DAY 21
Miles Davis      Kind Of Blue (1959)



Well for someone who would never dream of listening to jazz I must say I enjoyed that, but only because I was getting on with other things while it was on in the background.
I don't think I will ever buy a jazz album, but to be fair it was ok as I said, as background.
Was this the definitive jazz album? ........That's for more scholarly and learned people than I, but if you did ask me I would have to say it was all right but wont be going in my collection.

Nothing to add from the last Miles Davis post    (#41)

Only 2 more 50's albums to go 

PS  forgot to add, I wondered what modal jazz was, so looked it up,

The term “modal jazz” refers to improvisational music that is organized in a scalar (“horizontal”) way rather than in a chordal (“vertical”) manner. By de-emphasizing the role of chords, a modal approach forces the improviser to create interest by other means: melody, rhythm, timbre, and emotion. A modal piece will generally use chords, but the chords will be more or less derived from the prevailing mode.

Well that sorted that out!
None the wiser 
 

Last edited by arabchanter (30/8/2017 10:38 pm)

DAY 22
Marty Robbins   
Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs   (1959)



Well this is different, probably take me back to when no self respecting 6 year old would be seen out without holster belt,guns, waistcoat and hat.

Robbins turned to his Western heritage for this mold breaking, trend settingrecord.

Recorded in a single day with a well drilled but understated band, this album was a homage to the old West.

Some cuts were traditional story-songs, most notably "Billy The Kid" and "The Strawberry Roan."

What set the record apart was the quartet of Robbins-penned songs, delivered in his unmistakably tender croon.

" El Paso" worked the theme into the first person narritive. Robbins telling of how he shot cold a stranger for the love of a mysterious Mexican girl

The recording won the first Grammy awarded to a country song; the LP from which it came set the template for the countless country concept albums that followed.

Last edited by arabchanter (01/9/2017 9:12 am)

Day 23
The Dave Brubeck Quartet .......  Time Out  (1959)

 1. Blue Rondo a la Turk - 6:44
2. Strange Meadow Lark - 7:22
3. Take Five - 5:24
4. Three to Get Ready - 5:24
5. Kathy's Waltz - 4:48
6. Everybody's Jumpin' - 4:23
7. Pick Up Sticks - 4:16

It had to be jazz on the final day of the 50's didn't it, och well.


Time Out is a jazz album by The Dave Brubeck Quartet, released in 1959 on Columbia Records, catalogue CL 1397. Recorded at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City, it is based upon the use of time signatures that were unusual for jazz such as 9/8 and 5/4. The album is a subtle blend of cool and West Coast jazz. It peaked at #2 on the Billboard pop albums chart, and has been certified platinum by the RIAA.Although the album was intended as an experiment, with Columbia president Goddard Lieberson taking a chance to release it, and received negative reviews by critics upon its release, it became one of the best-known and biggest-selling jazz albums, charting highly on the popular albums chart when 50,000 units sold for a jazz album was impressive. It produced a Top 40 hit single in "Take Five," the one track not written by Dave Brubeck.
 


 

Day 23
The Dave Brubeck Quartet .......  Time Out  (1959)



I'm getting a wee bit worried about myself, 'cause I quite enjoyed this one too, mainly as background but still.
Am I turning into a superhip jazz afficienado?
or more than like finding out it's not as bad as I thought it was.
maybe it's taught me a lesson, not to judge before I listen
and to leave my preconceptions behind, while I listen to the next 978 albums.
In saying all that I wont be putting it in my collection.

Dave Brubeck was born on December 6, 1920 in Concord, California – just up the road from Sheet Music Plus’s offices in Emeryville. His mother was his first piano teacher and he began studying at the age of four.When Dave was 12, his family moved to a 45,000 acre cattle ranch in the Sierra foothills. This inspired him to enroll as a veterinary science major at College of the Pacific in Stockton, CA.

From the time Dave was 14, he played in local dance bands on the weekends. In college, he supported himself by performing at local nightclubs. He enjoyed it so much that he changed his major to music.After Dave graduated from College of the Pacific in 1942, he married Iola and joined the Army. He served in Patton’s Army in Europe during World War II and led a band there. 

After he was discharged from service in 1946, he began studying composition at Mills College in Oakland, CA with famed French composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud encouraged Dave to pursue a career in jazz.

He and seven other Mills College students formed a cross-genre group that would become known as the Dave Brubeck Octet. They performed actively on campus at Mills, but were too “far out” to get gigs off-campus.

Iola was the one who had the idea to get the group performing at other colleges, and so it was that the Dave Brubeck Octet introduced students to a new world of jazz.

In 1951, Dave and his family were vacationing in Hawaii. While on Waikiki Beach, he was trying to show his children how to dive into an oncoming wave, but he hit a sandbar and nearly severed his spinal cord. It was after this accident that Dave and saxophonist Paul Desmond formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Dave and Paul’s collaborations lasted for seventeen years.

 In 1958, the U.S. State Department sponsored an international tour of the Quartet to Poland, India, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. The influence of this tour on the Quartet, with its exposure to many different cultures, is reflected in the album “Time Out,” which was released the following year.

This album explores time signatures outside of the common 4/4 time. It was the first jazz album to sell over a million copies. Famous songs on the album include “Blue Rondo a la Turk” and “Take Five.”Throughout his career, Brubeck experimented with incorporating jazz into classical forms as both a performer and composer. He wrote “Points on Jazz” for the American Ballet Theater, a musical theater piece called “The Real Ambassadors,” an oratorio “The Light in the Wilderness,” a cantata “The Gates of Justice,” a mass “To Hope! A Celebration,” a Christmas choral pageant “La Fiesta de la Posada,” as well as chamber music, pieces for solo and duo-piano and orchestral works.
It has been speculated that "Kathy's Waltz" inspired the song "All My Loving", written by Paul McCartney and performed by The Beatles, as they share similar rhythmic endings to the last phrases of their melodies.

Dave and his wife Iola have four musical sons, Darius, Chris, Dan and Matt. Darius is a jazz keyboardist. Chris mainly plays electric bass, bass trombone and piano, and is active both in classical and jazz genres. Dan is a drummer. Together, he and Chris make up one-half of the Brubeck Brothers Quartet. The youngest son, Matt, is a cellist and performs classical music, jazz and rock.Dave Brubeck was an active musician until he died on December 5, 2012, just one days before his 92nd birthday. His wife, Iola, joined him just over a year later on March 12, 2014.

Roll on the 60's Tomorrow!
 

Say hello to the 60's 

DAY 24.
Joan Baez................Joan Baez (1960)



After playing to coffee houses around Boston in the late 1950's, Joan Baez's big break came with the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. where the pretty girl with the angelic voice astounded the crowd. And despite the seeming abscence ot the trademark idealogical stance she later became known for, even in the early days politics mattered .

Baez opted for a record deal with small label Vanguard, impressed by their decision to release material by folk act The Weavers despite many of the members being accused of being Communists.

The decision certainlly paid off, for both Baez and Vanguard, her self titled debut album is still one of the highest selling solo female folk albums of all time, and saw her receive the first of her six gold records.

Hopefully a good start to the 60's, don't mind Joan Baez normally.

Lovely Scottish lassie as well

DAY 24.
Joan Baez................Joan Baez (1960)



I found this album enjoyable but there is a point in some of the tracks where (tin hat on here) I find she goes that high it starts to grate.
The content of the album, was traditional folk ballads and laments all seemingly recorded in only four days in the ballroom of New York City's Manhattan Towers Hotel., and were ok but I think I prefer her later music.
Although her music was mainly covers she would put her own style and interpretation into them.
This  particular Joan Baez album I'm afraid wont be going into my collection.

Joan Chandos Baez was born in New York City in 1941, although she spent much of her childhood traveling around the world. Her family's religious and social beliefs influenced her music over the course of her lengthy career and helped shape her into one of the most well known Folk singers and interpreters of music in American history. Her parents became Quakers when she was a young girl and her family believed in peace and social justice before war. Her father, Albert Baez, was an esteemed physicist, but he refused to contribute his knowledge to the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

Pete Seeger was one of Baez's first musical influences. She told Rolling Stone magazine in 2009 about seeing the legend perform live when she was a young girl, "It's like they gave me a vaccine, and it worked." After starting out as a performer at coffee houses in the Boston area, Baez got her first big break when Bob Gibson invited her to sing with him at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Baez told The Telegraph in 2009, "I walked on stage and it looked like the largest gathering of people on earth... I felt as if I'd been invited to my own execution." A year later, her self-titled debut album went gold, as did her 1961 follow-up, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, and her next two live albums. Baez has not been known as a radio-friendly singles artist over her career, although her cover of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," written by Robbie Robertson of the Band, made the Top 5 in 1971.

Baez had a much-celebrated romance with Bob Dylan from 1962 until 1965. Dylan was not as well known as Baez when the relationship began and she frequently asked him to perform with her. One of the most iconic photographs of the pair is from their appearance at the March on Washington in 1963. Baez also performed solo for the crowd of 300,000 that day, including her version of "We Shall Overcome."

In 1967, Baez met her future husband, David Harris, at the Santa Rita Jail in California following her arrest for blocking the doorway of an Air Force induction center. Harris, a journalist, was an opponent of the draft and was eventually sent to federal prison. Pregnant with their son, Gabriel, Baez closed the first day of Woodstock by telling about her husband's incarceration and performing a set list that featured an a capella version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." The two had an amicable divorce in 1973 and their son occasionally performs with Baez as a drummer.

Her Mexican father Albert initially considered becoming a minister but instead turned to the study of physics, where he later became a co-inventor of the X-ray microscope.

And as I said in the last post, her mother was born in Edinburgh the family emigrated from Edinburgh, first to Canada, later the US, where she met Albert Baez. Albert was born in Puebla, Mexico, son of a Methodist minister, at a high school dance in Madison, New Jersey.

Last edited by arabchanter (02/9/2017 10:23 pm)

I'd say The Crickets would be about the only fifties album from the list I'd listen to enthusiastically.

And now the '60s: not a fan of Joan Baez either, I'm afraid. That's beardie music too.

PatReilly wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

I'm getting a wee bit worried about myself, 'cause I quite enjoyed this one too, mainly as background but still.
Am I turning into a superhip jazz afficienado?

 

Have you grown a beard and began discussing types of coffee?

Don't be a square Daddy-o
Got the feels you aint digging it man 

No quite there yet Pat, but mellowing and having a blast.

 

Beardy23 wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

And now the '60s: not a fan of Joan Baez either, I'm afraid. That's beardie music too.

 

Bit Beardist?
 

DAY 25.
Elvis Presley.............Elvis is Back   (1960)


This album had a good mix of songs on it, critics say this is when Elvis "sold his soul to pop music"
The album was a no' bad listen, but nothing to write home about imho.
I wont be adding this to my collection.

Elvis released an entire album of between-song stage banter called "Having Fun With Elvis On Stage" just to fulfill a contractual obligation in '74...So it's an album of Elvis talking. In between songs!


Elvis wore a cross, the Hebrew letter chai, and a star of David around his neck. “I don’t want to miss out on heaven due to a technicality,” he said.

An estimated 40 percent of Elvis’ music sales have been outside the United States; however, with the exception a handful of concerts he gave in Canada in 1957, he never performed on foreign soil. A number of sources have suggested that Elvis’ manager, Colonel Parker, turned down lucrative offers for the singer to perform abroad because Parker was an illegal immigrant and feared he wouldn’t be allowed back into the U.S. if he traveled overseas.

Elvis recorded more than 600 songs, but did not write any of them. 

Elvis is Norse for “all wise.”

At 11, Presley got a guitar. He really wanted a bicycle (some say a rifle), but his parents couldn’t afford it.

Presley’s 1961 hit “Can’t Help Falling in Love” is set to the melody of “Plaisir D’Amour,” an 18th century French love song.

Presley once gave Muhammad Ali a robe declaring the boxer “The People’s Champion.” (Ali gave Presley gloves that said, “You’re the greatest.”)

. It is estimated that there were about 170 Presley impersonators when he died in 1977. Today, some say there are 250,000.

It is believed Presley was prescribed about 10,000 pills the year he died.

DAY 26.
Miriam Makeba...........Miriam Makeba (1960)



 Traditional Xhosa wedding songs swing into airy African jazz moods, mellifluous Indonesian lullabies, and infectious Calypso romps, myriad influences and styles working to enormous effect.
Recorded a year after the international hit musical King Kong (1959), which provided many black South African musicians with the opportunity to escape apartheid, Makeba's debut album paints a compelling portrait of the artist in exile.

Sounds interesting.
 

DAY 27.
The Everly Brothers...........A Date With The Everly Brothers (1960)



They had label problems, managament woes, marital difficulties, and drur troubles, and Elvis was back from the army to reclaim his throne, the brothers responded to this challenge in 1960, by creating their finest body of work

Well we'll see about that.