Of the subsidiary labels that Bob Weinstock created to swing into the new decade, Moodsville is the most debatable. Swing and blues are undeniably important and arguably underserved genres, at least in this time frame, but mood music? Isn't that just watered-down jazz?
Except it isn't. Chris Albertson has asserted that every session produced for Prestige was held to the same high musical standards, and if you look at the artists in the Moodsville catalog, they're not watered-down anything.
You can raise the chicken-and-egg question. Did Weinstock say, "Hey, let's bring Red Garland in for a solo piano session, and we can release it on Moodsville"? Or did Red lobby Weinstock for solo session, and did Bob then, listening to the finished product, say, "Hey, that could work for Moodsville"?
It's questions like this that keep me up at night. And I'm entitled. In fact, as both an intellectual and a jazz fanatic, I'm doubly entitled to wakeful nights pondering pointless and unanswerable questions.
Why don't I just shut up and listen to the music? I do that too.
You can get a lot of music in when you've just got a solo piano, and Garland recorded two albums' worth on this balmy April day (I looked it up; temperatures were 15 degrees above normal). In spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, but Garland was playing alone, and his fancy turned to being alone, to songs about love lost. He was also thinking random thoughts about the blues, and apparently playing tunes as they came into his mind, so ultimately they were separated out to make two albums, and I'll take the songs album track by album track, starting with Red Alone, which became the third Moodsville release.
He begins with "When Your Lover Has Gone," written by Einar Swan for the James Cagney movie Girl Crazy. Swan was a dance band musician turned composer, and you'd think there'd be next to nothing written about him, which was true until 2006, when Scandinavian historian chanced upon a mention of him, noted his unusual first name, decided he must be Finnish (he was--the family name was Joutsen, Finnish for Swan), decided to research him and ended by writing a 90-page biography. Swan's father emigrated from Finland because he heard that American workers had an 8-hour day which meant he would have time to study music. All his children were musical, and there was a family orchestra.
"These Foolish Things" was written by British composer Jack Strachey, who also composed "A Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square." It's one of my favorite ballads.
The rest are mostly the work of composer royalty--Rodgers and Hart, Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Victor Young.
"Nancy with the Laughing Face" was written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Phil Silvers, and is generally thought to have been written for Frank Sinatra's wife, but it wasn't. Silvers had originally written as "Bessie with the Laughing Face, but that was apparently considered either too ethnic or too bovine.
Man does not live by Red Alone, so the remaining titles were gathered together in a second, album, Alone with the Blues, and as one can expect from Red Garland, there's a wide-ranging selection process, delivering a veritable history of the blues. Classic blues is represented by Leroy Carr's "In the Evening (when the Sun Goes Down)." We take a trip to Kansas City for Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner's "Wee Baby Blues." Ahmet Ertegun (as A. Nugetre) and pianist Harry Van Walls wrote "Chains of Love," which was an Atlantic recording for Big Joe. Jazz is represented across the decades: "Cloudy" by Mary Lou Williams; "Sent for You Yesterday (and Here You Come Today)" by Count Basie, Eddie Durham and Jimmy Rushing; "Blues in the Closet," by Oscar Pettiford; and John Coltrane's "Trane's Blues." All of it given the Garland touch.
No comments:
Post a Comment