Bruce Springsteen
Back on vinyl, how Chicago’s gospel-folk-blues family found Memphis grit and Muscle Shoals magic.
★★★★ The Rising COLUMBIA/LEGACY. LP
His first studio album of the 21st century returns on vinyl. As do:
18 Tracks (1999); Live In New York City (2001); Devils & Dust (2005); Live In Dublin (2007).
WHEN BRUCE Springsteen toured with the E Street Band in 19992000, he rediscovered a collective heft his music had lacked for 10 years; it was, he stated,
“not a reunion but a revival”. To capture that devotional energy on 2002’s studio comeback, he looked beyond his inner circle to producer Brendan O’Brien, who urged a leaner recording aesthetic and gave the archetypal E Street ram-a-lam a modern veneer. Most importantly, Springsteen brought his strongest rock material since Born In The USA: My City Of
Ruins, Lonesome Day, Empty Sky and the shattering title track, transcendent songs for grim times; recording began shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A 75-minute double, The Rising is unarguably too long – O’Brien bowed to his boss on fluff like Let’s Be Friends (Skin To Skin) – but its core intensity fired up Springsteen to thrive in the new century.
Keith Cameron
The Staple Singers ★★★★ Come Go With Me CRAFT RECORDINGS. 7-LP BOX SET
VETERANS OF a handful of labels since the mid ’50s, most successfully on VeeJay and Epic, The Staple Singers were signed to Stax by Al Bell in 1968 and remained until the label’s bitter end in the mid ’70s, recording six albums, one of them a five-star essential. Not heard on new vinyl for some years, this 7-LP box restores a catalogue of social, political and racial protest made via uplifting marriages of soul, gospel and funk thanks to Mavis Staples’ great God-amighty voice and Pops’ distinctively warbly blues-folk guitar.
In Memphis, M.G.’s guitarist and staff producer Steve Cropper worked on their first two albums. Material from local writers refocused Soul Folk In Action on past themes of unity and progress (We’ve Got To Get Ourselves Together) and hope and attainment (Top Of The Mountain; Slow Train; Got To Be Some Changes Made; Pops co-write I See It), plus a fine cover of The Band’s The Weight. We’ll Get Over, 1969’s follow-up, took a poppier route, from Give A Damn’s clear 5th Dimension echoes to covers of The Guess Who, Joe South, Sly Stone and Gladys Knight. But it ends strongly with the straight-talking When Will We Be Paid.
An experienced company man, Al Bell took the reins, moved operations to Muscle
Shoals and steered the group back on track with 1971’s The Staple Swingers, the sound of gunshots and a snatch of My Country Tis Of Thee opening first track, This Is A Perfect World, with irony and an incisive aim. Patchy, but with much to love, …Swingers’ Heavy Makes You Happy (Sha-Na-Boom Boom) gave them their first US Top 30 pop hit, while Mavis has returned to the message of personal pride in Pops’ co-write I Like The Things About You on 2013’s One True Vine.
The magic came later in ’71. Be Altitude: Respect Yourself is a five-star classic from its joyous opener, This World, through Respect Yourself’s forthright message to I’ll Take You There, with David Hood’s instantly recognisable bass line and sentiments of uplift and hope. There’s no filler among the eight other songs, and Mavis’s leads, in particular, are imperious.
Stax’s decline thereafter was reflected in 1973’s Be What You Are and ’74’s City In The Sky, despite the zeniths of If You’re Ready (Come Go With Me) on the former LP, and messages of protest on both: Washington We’re Watching You; Something Ain’t Right; Bridges Instead Of Walls, which is Come Go With Me’s groove repurposed for a lyric worth whispering to Trump.
The seventh album here collects rarities and B-sides like 1968’s rousing Stay With Us, a rare Mavis composition, Brand New Day (from the film The Landlord), ’73’s stomping non-LP hit Oh La De Da, Mavis alone on a totally untypical Trippin’ On Your Love, and five tracks from their set at August ’72’s Wattstax celebration. In all, a cherishable tribute to the vitality of the right-on gospel group whose strides into soul still echo today.
IN HIS EXCELLENT book on reggae history, Bass Culture, Lloyd Bradley notes that dub could well have roots in obeah, the Jamaican equivalent of voodoo, where the body is considered to have seven selves – sexual, digestive, heart, brain, etc – and practitioners attempt to ‘bring forward or push back’ the different selves, just like the channels on a mixing desk, to provide a new balance. On the other hand, he adds, it may simply be that Jamaicans who couldn’t afford to throw anything away became brilliant at recycling. The fast-moving Jamaican music scene of the late 1960s, where new fads popped up every few months, necessitated squeezing new music from old tapes.
Dub grew from the soundsystems’ discovery that crowds also loved instrumental versions of vocal hits because they could do their own thing to them. The James Brown-style instrumental B-side evolved into the dub plate. The sound’s great pioneer was King Tubby, a technician who, using filters and echo, could transform the fortunes of a soundsystem, and, it turned out, a multitrack tape. The innovator’s name on a dub always makes it intriguing.
Therefore, The Prophets’ King Tubby’s Prophecies Of Dub ★★★★ (Pressure Sounds), produced by singer Vivian Jackson, AKA Yabby You and issued originally in 1976 in a small edition on the Prestige label, is of considerable interest. Distinct from a slightly earlier release called King Tubby’s Prophesy Of Dub, also produced by Jackson, the album has confused collectors. And with good reason, because despite the presumption of the title, King Tubby himself apparently had little to do with it! It was simply mixed at his studio, by a kid named Pat Kelly.
“I mix a whole lot of thing for many people, but often the producer don’t credit the engineer properly, they just put King Tubby’s Studio,” Kelly told linernote author Diggory Kenrick. A young singer himself, Kelly was paid weekly by Tubby for his engineering prowess and learnt dub mixing from watching the master. “[By 1975] Tubby used to mostly concentrate on his electronics. He was a technician, so he loved building amplifiers and things like that… I loved [making] the music with a passion, so we didn’t look at it financially. Beca’ remember, we were living with our parents too, it was a different era; those days you lived with your family, so you didn’t have demands, you were just happy to make a record and hear it playing on the radio.”
Kelly’s sound naturally differed a little from Tubby’s, perhaps influenced by the jazz albums he was borrowing from the studio, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, and so on. Plus lots of Johnny Mathis!
Also, although Yabby You is listed as producer, the tracks almost all stem from rhythms cut by Bunny Lee, stored in a big wardrobe at Tubby’s, under a general agreement that they could be used for dubs to help promote the original songs. Yabby You had been mentored as a producer by Lee, so presumably felt entitled to use his tapes. Whether he had permission or not has been forgotten. These included rhythms played by, among others, Sly & Robbie, Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, Tommy McCook, Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith and Carlton Davis, and originally used for songs by Linval Thompson, Johnny Clarke, Delroy Wilson (for his
Sings For I album) and Horace Andy.
Kelly clearly knew what he was doing. Despite it not being Tubby’s direct work, this is a sharp, atmospheric collection with stinging effects, motive grooves and rich, booming bass lines. He did it, he says, in three or four evenings. Let’s hope this reissue – on vinyl and a CD with four bonus tracks – earns him more recognition in future.
“King Tubby had little to do with it.”
★★★★ Nigeria BLUE NOTE. LP
Audiophile vinyl-only revival of jazz guitarist’s overlooked 1962 album GIVEN THAT Green witnessed 11 of his recording sessions for Blue Note shelved during his first stint at the label between 1960-65, it’s surprising, perhaps, that he returned to Alfred Lion’s company in 1969 for a second, albeit shorter, spell. Nigeria, the first of three canned Green albums recorded in 1962, wasn’t released until 1980 when it appeared on LP in the USA and Japan. Now it’s been mastered directly to vinyl from the original 2-track analogue tapes as part of the label’s ongoing Tone Poet series. Green, who’s accompanied by pianist Sonny Clark, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Art Blakey, is in breathtaking form. The highlights include an incendiary version of Sonny Rollins’ hard bop staple, Airegin, and an inspired take on George Gershwin’s It Ain’t Necessarily So, driven by Blakey’s irresistible shuffle groove.
Charles Waring
CRAFT RECORDINGS
IN HIS short life – 19201955 – Bird burnt bright and hard, playing like he knew he didn’t have long. His innovation was to improvise around the highest notes in a chord sequence, the less obvious harmonies, the flattened ninths, the vertiginous intervals. And to do it at pace. It took much study – and some ridicule – before he perfected the style, but it’s generally agreed that he got there during sessions for Savoy Records, especially one on November 26, 1945, featuring Miles Davis and Max Roach, which featured definitive be-bop performances of Koko, Now’s The Time and Billie’s Bounce. These four 10-inch LP collections, gathering sides first issued on 78 rpm singles, were released between 1950-52. Remastered, handsomely boxed and well annotated, they gather 28 sides that sowed the seeds for Coltrane, Coleman and the rest to reap. Released to mark his centennial, they make an excellent entry point for anyone new to collecting Parker.
Jim Irvin