Skip to main content

What's Going On

Say it's 1987 and you're curious to learn more about the classic 'canon' of rock & pop music. The web is still some years off in the future and you're not going to be able to afford to connect to it until 1998 in any case. What you might do is lurk in your local branch of WH Smith and peruse the display copy of a new book (Paul Gambaccini Presents the) Top 100 Albums (a best-of list based on top-tens provided by its 81 contributors), and make some mental notes as to what albums you might acquire next on cassette.

I wasn't interested at that point in the book's top three picks: Sgt. Pepper... ; Born To Run; Blonde On Blonde -  but the write-ups within did guide me in the direction of albums such as Astral Weeks (#9); The Velvet Underground and Nico (#7) and What's Going On (#4). I didn't then (or for a long while afterwards) listen to much soul music, but it was obvious from the first notes that this was a top quality item.

I've always loved the title track and 'Mercy Mercy me' and 'Inner City Blues', but in the callousness of my youth the the earnest tenor of songs like 'Save the Children' and 'God is Love' grated on me somewhat. With the mellowing benefit of age I've come to enjoy those songs too: the whole thing is a joy from start to finish. I bought my present copy - a 2016 vinyl re-press - shortly before the pandemic took hold.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more