Skip to main content

Melting Pot

Booker T. Jones & the M.G.'s are captured in seemingly sombre mood on the cover of their 1970 album Melting Pot. Reputedly, by the time this this record was made, both Jones and guitarist Steve Cropper were becoming estranged from Stax records - their musical home for most of the '60s - in the wake of a change of management there. The photo need not, of course, have had any relation to those tensions, but it does help illustrate that all was not well behind the scenes.

Happily for the listener, however, it is in no way an "off" or awkward-sounding record: quite the opposite. Made in New York, rather than their native Memphis, the band are on top form throughout. Most of their previous albums had given the impression of being hastily-assembled sets, heavy on the cover-versions, but on this one, all the tracks are original compositions. The very best comes first, in the shape of the 8:15-long title-track, an outstanding groove with Al Jackson, Jr.'s drums its beating heart. In parts of 'Back Home' and 'Fuquawi', Jones contributes piano parts, as well as playing his customary Hammond B-3. 

After an all-instrumental side A, there's a suprise in 'Kinda Easy Like', the opener on side B, when vocals kick in - not from the band themselves, but in the form of wordless harmonies by "The Pepper Singers". They are heard again in 'LA Jazz Song', an airy number where one really does get the sense that we're not in Memphis any more. The closing track ('Sunny Monday') begins with a delicate intro combining acoustic guitar, piano & skittering cymbals, before picking up momentum to bring things to a suitably pleasing conclusion. I love this record, which I was lucky enough to acquire for only a few pounds around this time last year.

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

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more