered from this misery by punk rock and Margaret Thatcher. Complete nonsense of course, and a facile rewriting of history by Thatcherite politicians and white middle class rock journalists.

Musically, the 1970s was far more varied and complex decade than the 1960s. It is a time which defies the 60s' easy myth-making. It's true that there were a fallow couple of years for rock music before punk arrived however there was great soul and reggae music being made right up until the end of the decade. Al Green, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were making their best records and Bob Marley became an international star. Many of the musical experiments which started in the 60s saw fruition in the 70s in jazz rock, British folk-rock, glam-rock, heavy metal, funk and disco. German bands like Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Can and Amon Duul were taking the avant garde and putting it into the rock mainstream. It was also David Bowie's decade. Bowie was the leading style and musical icon of the 70s and defines the decade and its changing styles more than any other contemporary artist. Bowie's most satisfyingly creative albums are probably the Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and The Lodger; all albums on which Brian Eno played an influential role.


Eno: The Man Who Fell To Earth

AVRO

Brian Eno had an astonishingly prolific and influential 5 years from 1972 to 1977 and gives the lie that the 70s were any less pioneering than the 60s. He was an original member of Roxy Music and played on their first two classic LPs Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure. He then left Roxy, for reasons which may have had something to do with Bryan Ferry's envy at Eno's success with women, and put out 4 solo albums; Here Come The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, Before and After Science and the sublime Another Green World - one of the best albums of the the 70s and a masterpiece of languid pastoral pop.

Apart from his work with Bowie, there were also many other impressive collaborations; with Robert Fripp on No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, forerunners to Eno's later Ambient series of albums; with German musicians Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius on Cluster and Eno and After The Heat; and also with David Byrne on the groundbreaking My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.

And all this by a self-professed "non-musician".

Few other artists, whether they be from the 60s or the 70s, have matched that sustained level of creativity and successful experimentation over such a short period of time and have left such an indelible mark on 21st century music. Eno's influence can still be felt in both the mainstream and avant-garde. Jason Ankeny at Allmusic maintains that Eno "forever altered the ways in which music is approached, composed, performed, and perceived, and everything from punk to techno to new age bears his unmistakable influence."

This two and a half hour documentary examines this intensely creative period and the reasons for Eno's lasting impact on modern music.

Watch it in parts on YouTube - Part 1 here

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Embryo

Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution

There is a spirit in of a lot of post war popular music that seems to be exploratory, experimental and, dare one say it, progressive. This desire to push at the boundaries and overturn what had gone before can be seen in in post war jazz, Bebop, 1960s rock music, the music of the Beatles, Byrds, Pink Floyd and many others.

However by the end of the 70s, Jazz saw its audience dwindle (perhaps due to being exposed to a little too much free jazz experimentation) and British and US rock music seemed have become ever more corporate, business oriented, predictable and safe.

At the end of 1960s this experimental baton was picked up by a wave of German bands  intent on creating new sounds and exploring new  technologies. Kraftwerk, Can, Amon Duul, Tangerine Dream, Popul Vuh - all seemed to be bands that were determined to create something new without falling into the blues jam / prog-rock noodling that had befallen many of their British and American contermpories. Why did this happen in Germany?

"Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution" is a three hour documentary that explores the history of those German bands. It particularly focuses the group whose music achieved the most crossover success and  influenced so much of modern electronica - Kraftwerk.

Most of the main participants are interviewed although only Karl Bartos appears from Kraftwerk. As he says, a bunch of musicians "not raised on the Mississippi delta" had little choice but to take rock music in a new direction if they wanted to maintain any kind of integrity.


This documentary can be watched in parts on Youtube. Here is part 1.

More on stranger than known

Parallax - The Pink Floyd and the BBC 

Redeeming the 70s - Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth

"A Group By The Name of Love" - Arthur Lee and Love on Danish TV 1970

"En gruppe ved navn Love" (A Group by the Name of Love) is a Danish TV documentary broadcast on 17th July 1970. It features Arthur Lee and the second line-up of Love with Gary Rowles, Frank Fayad & George Suranovich playing live at The Tivoli in Copenhagen in March of that year.

Arthur is interviewed and when questioned about the band's line-up changes just grins and says "everybody is Love"

Interesting for the live footage of the band, there are also scenes of Arthur wondering around Copenhagen, walking through a snow-laden Danish wood and a perhaps not suitable for work topless Danish dancer jiving around to "She Comes In Colors".
Hey it was the 60s.

David Fricke on Rolling Stone's Arthur Lee and Love's Essential Bootlegs described the live recordings thus "Love were especially feted in Denmark: Danish TV interviewed Lee and taped five songs at the Tivoli show, including the convulsive thunder of "August," from 1969's Four Sail, and Lee's brutal update of the heroin-blues crawl "Signed D.C.," originally on Love. It is a short but rare solid-audio shot of Lee in the kind of dramatic vocal command that made him an instant, fearsome star on the Strip just five years earlier."

Not sure I agree about the version of Signed DC. It seems a little overwrought compared to the raw acoustic simplicity of the version on the first album but the band are impressive. Four Sail is a much under-rated album coming as it does after the momentous Forever Changes.

See the complete 40 minute documentary below.

See also http://love.torbenskott.dk/tour/19700312_copenhagen.aspp for more on the Copenhagen gigs.