As I write in today's Wall Street Journal (go here), the Stax Music Academy is working wonders down in Memphis giving at-risk high school students purpose and direction. Most interesting is that the academy treats soul like classical music and jazz—taking it seriously and teaching the next generation the essence and art of the music and performance. In case you hadn't noticed, soul is a dying art form. One of the former Stax stars who is actively involved in showing the academy's students how it's done is Eddie Floyd.
Back in the 1960s, jazz went off in several new directions. The times demanded it. There was jazz-pop, free jazz, avant-garde jazz and the esoteric jazz of the Miles Davis Quintet. The same was true of R&B. The music that artists like Lionel Hampton and Johnny Otis kicked off in the late 1940s soon was influenced by gospel singers in the early 1950s and then street-harmony groups in the late 1950s. By 1961, Motown in Detroit was leveraging a new smoother form that groomed black artists for mass-market crossover success. And then there was Stax.
Stax was based in Memphis, and its R&B style was grittier and more soulful than Northern labels. Stax was an amalgamation of Southern blues, jump beats and riffs found in church music. Black and white musicians composed and arranged the music together, and they all played behind black stars. Stax's hits often were built on riffs and licks, most often played by horns, electric guitar and organ.
The Stax name was a merging of the first two letters of the founders' last names—James Stewart and Estelle Axton. They were brother and sister. And they were white. After Otis Redding died in a plane crash in 1967, they took on a third partner, Al Bell, who is black. The fascinating thing about Stax was how integrated the company was on all levels and how the label along with Motown helped grease the wheels of the civil rights movement.
When I was down in Memphis a few weeks ago reporting this story, I spent a few hours with Eddie Floyd. Eddie wrote and co-wrote quite a few Stax hits. His biggest, co-written with Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the M.G.'s, was Knock on Wood. When I met Eddie, he had just driven eight hours from Dallas (he's a big Cowboys fan) just to be with the academy's students who were starting a new semester. [Photo of Eddie Floyd mentoring Stax Music Academy students on August 12 by Marc Myers]
Here are some of my notes from my conversation with Eddie:
"Kids at the academy need to know that soul is their music. Of course, it's everyone's music, but these students are carrying it forward. Soul music is a feeling. It's genuine. Audiences respond to soul singers, not just the music. But to be effective, a soul singer needs to feel the words and to send out those feelings. Whenever I'm on tour, I can feel my music go out from me into the audience. You see this happen particularly in foreign countries. Audience members who may not even understand English instantly grasp the music's feeling and force.
"When the kids at the academy see me in person, they are seeing the person who sang or wrote the songs on their records, and they become excited. Seeing me connects the music to a real person. It also helps them understand the big responsibility they have to take care of soul's legacy, especially Stax's legacy.
"The kids in the program don't sing and play just Stax music. The basic music is Stax but it's also Motown and other forms. The Stax rhythms were natural, not polished. They're just played well, without gimmicks. But the whole Stax-Motown rivalry is really just people having emotional reactions to music they love. It's all good.
"Back in the '60s, Stax and Motown were doing the same thing, just a little differently. I was familiar with both Motown and Stax. I started singing with the Falcons in 1955 in Detroit. In the early '60s, I came up with Motown. Back then I knew Diana Ross as a member of the Primettes in Detroit. When the Falcons broke up, I went to Memphis. When I came to Stax, I was a songwriter. I wrote Comfort Me, which became a hit for Carla Thomas. [Pictured: The Falcons, clockwise from left, Eddie Floyd, Joe Stubbs, Mack Rice, Willie Schofield and Lance Finnie]
"My advice to the kids at the academy is to focus on the audience, not yourself. Deep down, you know who you are. Your job as a performer is to let the audience know, to let go and be yourself and express what you're feeling. When you do that, audiences will love you for it.
Knock on Wood—"Steve [Cropper] and I set out to write a song about superstition, you know, good luck. We were writing it at the Lorraine Motel in 1966 in Memphis. It was the only place in town where blacks could stay. Steve is white, of course, and was a founding member ot Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Stax's house band. While we were trying to come up with a song, there was this huge thunder and bright lightning. That's how I came up with the line, "Like thunder, lightning, the way I love you is frightening." So it became a love song."
California Girl—"I was on a balcony in Los Angeles and saw those words on a truck."
634-5789—"I can't remember whose number that was but I remember there was this woman in Miami who called Stax complaining that people kept calling her house. She had that number [laughs]. When [Wilson] Pickett heard the song, he wanted to record it. I came up with the feel for that song from The Hucklebuck."
Big Bird—"I was in England on tour when Otis Redding's flight went down in December 1967. Our revue had five shows to finish but we were still going to try and fly back to the States to Otis' funeral. But as we were taxiing to take off, a problem developed with the engine. I was hoping the plane would leave and wrote Big Bird as a way to coax it into flight. But we never left and weren't able to make it."
JazzWax tracks: There are quite a few compilations of Eddie Floyd's recordings. Stax Profiles: Eddie Floyd is a good place to start. You'll find this one at iTunes or here.
JazzWax clip:Here's Eddie Floyd's Knock on Wood...
You could say that trumpeter Nick Travis was the East Coast Don Fagerquist. Blowing with a warm tone and lyrical style, Travis could swing. And like Fagerquist, Travis was always busy in the studios. Though he died at age 38 in 1964, he was on 350 jazz recording sessions, which is quite a significant number over roughly 20 years. Fagerquist, who started at about the same time as Travis in the early '40s and played until the late '60s, was on 362 jazz dates. Yet Travis recorded just one album as a leader—The Panic Is On—for RCA in March 1954. [Photo of Nick Travis in 1947 by William P. Gottlieb]
I spoke with saxophonist Hal McKusick about Travis yesterday. More with Hal in a minute.
The Panic Is On was a quintet date that featured Al Cohn on tenor sax, John Williams on piano, Teddy Kotick on bass and Art Mardigan on drums. One senses that the arrangements were largely by Cohn to showcase Travis' story-telling solo style.
Travis could gently but insistently climb improvisational ladders and joyously roll down the chord changes. This is certainly the case on Travisimo and Jazzbo's Jaunt, which beautifully showcase Travis' soloing grace. Of course, having Cohn along on the date gave the tracks smoky heft and mobility.
Travis and Cohn often played together throughout the 1950s. Collaborative albums include Al Cohn Quintet (1953), The Jazz Workshop: Four Brass, One Tenor (1955), Billy Byers: Lullaby of Birdland (1955), Manny Albam: The Jazz Workshop (1955), Elliot Lawrence: Plays Tiny Kahn and Johnny Mandel (1956), Joe Newman: Salute to Satch (1956), Maynard Ferguson: Birdland Dreamband (1956), Terry Gibbs: Swingin' (1956), John Benson Brooks: Folk Jazz USA (1956), Manny Albam: Jazz Greats of Our Time (1957), and on and on.
The swinging stuff is great kicks, but dig Travis on the ballad, You Don't Know What Love Is, a song that always separates the passionate poets from the high poppers. Travis' lines here are sultry and sublime, rendering Cohn's presence on the track almost unnecessary, if that's even possible. [Photo, from left, of Don Goldie, Nick Travis and Al Stewart in 1962 courtesy of Al Stewart]
Hal played on 30 dates with Travis:
"Nick was a great player and a great guy. He was so busy in the 1950s. He'd get done with work at 2 a.m., head off to his home in New Jersey and be back the next day in a New York studio at 8 a.m. Zoot told me a funny story. Nick was so tired one day that he slept in. His phone rang early that morning. Nick sleepily answered: "Hello?" "Hi Nick, it's Zoot." Nick paused and said, groggily, "Zoot who?" [laughs] [Pictured: Hal McKusick]
"I remember Nick as being quiet and intelligent. He spent a lot of time with his instrument. When you’re working the way we did, you didn't have a lot of time to practice, so work was practice. He was a great lead horn player and quite a soloist. Nick was always there on a date in every way. Efficient, on time and he never hit a bad note.
"Ultimately, Nick probably had too much work. We all did. Nick was in such great demand by so many different orchestrators and contractors at the time that he probably had a hard time handling the stress internally. He kept a lot of it bottled up, I guess. I didn't realize he had passed from ulcer troubles.
"As sounds go, Nick's was down the middle. You'd hear his horn and if you didn't know who was playing you'd say, 'Wow, who is that? That sure sounds good.' He caught your attention. Nick also was a wonderful reader, which was why he was in such demand. Nick played caringly."
JazzWax tracks: Like most of the RCA jazz catalog from this period, The Panic Is On is out of print. Fresh Sound issued it in 2004, and CD copies are available here and probably at some download retail sites.
JazzWax clip: How good was Nick Travis? Dig him here with Zoot Sims on Fools Rush In. Tasty and strong but never overbearing or imposing. And dig Zoot's Glad to Be Unhappy tag!...
A litle light fun today: In the 1960s, many jazz musicians found club gigs harder to come by. Many top players joined TV studio orchestras or went to work for Muzak. Others took teaching jobs. And a good number performed at weddings.
Back then, kids often were dragged along to the fussy marriages of uncles, older cousins and friends of parents. The big joy for us wasn't the open bar, since we couldn't drink. Instead, it was ditching imposing parents and tearing around the reception hall.
For three big hours, usually in the summer, we were able to operate on our own as parents relaxed, drank and danced the cha-cha-cha (quite expertly, I might add).
Here are 12 songs that I remember from '60s summer weddings that typically featured a saxophonist and rock-sounding guitar. (Proud Mary usually brought the kids to the dance floor.) Of course, if you recall ones I've neglected, please add 'em to the Comments field:
What's surprising about the French horn isn't that it became a jazz instrument but that there were so many fine jazz players in the late 1940s and '50s. Among the best were Junior Collins, Julius Watkins, David Amram, John Cave, Willie Ruff, Tony Miranda, Jimmy Buffington and Gunther Schuller. But perhaps the finest of them all was John Graas [pictured]. It's his mellow bellow that stands out in many of the best West Coast jazz orchestras, particularly in bands led by Shorty Rogers and Stan Kenton. He's also among the best of the arranger-composers for small groups that incorporated the horn's sound.
As you know, I have a habit of rummaging around iTunes and Amazon from time to time looking for oddities that have mysteriously slipped into the e-bins. From time to time, I stumble across amazing finds. In some cases, these finds are clearly marked. In other cases, they're either purposefully disguised or done so out of ignorance.
In the case of Graas, I found the mother lode—and it was indeed well hidden.
The download-only album is called John Graas: 100 French Horn Jazz Classics. Three big errors, though: First, there are 110 tracks, not 100. Second, only 71 of the tracks feature Graas. And third, 11 of those tracks feature the arrangements of Graas, without Graas playing. The rest of the tracks are from Decca's wonderful Jazz Studio series that was issued from 1953 to 1957. The price for the Graas download is only $19.99 at iTunes, $17.98 at Amazon.
So I downloaded the iTunes version (the fidelity is better). I then spent the next hour untangling and rearranging all of the tracks and assigning dates to them using Tom Lord's Jazz Discography. When I finished, I was blown away. What I saw in front of me was virtually every track from all of Graas' leadership dates, from 1953 to 1958. Plus the complete Jazz Studio 1-6 sessions by Graas and other artists. All for the price of a large pizza pie.
Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1917, Graas started on the French horn in high school. After winning a national solo contest, he was awarded a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music School in Massachusetts, where he played under conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
After playing first horn in the Indianapolis Symphony in 1941 and 1942, he joined Claude Thornhill's band before being drafted into the Army in 1943. When he was discharged in 1945, he briefly became a member of the Cleveland Symphony. But he already detested how symphony conductors imposed their interpretations on an instrument he felt he knew cold.
He spent the late 1940s in Tex Beneke's band and Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra of 1950. Graas remained in Hollywood, recording regularly on a range of Capitol and MGM sessions as well as with Kenton and Rogers.
Graas studied with Lennie Tristano, Shorty Rogers and Wesley La Violette under the G.I. Bill. Throughout the '50s, Graas worked steadily in the studios and was a prolific composer and arranger. His leadership dates are remarkable for their spirit, the power of his horn (which always emitted a "call to the hunt" sound), and the fluidity of his improvised ideas on what is a notoriously difficult instrument.
Graas died in 1962 in California of a heart attack at age 45.
If you download this album at iTunes or Amazon, I'd be happy to send you a free PDF I made of the tracks listed in chronological order with the original albums and month and year they were recorded. I don't make a dime off of your download. I'm just a generous sort, and this PDF should help you move the tracks around in your iTunes folder pretty quickly.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find John Graas: 100 French Horn Jazz Classics at iTunes or here. The remastering throughout is superb.
JazzWax clip:Here's John Graas' on a Shorty Rogers and His Giants date from March 1953. The first track is Rogers' Coop de Graas, featuring dueling solos by Graas and Bob Cooper, followed by Rogers' Infinity Promenade. These tracks aren't on the album, but they're among my favorite early '50s West Coast jazz arrangements and too good not to share...
While writing my post the other day on my favorite Anita O'Day album for Verve (Anita O'Day and Billy May Swing Rodgers and Hart), I reached out to arranger-composer Russ Garcia in New Zealand for a comment. Here's what Russ had to say, followed by a few other stories from readers [Photo of Anita O'Day by Malcolm Moore]...
"Dear friend Marc, I did several albums and odd arrangements for Anita over the years. Yes, she was very kooky, but she always could swing like a brass section. In fact, she made the band swing. She sang with lots of real feeling, and she didn't drag way behind the beat, like so many singers did. On a beautiful ballad, she would sing close to the melody on the first chorus and then dip into her bag of tricks for the rest. So you can see why it was a joy to work with her. [Pictured: Russ Garcia]
"Even though I did often bail out Billy [May, pictured] when he wasn't going to make his deadline for a session—staying up all night and writing like a bunny—I don't recall working on Swings Rodgers and Hart. Of course, this was many long years ago. And even though I helped Billy, he was a great arranger and a nice guy with a great sense of humor."
Note: Russ will be in the U.S. in October and November conducting concerts in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Palm Beach, Fla. More to come as plans firm up.
This comment is from photographer Malcolm Moore, whose image is at the top of this post...
"Great column today. I saw Anita O'Day twice—in the summers of 1982 and 1984. The former was at Charlie's Georgetown, the club in Georgetown in Washington, D.C., owned by guitarist Charlie Byrd. She was quite a character. Even though I'm now getting rid of most of my LPs, those of Anita's that she autographed for me will remain in my possession. She autographed one album, 'How come Malcolm?'—the type of playful comment that made her such a 'hip chick.' Thanks for your column."
And this one is from Joe Lang, past president of the New Jersey Jazz Society...
"In December 1973, I saw that Anita was going to be at the Half Note, in its new uptown location in New York. Our first son had been born three months earlier, and we hadn't been out since his birth. The temptation to see Anita was strong, so we arranged to have my sister play the role of babysitter. It was Saturday December 23.
"We arrived for the first set but wound up staying through the entire evening. As the last set was coming to a close, Anita decided to sing The Christmas Song as her closer. It was appealing to anticipate her singing such an out there choice, at least for her.
"Well, it must have taken six or seven minutes for her and her pianist to settle on a key, but it was a special ending to a memorable evening.
"On another occasion, I was going to see her at Trumpets in Lincoln Park, N.J. I have never been an avid autograph collector, but I decided to bring my copy of her autobiography, Hard Times High Times, and politely ask her sign it. When I got there, she was talking with Amos Kaune, the club's owner. So I waited for their conversation to end before approaching her.
"When she and Amos parted, I walked up to her and made my request. She curtly responded 'I'm on my time now,' and headed straight to the bar for a drink.
"After the first set, Amos announced that Anita would be at the bar during the break and would sign autographs. I swallowed my pride and headed over to the bar, book in hand.
"Upon asking her again to sign the book, she took it with a big grin on her face, signed it and proceeded to go through the pictures, describing to me and others the circumstances behind the photos. I began to wonder if she was ever going to return the book to me.
"The pianist, who must have been familiar with her quirks, simply shrugged his shoulders, and proceeded to play another arpeggio that seemed to satisfy her. The show went on."
JazzWax clip: I'm not sure where this footage comes from (if you know, please leave a Comment), but it's truly extraordinary. For one, Anita can tell a story as well as she can sell a song. For another, she delivers her story almost journalistically, without any analysis or performance. And watch carefully at the end how her expression steadily downshifts into deep sadness...
In the summer of 1958, Johnny Richards took his orchestra into a Warner Bros. studio in New York to record the soundtrack for a low-budget film that was being shot in Cuba. The movie was Kiss Her Goodbye, starring Elaine Stritch as a young woman who loses her sanity. Richards asked David Allyn to sing the title theme. More with David in a minute. [Photo of Johnny Richards in 1947 by William P. Gottlieb]
But when Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in January 1959, he confiscated the film, which was still in production, as property of the revolution. The film was never released, and Warner Bros. promptly bagged the LP project. But as Todd Selbert writes in his liner notes to the newly issued Johnny Richards: Kiss her Goodbye (Uptown), Warner Bros. gave Richards a pre-pressing of the LP. I assume this is what was used for this new CD. Unfortunately, details about the source material and how Uptown came into its possession aren't included in the notes.
Richards is one of the finest high-concept orchestral composers and arrangers of the 1950s. His best known original, Young at Heart, was written for a Frank Sinatra film of the same name in 1954. As an arranger for Stan Kenton, he was responsible for Cuban Fire (1956), Back to Balboa (1958) and West Side Story (1961). His work as a leader was even more striking and bombastic. Two prime examples are Something Else (1956) and Wide Range (1957), which are easily among the finest band albums of the decade.
What makes Richards' style so special are his exotic instrumental textures and moody resolutions. A typical Richards song opens with cinematic drama—French horns or trombones with a ticklish piccolo or crystalline celeste. Then the bass might kick off the beat, with the trumpets, trombones, saxes and other orchestra instruments tearing off to the races. Instead of a blues base, Richards relied on a neo-classical approach that owed a debt to Impressionists like Ravel and modernists like Stravinsky.
Kiss Her Goodbye has all of these elements. Though the sonic quality of this CD isn't sterling due to the source material, it's still exciting music that has not been heard by the public. Here, Richards showcases his entire bag of tricks—the Latinesque sighing and swaying blended with knowing compassion and cigar-chomping aggressiveness.
In addition to the movie score, the new CD includes a track Richards is believed to have arranged from an album by Luis Tiramani's Orchestra called a Touch of Cuba, as well as nine tracks from broadcasts from New York's Birdland in 1959.
After listening to this CD yesterday, I gave David Allyn a call:
"Oh sure I remember recording Kiss Her Goodbye. I have the chart in my big band book. Johnny led a terrific band. His scores were always pretty wild, very heavy and very Kentonized. I enjoyed singing Kiss Her Goodbye and received a big applause from the band afterward. They dug it. [Pictured: David Allyn with Jack Teagarden]
"If I recall, Johnny had the brass playing in the upper register. My notes were half a step different from the brass parts. It was a hard song to sing, but great just the same. The song was written by Johnny, but I don't know who wrote the lyric. It could have been Johnny's wife, Blanca Webb.
"You really had to sing that chart. There was no fooling around there."
JazzWax tracks:Johnny Richards: Kiss Her Goodbye (Uptown) is available here. This is a highly worthwhile album. It should be noted that the Birdland tracks have never before been issued and should not be confused with the tracks released on CD years ago on Live in Hi-Fi by the Canadian Jazz Hour label. Those Birdland broadcasts were from 1957 and 1958.
Something Else, Wide Range and several other Johnny Richards albums are now available at iTunes.
For more on Johnny Richards at JazzWax, go here,here and here.
JazzWax clip: There are no video clips from the new album on YouTube but I did find Long Ago and Far Awayhere, from Richards' Something Else. All of Richards' arrangements tended to be extremely difficult, and he typically brought in only the finest players and readers. For example, the trumpets here were Pete Candoli, Buddy Childers and Maynard Ferguson. The flugelhorn? Shorty Rogers...
You're about to learn about one of the finest female folk albums ever recorded. Not many people know about Catherine Howe's What a Beautiful Place (1971), largely because the album produced and arranged by Bobby Scott (A Taste of Honey) barely made a dent after it was recorded in London. The company for which it was made went bust shortly after the album was released, and only a handful of the LPs existed. Then the album disappeared for 35 years, surfacing in 2007, when it was remastered and re-issued on CD for the first time.
If you dig Laura Nyro, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and the other great female singer-songwriters of the late '60s and early '70s—and if you have a heart—you need to hear this recording and others by Catherine. Actually, nothing in the rest of this post is going to make much sense unless you hear a track from her 1971 album here...
This all started several weeks ago, when I received an email from Catherine in England thanking me for my earlier post on Bobby Scott. A few back and forths followed until I realized who I was communicating with. I already owned What a Beautiful Place on CD, but I didn't put two and two together immediately. After a few more emails, Catherine agreed to an e-interview:
JazzWax: Which artists did you listen to growing up? Catherine Howe: I had the whole of my four older siblings’ record collections to hear growing up in England. Buddy Holly and Fats Domino were two who first really got through to me. Then the Beach Boys came along, and I had every one of their albums. Also Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and the Crystals.
JW: Which song had the deepest impact? CH: Hearing Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s The Look of Love in 1967 was a seminal moment for me. That's when I started using those sevenths, which appear in many of the songs on What a Beautiful Place. In my teenage years I listened to Randy Newman, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Lennon and McCartney, Dylan and the British bands Cream, The Who, The Zombies and Procol Harum.
JW: Were there any jazz singers who influenced you? CH: Billie Holiday impinged upon my small English consciousness as a child, and I remember being riveted to my seat by a performance from Lena Horne at Blackpool Winter Gardens in the 1950s, when the greatest of American singers would come there in the summer season. My family was not especially musical, I heard very little folk, jazz or classical music. Instead, I heard mostly records of mainstream popular work, and I loved it beyond everything.
JW: Did you study voice? CH: In a small way. I took a weekly singing lesson from the age of 12 to 14 with a good teacher in London named Rona Knight, who ran Corona Drama School in Hammersmith, London. I had no musical training beyond that, except for a few piano lessons when I was very small.
JW: When did you write the music for What a Beautiful Place? CH: All those songs were written in the late '60s. Some I wrote in a little coastal town on the south coast of England called Swanage, where I lived as a teenager with my parents. And some were written in London. Those were the best times, when everything was new. There was sea and sun and coming to terms with life, and music was my voice.
JW: How did you meet Bobby Scott? CH: My first meeting with Bobby is as vivid now as it was at the time. It was in February 1971. He came to England specifically to work on my album. He was 35 years old. He was full of energy, brilliant eyed, wired-up. He had imagined me as a dowdy English girl, and I had imagined him as fairly unprepossessing, too. So we were both surprised with each other. We were introduced by Andrew Miller, executive producer of Reflection Records, which was a subsidiary label distributed through CBS in England. Phil Gillen, Bobby’s American business partner of the time, was there too.
JW: Why did Scott come to the U.K. to produce the album? CH: I had met Andrew Miller and his partner John Hawkins in 1969.Together they ran Reflection, which I had signed to. Somehow they linked up with Bobby and Phil, who had injected some cash into the label. That was when Andrew and John sent some of my early demos over for Bobby to hear. That’s how Bobby heard some of the songs which eventually made up What a Beautiful Place, and it was those songs that brought him over. Why we recorded in England rather than me going to America? I don’t know, but it was probably better that way.
JW: How did you two work together? CH: My input was the songs. We sat together at the piano, and Bobby asked me to play him everything I had. There was one song I wasn’t pleased with, but he saw the manuscript there. I said I wouldn’t play it, but he insisted. So I played it, and he had the grace to agree that it wasn’t one of my best. This augured well for me. I quickly understood that Bobby’s musical sensibilities ran in the same direction as my own. I never had that kind of rapport again with subsequent producers.
JW: What happened next? CH: Bobby took over. In the days that followed he just sat down and started scoring the parts without the use of a piano. I imagine he could have acquired one, but he didn’t need one. I believe he wrote all the rhythm and orchestral parts at a desk, and with remarkable speed. There’s some notion around that Bobby’s working practices were haphazard. This is complete nonsense. I have never come across anyone since those days who was as professionally competent, naturally inspired, and intuitive as Bobby was. He could just do it. It was like shelling peas to him. From start to finish, the scores took about a week I would say.
JW: How was he as a performer in the studio? CH: His performance was remarkable, too, and I just rode the waves. He was very comfortable with studio work, while at the same time keeping up the pressure to a perfect pitch. He knew exactly how to maintain the right kind of atmosphere. For the What a Beautiful Place sessions the rhythm section was made up of British musicians, and the orchestra comprised of London Symphony Orchestra members. There was a vocal booth for me, a Steinway piano for Bobby, and together we laid down the tracks. Bobby conducted, sometimes from the keyboard. The effect of his presence on the musicians in that studio was electric. Bobby knew exactly what he wanted, and he got it. The rhythm guys, in particular, went away feeling that they’d never played so well.
JW:What a Beautiful Place was reported to have been recorded in just two weeks in February 1971. High pressure? CH: In fact the album was recorded in no more than four days. There were no over-dubs, all the instrumentation and the vocals went down together. And never more than two takes were needed, in fact, I can’t remember singing any of the songs twice. Bobby was blessedly unbothered by those lovely imperfections that seem to distress some musicians. Once the arrangements were ready to go, it was the spirit of the thing which took his entire focus.
JW: Time was tight? CH: There was pressure on time, but I think Bobby liked to work at a fast pace. He could do it, so he did. He was at the top of the tree, and it was easy for him. For Bobby, it was high energy, rarefied speed, and utterly under control. I loved working at that kind of speed too. No amount of time is going to make a thing work. It either works, or it doesn’t. It was music making as music should be made.
JW: What happened with Reflection Records? Why was your record lost for so many years? CH: There was some disagreement between the American and English camps, the nature of which escaped my attention. What a Beautiful Place was just about to make the rounds of radio stations when Bobby phoned from New York to tell me that John and Andrew had placed a legal injunction on the tapes here in England.
JW: Why? CH: Phil Gillen and Bobby had been funding Reflection Records, so when they pulled out, Reflection folded. It’s a label that had signed Steamhammer and Andwella’s Dream, so its collapse wasn’t good for anyone. What a Beautiful Place disappeared for 35 years.
JW: Looking back, where was the mistake? If you were to do it all again, what would you have done differently? CH: No mistake, at least not where What a Beautiful Place is concerned. Things happen.
JW: Did the experience sour you on recording? CH: I have never fallen out of love with recording. I write songs to perform them. As long as people hear them, I’m content. Bobby was an extraordinary man. He was complex to say the least. A consummate musician and writer, he sometimes felt that he would have liked to have done more. He had a fierce intellect, he had passion and he either loved or hated others. There wasn’t anything at all that could be described as grey about Bobby.
JW: And as a visionary? CH: He was also what I would call a great facilitator—a great mentor. He gave a lot to other performers and writers with remarkable selflessness. But there was nothing soft about him. He was exacting in his professional and private life. He was tremendously loyal to those he loved, and he inspired great love.
JW: Was he a rebel? CH: He didn’t like the establishment much, even though he worked in it for many years and knew he needed it. That created a lot of tension. Bobby knew the worth of his own work. Yet he would often record the works of others, which is a curious fact. I can only think it reflects his unreserved admiration for the great musicians and songwriters of his generation. There was nothing that came his way that he didn’t feel to his core. Bobby was a difficult and a beautiful man.
JW: Did you love him? CH: Yes, and I have reason to believe he loved me, too.
JazzWax tracks: Catherine Howe's What a Beautiful Place was finally re-issued in 2007 on Numero records and is available here. If one argues that folk originally was a form that first evolved in England, then this is folk in its purest and most beautiful expression.
Catherine's latest album, English Tale, was recorded last year with singer-guitarist Vo Fletcher. It's gorgeous and is available here.
JazzWax note: Bobby Scott died of lung cancer in November 1990, at the age of 53.
MTV turned music inside out on this date 30 years ago. On August 1, 1981, the 24-hour music channel not only added a powerful visual component to rock but also helped usher in a third pop British Invasion that influenced virtually all forms of music and music videos in the 1980s. By extension, MTV created a new appetite for music sales. Before MTV, rock, pop and soul were radio and record affairs. For a visual look at your favorite artists, you had to turn to album covers and fan magazines. MTV forced stars to become larger than life personalities, dancers and actors.
Music videos for MTV may have killed the radio star but they also sparked an employment boom for video directors, choreographers, cameramen, tape editors, hair and makeup artists, costume designers, and graphic designers. When most people think of MTV in the '80s, what comes to mind first is the channel's cartoony logo and endless clever ways in which the letters M, T and V were displayed.
The person largely responsible for the logo was Fred Seibert [pictured in 1981], a creative director then and now a television and film producer who owns Frederator Studios in New York. Thirty years ago Fred had a vision for the network's brand and inspired artist Frank Olinsky to solve the challenge. Today, on the anniversary of MTV's start, I asked Fred to recall the story of the logo's birth, a fabulous tale he told me over lunch recently:
"Back in 1977, I was 25 years old and going broke as an independent jazz and blues record producer in New York. To make ends meet, I took a job at WHN-AM, a country music radio station, working in promotion production for Dale Pon, the station's creative services vice president. When Dale quit in 1979, he introduced me to a former radio programmer—Bob Pittman—who offered me a job in cable television, which was in its infancy then. [Pictured: Bob Pittman]
"At first, I resisted. 'Bob,' I said over the phone, 'I watch TV, I don't make it.' I was still holding out hopes that I could figure out how to make a good living in music production, my passion.
"But after my meeting with Bob, who was just 25 years old at the time, I realized that I could learn more from him than Dale's replacement. First I made a list of the pros and cons of taking a job in cable-TV. Last on my list of cons: 'You'll never work in music again.' [Pictured: Fred Seibert]
"So I took the job, and on May 5, 1980 I began as the one-man promo production team for The Movie Channel, part of the brand-new Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Co. We had posh offices high up in a tower on the Avenue of the Americas but a minuscule budget.
"A month later, Bob left a one-page memo on my desk outlining a new network the company was going to develop called The Music Channel. Attached to the memo was a concise timeline for the next 10 years, including a launch date 14 months out on August 1, 1981.
"As soon as I read Bob's memo, I marched into his office, proclaiming I knew more about music than anyone in the building and that I had to work on the launch. He agreed. Just like that I had managed to talk my way into two jobs—supervising the exploding promotion department at The Movie Channel and trying to figure what exactly the new Music Channel would be. Bob said he imagined it as a radio station with pictures. But what would the pictures be?
"Clearly, I needed help. So I reached out to Alan Goodman, my best friend from college radio days at Columbia University's WKCR. Alan was miserable in the advertising department at CBS Records. I knew he could figure out the solution to any music-related problem. So I hired him as a writer, producer and, best of all, a thinker. [Pictured from left, Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert in 1981]
"We started by doing unconventional research—watching Looney Tunes, since wacky cartoons were the closest thing to visual music and represented exactly the same emotional punch and rebellion as rock 'n' roll.
"Alan and I also went to visit my oldest friend from childhood, Frank Olinsky, a brilliant artist whose love for all things music had completely informed my high school years. He also had designed album covers for Oblivion Records, my independent blues and jazz label. [Pictured: Frank Olinsky, self-portrait in 1969]
"I thought perhaps Frank could design our logo. It wasn't actually my job to create a logo, but I didn't have anyone else I could turn to at Warner who was available to do it. Frank and his two partners, Pat Gorman and Patti Rogoff, set to work. Their firm, Manhattan Design, was tucked into a back room behind a tai chi studio above Bigelow Chemists in Greenwich Village. They started sketching logos for me right away—with no budget, no promises, and no idea of exactly what we were actually going to program on our channel.
"Dozens of ideas came and went over the next several months. Soon we zeroed in on a favorite—a Mickey Mouse-style hand squeezing the crap out of a musical note. Then at some point during the winter of '81, senior management decided that we weren't going to be called The Music Channel after all. Bob decided to name it TV-1, with the thought that the new name sounded space age.
"We all rebelled, pointing out there was no number 1 on television sets at the time. To Bob's credit, he gave in and assigned a committee to come up with a better name for the channel. In classic committee fashion, no one could agree on anything with a personality, so we settled on the only thing the group could agree upon—a dull, descriptive name: MTV: Music Television.
"From our field of vision 30 years ago, a channel's name needed three letters, right? Like NBC, CBS or ABC. The problem was that when we said MTV out loud, we all kept mistakenly calling it MTM—Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker's huge indie TV production company.
"'Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?' mused company president Jack Schneider. But, MTV it was.
"Manhattan Design started grafting the letters onto the logo. But no matter what Frank and his partners created, the result looked crummy. So it was back to the drawing board. Hundreds of sketches flowed back to Alan and me.
"Then one day in April 1981, all three Manhattan Design partners showed up with what would need to be the last pile of graphic attempts. We needed to finalize the logo and begin producing on-air elements, stationery, business cards, promotional materials—all the stuff needed to start a real TV channel and run our business.
"As I weeded through their new submissions, Alan and I grew increasingly depressed. Nothing in the stacks rang a bell. That is, until the bottom of the pile, where we found a crumpled piece of tracing paper with a giant formal blocked 'M' followed by a scrawled TV. Alan and I lit up. It reminded us of the old 20th Century Fox logo—big, dramatic, imposing. The logo would completely fill the television screen's real estate.
"Manhattan Design went back to their studio to gussy up the creation for a presentation to my bosses. A few days later Frank and his partners returned with color samples and a board with dozens of different treatments that were meant to change, depending on what music show was on. Never mind that there weren't going to any 'shows' on MTV, just one three-minute music video after the next, interrupted on occasion by a VJ (our on-camera video disc jockeys) with commentary.
"Management looked at the result and nodded. The logo was approved. In fact, it was the easiest creative approval I've seen. Much easier than the year we had just spent trying to come up with it in the first place.
"Cooler still, Frank had spray-painted a graffitied 'TV,' allowing the drips to stay in. I couldn't decide which logo color treatment would be ideal to pitch to the business side. The experts in marketing had told me that logos had to be fixed—the same every time. So I pinned all the samples to my wall, hoping the right one would present itself to me during the days to come.
"Now came the fun part. The part I was most excited about. We had to animate the logo for our dozens of network identity pieces. These would run 144 times a day. I had always been in love with album covers—actually, obsessed with the great designers who saw cover art as more than decoration but brand identities for their labels. To my mind, the MTV network IDs, done right, could maybe define the new age the way those covers had defined the LP era.
"Bob Pittman's view was that radio had jingles as audio identifiers—the way NBC had its famous chimes. But such a device would be hopelessly dated for the young TV generation. So I asked him how he saw our IDs.
"'Well,' he drawled in his Mississippi accent, 'there could be an animated cow. A giant axe comes and cuts the cow's head off. Then, the cow vomits up our logo! OK?' Clearly Bob wasn't afraid of the cutting edge.
"OK! This was going to be fun!
"But the clock was running down. Animation takes time—and we hadn't locked in the logo's final design yet. I looked at all the versions on my wall, looked down at the board of all the versions that Manhattan Design had tricked up for our 'shows.' Then I blurted out that we'd use all of them—all the time. TV changed every minute, and music was in a constant state of flux. Why shouldn't our logo do the same?
"Problem solved. We'd use all of them! We'd create hundreds and use dozens at a time in one animation. Our audience could draw them, any artist could have their own versions.
"And that's when the trouble started.
"At our first business-side meeting, the lawyers said we had to pick just one, otherwise they'd have to register each and every version with the trademark office. That would be too much work, they said. I convinced them that if they trademarked just the logo's outline, the different colorings and designs wouldn't constitute a 'change.' They reluctantly agreed.
"When we met with our ad agency, they went into a total panic. 'It's ugly,' they said. Besides, the agency's founder had decreed 10 rules of an effective logo, and we had broken eight of them.
"Our head of marketing sympathized with the agency, arguing that a logo needed to be, above all, consistent. I pushed back: 'Our inconsistency is our consistency.'
"We also had come up with a classy black and grey scheme for the sales guys' business cards. 'You expect me to bring this blobby piece of shit to my clients?' screamed the vice president of sales.
"'You think this will last as long as the CBS eye?' asked the senior vice president of marketing, referring to the network's iconic corporate logo. 'Of course not!' I answered. 'It's a rock station. We'll be lucky if we're still be in business in five years!'
"John Lack, the executive who had the idea for a music channel in the first place, asked me who designed the logo. 'Three folks behind a tai chi studio in the Village,' I said. 'Go to some real designers and get something good,' he said. Ten weeks until launch and our expensive logo was dead. Or was it?
"I loved what Manhattan Design had produced. Besides, we didn't have much time left. So I went off to some incredible studios with king-sized reputations and gave them lousy direction—all but ensuring their failure. Frank and his crew had designed our logo. It was great, innovative, one for the ages. I wanted that damn logo.
"At our next big meeting, Alan and I brought along the big-time designers' work. Everyone agreed that they were pretty bad. Reluctantly, with a minor tweak—we changed the 'Music Television' font in Manhattan Design's MTV logo. Now everyone was on board, and the logo animated by the best independent animators in the world came into existence.
"Though we were based in New York, MTV wouldn't be broadcast in Manhattan for over a year. Issues relating to the intricacies of the cable-TV business at the time and competition for available stations kept us out. Believe it or not, many cable operators thought that a rock channel for young people wouldn't be a core cable channel. Back then, most of the decision makers were of a certain age.
"So before midnight on July 31, 1981, we all were taken by school bus (yes!) out to a Fort Lee, N.J., bar. Though New Jersey was just across the Hudson River, the cable company there was different and MTV had been given a slot. At midnight on August 1, MTV: Music Television launched. [Pictured, Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert]
'Launched' is the right word, since the very first thing viewers saw was an animation by Manhattan Design that was a mash up of an Apollo spacecraft landing astronauts on the moon. But instead of jabbing an American flag into the surface, the astronauts planted one that went through a dozen MTV logos. Playing in the background was a Kinks-like hard rock soundtrack composed and produced by Jonathan Elias and John Peterson.
"Then came the first video—the Buggles' hit Video Killed the Radio Star. It fit so perfectly for our launch that for years people thought we had commissioned the song and video for our debut. We didn't.
"At about 12:20 a.m., I gained a lot of faith in humanity when the executive who had asked me about the CBS 'eye' logo came over and shook my hand. 'I was wrong, the logo's great,' he said. 'Congratulations!'
"I'll be emailing him my thanks for a great memory today."
JazzWax clip: Here's the launch of MTV at midnight August 1, 1981...
About
Marc Myers writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and is author of "Anatomy of 55 More Songs," "Anatomy of a Song," "Rock Concert: An Oral History" and "Why Jazz Happened." Founded in 2007, JazzWax has won three Jazz Journalists Association awards.
