A Visit to the Never-Ending Musical Archive
Talking three recent archive releases plus what I've been listening to recently and a check on how my Substack is doing
Welcome music lovers!
Today, I am sharing my second paid post—a bonus, if you like, to the ongoing series of music essays I share every 10 days. The first part is a look at three recent archival releases that are definitely worth your attention, if you haven’t checked them out already, and is available to everyone. The remaining part of the post: a look at what I’ve been listening to recently and an update on how my newsletter is doing, is behind the paywall. If you’d like to support my work with a paid subscription, I would be deeply grateful. Yearly ($50) and monthly ($6) plans are available. If money is tight, I would be happy to comp you a paid subscription. Just fire off an email to me here—no questions asked. We’re all in this together!
My next regular post will be out on February 5 and will be a roundup of new and upcoming music I am particularly excited about. After that will be an essay on Roy Orbison’s work on Monument, focusing on a dynamite single he released in 1963.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Report from the Archives
Last year, I wrote an essay for Chris Dalla Riva’s great Substack Can’t Get Much Higher on my fascination with archival recordings. At their best, they fill in a missing link in how the music I love came into being.
They weren’t that prevalent when I was growing up but today, they are an industry all their own. Are they taking up space that should be reserved for artists making music today? I would say to a point but there is, and this is a good thing, a lot of new music being made and released (albeit not a lot on major labels) that is worth checking out. Still, there is always that moment when I gasp and my heart begins to swoon when news comes that the music vault had been cracked open again to provide a newly unearthed treasure.
I sure wasn’t alone when it came to last November's release of Forces of Nature featuring a tape from 1966 of McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson with Henry Grimes and Jack DeJohnette live at Slugs’ Saloon in New York. The advance hype was intense. How could it not? Here was a chance to hear Tyner and Henderson play in a club setting with Grimes, by then deep into the jazz avant-garde and soon to almost disappear for over 30 years, and DeJohnette, just as he was beginning his stint with the groundbreaking quartet of Charles Lloyd. Here was also a chance to hear music that one wouldn’t have had a chance to hear unless one was at the East Village club that night. And that’s really where the value of these recordings lie—the zeroing in on a moment in time, a chance to be in the middle of the revolution as opposed to plotting a certain album on the arc of the changes it wrought.
At its most potent, Forces of Nature is all about the tightrope that many jazz musicians were upon in 1966. On one end was the music’s foundation: the steady pulse, a structure based either on harmony or the lack of it and a cohesiveness that bent but never broke. On the other end was freedom, the forsaking of all the guideposts fueled either by energy or sparseness.
Tyner, Henderson and crew hew to a structure that is wound extra tight, especially on marathon versions of the tenor saxophonist’s ‘In ’N Out’ and the spur-of-the-moment ‘Taking Off.’ There are moments of ambivalence where the balance teeters (particularly during Tyner’s solos on both tracks) but it’s nothing quite like the wilder negotiation that occurs during the recordings of John Coltrane and group in Seattle in September and October of 1965. Still, Forces of Nature, by the very unlikeliness of such a thing existing, compels the jazz fan to listen and drop in on a very exciting moment in time.
No one has played the archive game quite as well as Joni Mitchell has in the past few years. Her ongoing series of Archives box sets and re-issues of her studio and live albums has been a rewarding and quite frankly fun way to newly appreciate an artist that doesn’t immediately come to mind as one that requires to be newly appreciated.
Her fourth volume of Archives was released early last October and covers her occasional guest appearances during Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the fall of 1975 to the Shadows and Light tour in the summer of 1979. As usual, the volume goes in-depth, leaving few stones unturned as Mitchell went further and further into jazz.
The highlight for me of the set is an outtake from the protracted sessions for Mingus: a version of ‘Sweet Sucker Dance’ with Jerry Lubbock on electric piano, Don Alias on drums and Gerry Mulligan on baritone saxophone. Hearing Mitchell and Mulligan together is the kind of collaboration dreamed up as a seemingly implausible what-if that not only happened but we also get to hear it. It’s another of the many reasons why I feel archive releases can be manifestations of the miraculous.
For me, the most absorbing section of volume four is the disc and a half dedicated to her 1976 tour with the LA Express. It was a tour that ended abruptly as Mitchell’s relationship with drummer John Guerin ended. No surprise that there is a tension to the recordings from it. Antic energy is weaved throughout run-throughs of hits like ‘Help Me,’ ‘Free Man in Paris’ and ‘Raised on Robbery.’ Hearing Mitchell solo on electric guitar on songs like ‘Shades of Scarlett Conquering’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ add to the feeling that she was moving beyond this way of presenting her music. Most startling is an almost frightening version of ‘The Jungle Line’ that struggles to capture the eeriness of it on The Hissing of Summer Lawns. I’m particularly excited to hear how Mitchell tackles the eighties and beyond, the point where I am far less familiar with her music. I expect it will be an immensely rewarding education.
Chicago is a band that has been making music for 56 years now and counting with three of its founding members: Robert Lamm, Lee Loughnane and James Pankow still part of the group. I’m not sure there’s ever been a band quite like Chicago. By that I mean I would be hard pressed to think of a group whose music presents continuing diminishing returns. Their debut album, Chicago Transit Authority from 1969, remains astonishing. Their guise as soft-rock schmaltzers in the eighties is about as far away from the edge of ‘Poem 58,’ for one example, as can conceivably be believed.
The recent release of their concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. from September 16, 1971, just eight days after the hall opened with Leonard Bernstein leading a performance of his Mass, puts the band at the end of their glorious beginning. The transition was well underway of Chicago becoming a band of often very good songs but not very cohesive albums.
Heard live, the band remained one of shattering intensity propelled by Terry Kath on guitar and Danny Seraphine on drums; their sound fattened by those ever-present horn lines. Their show at Kennedy Center is expectedly red hot with intense versions of prime album tracks like ‘In the Country’ and ‘Fancy Colors’ from their second album and another reminder that ‘Lowdown,’ from their third album, is one of their finest if unheralded hits.
The material they were workshopping for their fifth album betrays the gradual dying away of Chicago’s magic. ‘Saturday in the Park,’ appearing here in its debut performance live, remains marvelous and ‘Goodbye’ has some fine horn writing but the clever ‘A Hit by [Edgar] Varèse’ never seems to stick and ‘A Poem for Richard [Nixon] and His Friends,’ left off of Chicago V, is more proof that the band’s forays into politics were usually heavy-handed.
Still, a sign of this album’s worth is that the version here of the Spencer Davis Group’s irrepressible ‘I’m a Man’ is so exciting, especially the in-the-pocket interlude featuring Kath and Seraphine, that it almost makes up for the band’s ludicrously made-up lyrics that come off as nonsensical compared to the hip lines that Steve Winwood sings.
Almost all of the expected high points are here: ‘Beginnings,’ ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?,’ the Ballet for a Girl in Buchannan suite and ‘25 or 6 to 4.’ They are all meaty versions. I’m glad to hear another Chicago show that is worth savouring.
Report from the Record Room
McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, Joni Mitchell and Chicago aren’t the only artists, of course, that have been heard in the record room recently. There’ll be a round-up of new and upcoming music that I’ve enjoyed coming on February 5.
In addition to that, Joan Baez has been on the turntable quite a lot in January.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Listening Sessions to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.