This is a Recording

On the back cover of Memphis Underground is a remarkable photograph taken in the American Sound Studio (in Memphis) during the making of the album. From an elevated vantage-point we see Mann himself, shirtless & hirsute in tight white jeans playing his flute; along with five other musicians and one other man, who I think may be recording engineer extraodinaire Tom Dowd. Mann is separated from the others by padded room dividers to help isolate his contribution, the larger of those dividers with a window in it seemingly punctured by four bullet-holes, above which is written - possibly in lipstick - "BONNIE AND CLYDE WAS HERE". It's a very good album of soul jazz, or perhaps jazz-meets-r'n'b. While I admire and enjoy Mann's flute-playing lead, for me the chief interest comes from the wonderful grooves laid down by the "Memphis Boys", i.e. the studio's excellent house band, aided by an additional trio of visiting musicians, among them Roy Ayers....

'Concrete and Clay' by Unit 4 + 2 was among the singles my mother bought when she was a teenager, that she later misguidedly gave to me and my sister. The other singles from her collection I can specifically recall ran a gamut between the cool ('Mr. Tambourine Man' by The Byrds; Lee Dorsey's 'Working in the Coal Mine') and the uncool ('Deck of Cards' by Wink Martindale) by way of the likes of The Springfields' 'Island of Dreams' and 'Glad All Over' by The Dave Clark Five. She would have probably owned some Beatles 45s too, had her big sister not already acquired them. Unit 4 + 2 came by their name by virtue of having been a quartet that became a sextet. 'Concrete and Clay' was their sole big hit, reaching the heights of Number 1 in the UK Singles Chart for a single week in April 1965. It's a protestation of undying love clad in a rather lovely Latin-influenced arrangement. There's a promotional film-clip of the ba...

No more than dimly aware of his music, I hadn't known of Chet Baker's outings as a vocalist until about four or five years ago. Then, in a classic case of the so-called Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I suddenly seemed to hear and read about it from multiple sources within the space of a few months. Having much enjoyed some of the tracks from Chet Baker Sings , I obtained it on CD, as part of a four-disc set of Eight Classic Albums which also included two other records with some of Chet's crooning on them: Grey December and Embraceable You . Then, last year, I happened to find a vinyl copy in the wild - specifically a mid-'80s Spanish re-issue in excellent condition that, according to Discogs, is worth rather more than the few pounds I paid for it. The record brings together the contents of a 10" album recorded and released in 1954 (the original Chet Baker Sings ) with a further half dozen numbers recorded in 1956 for the initial 12" issue. The music is mellow, a...

Frederick Youens' sleeve-notes on this UK release of Louis (or Ludwig) Spohr's Nonet in F, op. 31 , say of the composer that "he never attained profound depths or a wide range, but his undoubted gift for melody made him a much-loved composer during his lifetime" (rated ahead of Beethoven by some contemporaries). Such seems to be Spohr's legacy: to be half-damned by lukewarm praise. Youens reckons the Nonet "has much of the charm of the Schubert Octet" - when, to my mind, Spohr's is the more enjoyable piece of the two.  Though not a musical revolutionary in the same vein as Beethoven, Spohr was also an innovator in his own way - credited with inventing the violin chin-rest, and of being the first to conduct an orchestra with a baton. And in his compositions, Spohr not infrequently "experimented with unusual combinations of instruments" (Youens again) with the Nonet a case in point. Similar instrumental groupings had been used in late-18th-Ce...

For the almost-completely out-of-touch, end-of-year best-of lists can be useful and instructive. Having stuck my head in the musical sand in the Spring of 2020, I'd missed the advent of Sault's two Untitled albums until I saw enthusiastic praise for them that December. After trying on a few tracks for size, I ordered CD copies of them both (from Juno, as I recall) in January last year, It hadn't been long since I'd first seen the name "Inflo": in the credits for Michael Kiwanuka's eponymous 2019 album. Impressive as that record was, it's as captain of the good ship SAULT that his vision & talent have truly come into their own. Untitled (Rise) can seem an uplifting carnivalesque counterpart to the oftener mournful & angry Untitled (Black Is) - but that's an oversimplification, as they're meanwhile cut from different parts of the same cloth. Even a dance music ignoramus like me can appreciate some of the strands skilfully interwoven he...

Stanley Brinks, formerly known as André Herman Düne, is a half Swedish, half Moroccan, Paris-born, Berlin-resident singer-songwriter. The Wave Pictures are a three-piece band from Leicestershire fronted by singer/guitarist David Tattersall. Both they and Brinks have recorded prolifically. Jointly they have released at least three albums and as many singles, with 'Orange Juice', issued in 2014, being the first of the latter. It was released as a bright orange 7" on the Fika Recordings label. A week ago I wrote "very often I need to hear an unfamiliar song several times before its charms or its annoyances become fully apparent": 'Orange Juice' is a counter-example, a case where it was love at first hearing. In a nasal tenor, Brinks laments the state of the weather, his own decrepitude, the music he hears on the radio, the dirty streets, and, lastly, the apparent futility of existence. Against all that, a more optimistic chorus rejoins "but I'll get...

Having fallen for the late, lamented Jaimie Branch's wonderful album Fly or Die II , I wondered if there might be anything else on the same label - International Anthem - that I'd also enjoy. Via YouTube I began listening to Irreversible Entanglements, and, while the music was a little freer than I typically take my jazz, I was hooked by the video for the track 'No Más', and had soon acquired the Who Sent You? album on CD. Irreversible Entanglements are a quintet with four instrumentalists (Keir Neuringer - saxophone; Aquiles Navarro - trumpet; Luke Stewart - bass; Tcheser Holmes - drums) and a vocalist (Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother). Ayewa recites rather than sings her words, yet the rhythmic quality of her delivery enhances the music as well as providing the message. Who Sent You? released in 2020, is their second album. There are five tracks over the disc's forty-three minutes. The first half of the second number, which gives the album its name, is another hig...