Category: Music

I had to take a trip to Kansas City on the Ides of February, so I stopped by the library to check out a couple of audio courses to listen to on the way up and back (in a day–it was seven hours of driving for about an hour of work appointment).

Since I liked Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion, I picked up this course to supplement what I learned from the earlier course. All the way up and back, I swapped discs between this course and one on the Old Testament (that I’m still listening to, so don’t expect to see it any time soon).

But I didn’t like this course as much.

For starters, it begins (hem) with a couple courses on listening to jazz where the lecturer talks about the sounds of jazz, the elements (hem) and how they evolved, and the instructor illustrates a bit on the trumpet (his instrument). But then the bulk of the course is a name-checking of jazz musicians and who they played with de-coupled from the sounds of the jazz they’re making. For some reason, probably rights issues, the courses themselves do not have music samples inline to illustrate what the lecturer is saying. Instead, the course includes a two-CD collection of jazz that originally accompanied another book or textbook, and the lecturer refers to sample songs by track number, and the bulk of this course has no music in it whatsoever.

The lecturer’s presentation was a little flat and a little uninspired, too, especially compared to the enthusiasm and humor expressed by the lecturer in Elements of Jazz.

So the whole course pales in comparison. Perhaps it would seem better if it was the only course you listened to or if you listened to them in the opposite order. Or if this was your only dabbling in jazz lectures. Or if you wanted more of a history of jazz.

As this was a library edition, I had to hasten it back to the library before I read the guide book that came with it, so I don’t really get to count it as a book read this year. Much like, perhaps, The Count of Monte Cristo.

For my birthday, my beautiful wife got me a two CD collection of Angela Bofill’s greatest hits. As you know, I’ve been accumulating her records for a couple of years now, and she’s becoming one of my favorite R & B musicians if not one of my current musical crushes:

A couple years ago I picked up the Walter Murphy Band’s A Fifth of Beethoven based on the weight of the title song which also appears on the soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever and because one of the guys I know made a gag about it. My favorite song from that album is actually “California Strut”:

The booklet that came with the Angela Bofill CDs points out that she provided the vocal tracks for that particular song.

Coincidence? Or a discerning ear?

Please, choose the option which reflects best upon your host.

Because President’s Day was a holiday for only some of us, I took the boys out for the day so my beautiful wife could work in peace. We went bowling and to the (relatively) new Wonders of Wildlife museum and aquarium where I basically paid $50 to see a museum of things I try not to hit with my car.

To cap the day, we stopped at Relics Antique Mall to extend her worktime by another forty minutes or so.

I found the end cap where I’d spotted an unpriced Phoebe Snow album last year no longer had any albums, so I just picked through a couple bins on the middle row.

I spent less than $20 and got:

• City Kids by Spyro Gyra. Now that I know they’re Buckwheat Zydeco, I’m picking their stuff up here and there.
• Hero by Clarence Clemons, the E Street Band saxophonist. Apparently, the first song, “You’re a Friend of Mine” with Jackson Browne, was a hit, but I don’t remember it.
• Quincy Jones Plays Hip Hits
• Swing Along With Jonah Jones; he’s a jazz trumpeter who sounds like he might be trying to imitate Louis Armstrong a bit too strongly to stand out on his own. Still, it’s cool jazz. I saw another of his albums that I did not pick up this time, but I’ll look for it next time.
• She Works Hard for the Money by Donna Summer. So now that we’re almost to forty years past disco and thirty some years past the Eighties Sound, apparently I think they’re old enough to buy on vinyl.
• Hall of Fame featuring The McGuire Sisters and the De John Sisters.

It’s enough to keep my burgeoning record collection accumulation from seeming stale. For a couple of weeks.

I really enjoy the samba beat in this single, “You or Me”, from Janet Evra’s new album, Ask Her To Dance.

Although I’m only guessing samba; although it was briefly covered in Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion, I’ve already begun to forget what I might have learned from the course.

Janet Evra is also from the Saint Louis area (which explains why I saw her mentioned on WSIE’s Facebook page). I expect to get her new album when I feel comfortable just ordering new CDs on a whim again. Or for my upcoming birthday, since I spelled ‘Janet Evra‘ to my beautiful wife. Although I guess I did spell my last name to my beautiful wife at some point before I made her practice writing it over and over.

Well, I’m butchering an unrelated country song title, but I saw this meme on Facebook:

And I immediately thought about the song “The Bird” by Jerry Reed:

And I remembered when it was on the radio:

It was 1982. I was freshly ten years old; my parents were separated for probably a year. My mother listened to country and western on the radio when we lived in Milwaukee before shifting to oldies when we lived in St. Louis, which explains my listening habits as I grew up (I didn’t learn I could change the station on the radio and did not have a radio of my own until I was about thirteen, which explains why I was so pressed to think of a pop song as a favorite song on a questionnaire when I was chosen as Student of the Week in eighth grade and had to go with “Ghostbusters” as both my favorite song and movie). We spent a lot of time with the Odya boys, and I remember singing along with them when “The Bird” came on the radio.

I’m not sure I had heard the song between then and looking it up on YouTube to post as a comment on Facebook.

But now I have, and I feel all thirty-six years that have passed.

So yesterday morning, I needed to stop by the Ozark Treasures antique mall to pick up some jams and jellies for Christmas gifts (new ones, not antique ones–I hope). I also found a booth that had LPs for a dollar each, which explains why I took a flyer on this album:

The band is Saint Tropez. The album (five songs, so more of an EP), is Je T’aime. Here at Nogglestead, we were talking French the other night, and I tried out the French I know, including “Je t’aime” and “je t’adore,” which, coupled with “Parlez-vous français, “Après moi le déluge,” and the contents of Billy Joel’s “C’etait Toi” are all I know of the language (and I pronounce none of them right). So this looked like a good pickup for a dollar.

I didn’t open the foldout cover at the antique mall. The back cover is just the track list and credits in French, but the foldout cover (and, apparently, the back cover on the CD) is a little more titillating:

According to Discogs, there’s a story running through the group’s three studio albums about a woman who falls for another woman wanted by the Paris police and Interpol. The story was supposed to conclude on the fourth album, but that one never materialized.

Well, that’s curious, Brian J. But how does it sound?

The title track is a little breathy and moany:

But the other four tracks are more straightforward disco-y.

Which is weird. Suddenly, I’m buying disco records because I relate to them as easy listening from the 1970s.

Given that the other Saint Tropez records are mostly in English, this quite well might be the only French language disco record with a lesbian intrigue subplot that I ever hear. Unlike the best disco flute record I’ve ever heard, whose artist released other similar records (which are good, too, but not the best).

Saint Tropez cannot be my favorite French singer as they’re probably Americans singing in French. They’re not my favorite singer in French/singer in France. They’re not even Stargard. But they’re okay for a couple bucks.

What other records did you get, Brian J.? you probably aren’t asking. Well, I got George Benson’s Give Me The Night, Vikki Carr’s For Once In My Life, Lou Rawls Come On In, Mister Blues, and Dionne Warwick’s Heartbreaker.

If anything, you’re asking What booth still has $1 R&B records?, and I’m not going to tell you.

On Friday afternoon, I led my reluctant boys out “Christmas shopping” to Relics Antique Mall mostly to get them out of my beautiful wife’s hair as she finished her work day.

Not surprisingly, this led to little actual Christmas shopping and a whole lot of record browsing. Which leads me to my first lamentation: The price of records at the antique mall is going up. Whereas the floor for album prices was a dollar, with a few going for five or eight bucks, now the floor is essentially three dollars with some titles of recognized bands from the 1970s or 1980s (or beyond) going for over ten dollars each. Which is a little rich for my blood. Which means I find it impossible to justify a stack of them such as I can with records that are only a buck.

Now, my second lamentation. The record I did not get? Phoebe Snow:

The first record I saw that I was excited about (the first I picked up was a two dollar Latin compilation album with a saucy woman on the cover). But the Phoebe Snow album…. Well, all right. I said in September that I was going to keep an eye out for this LP, and here it is!

Except: It had no price on it. No price tag that had fallen off that I could find. As it’s an antique mall, the people running the registers have no idea about the pricing set by the individual booth renters. This particular booth sold LPs for between two and ten bucks. I think I would pay ten bucks for the album, but I was not in the mood to take it to the registers and tell them I’d pay it; they’d think I’d taken off the tag which was priced higher yet.

So I set it on top of the record display, hoping that the owner of the booth will see it has no price tag and will price it (at $2, I hope) so I can pick it up in a week. When I will return to see if the album has been priced and I can buy it when I return for more “Christmas shopping.”

But I did console myself with a few other things.

I got:

• Elvis’ Christmas Album by Elvis Presley. You hear a number of selections from this album on the radio from time to time, but he didn’t make it onto the compilation albums of the era.
• The Beat of Brazil by Sergio Mendes.
• Confetti by Sergio Mendes.
• Homecooking by Sergio Mendes and Brazil ’77.
• London Underground by Herbie Mann.
• Voyeur by David Sanborn.
• Straight to the Heart by David Sanborn. Jeez, button your shirt, brah. I almost needed to buy two albums with saucy women on them to compensate.
• Too Tough by Angela Bofill.
• Let Me Be The One by Angela Bofill. Compensation: Complete. Also, I like Angela Bofill, as you probably know if you read these posts all the way through.
• Shangri-La by Jackie Gleason.
• Riff Jass by Jackie Gleason.
• Breakout by Spyro Gyra. I’ll pick them up when I find them now that I’m straight on who Spyro Gyra is and is not.
• Monument Proudly Presents Boots Randolph with the Knightsbridge Strings & Voices by Boots Randolph, presumably, and the Knightsbridge Strings and Voices.
• Second Childhood by Phoebe Snow. Her second album, which went Gold (Wikipedia tells me).
• Latin Escapade by The George Shearing Quintet, the aforementioned Latin compliation platter.

Okay, I’ve said the last was saucy. Here’s what I mean:

I don’t know whether my calling that saucy tracks with your idea of saucy or not, this being the Internet and all, but I do buy an extraordinary number of platters by artists/groups I don’t know/normally buy when they have a fetching lass on the cover. Or a saucy woman. Which must mean that the people who designed the cover art of said things were onto something.

WSIE has been feeding us a steady diet of Lynne Fiddmont’s new song “The Power of Love” lately:

I assume it’s because she’s got an upcoming concert at Sheldon Hall.

She’s a bit breathier than I take my songbirds these days, Erin Bode notwithstanding.

I will keep an eye out for Lynne Fiddmont in the society pages, though, gentle reader.

Yesterday, “Der Kommissar” came on the radio, and my oldest child asked what a kommissar was.

I gave a lengthy explanation, as is my wont, but I blundered when he asked who sings it. “Falco?” I said.

“After the Fire,” my beautiful wife corrected me.

If only I had read this Dustbury post beforehand. I would have known and not made a fool of myself.

“They sound like that band that sings….” and then he spit out some lyrics that I recognized as “The Boys Are Back In Town”.

“That’s Thin Lizzy,” I said. “No, they [After the Fire] sound British or European. Thin Lizzy is American.”

Wrong again! Thin Lizzy is an Irish band. Although I did peg After the Fire right: They’re British.

Maybe I should not expound on any music at all unless I’m merely parroting Charles. Or amusing Friar, who apparently likes humor in poor taste. Which explains why he’s a regular reader here.

WAIT A MINUTE.

As I decided to add YouTube videos to this post, I discovered Falco did indeed do the song “Der Kommissar”:

It was, in fact, the After the Fire version, which is in English, that came on the radio.

And I still botched the nationality of Thin Lizzy. Like I once told the boys Lou Gramm of Foreigner was Canadian.

No wonder they don’t trust a thing I tell them, like “It’s time to go to bed.”

Apparently, there is a football player whose name is Will Fuller V.

Yes, if you are keeping score, that is better than the Bobby Fuller IV:

Which like so many other things, I own on vinyl. In this case, a 45 that my sainted mother bought in her youth.

So I was listening to the radio in the car the other day, and I announced to my children that the song on the radio was my favorite .38 Special song.

The song? “Hold the Line”. The problem?

That’s Toto, not .38 Special.

In my defense, my favorite .38 Special song is “Hold On Loosely“:

A defense such as it is.

At any rate, it comes to mind because today is Friday, which is a holiday (albeit different from the Friday holiday celebrated at Dustbury). On Friday, Leo at Frog Leap Studios releases a new metal cover.

This week, he improved on my favorite Toto song:

Previously, of course, he had done Toto’s “Africa”.

In my defense, I have not (yet) mistaken Toto or .38 Special for Poco, but that time is coming, no doubt.