Va - Blue Note Plays Bossa Nova Rar
Mufid Bonnet
The bossa nova repertoire uses longer and more articulated musical forms and a much denser harmony, for example it is difficult if not impossible to find a piece by Antonio Carlos Jobim that uses a harmonic sequence of 16 measures only.
Wistful, pretty and elegiac, the music is somehow a fitting final statement from a player best known for more muscular, extrovert, swing-to-bop balladeering. The wonder is that Quebec was able to create such lovely music when he must have known his end was near. But as session engineer Rudy Van Gelder says in the liner notes to this RVG remaster, "Ike always played beautifully, even at the end, when he was dying...I mean, literally dying." And it's true. Despite the circumstances surrounding it, Bossa Nova Soul Samba is an album of beauty.
1962, of course, was the year it seemed every jazzman was making a bossa nova album. Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz began the trend with Jazz Samba (Verve, 1962), made with guitarist Charlie Byrd and containing the chart hit "Desafinado." By the time Quebec was in the studio, even big-tone tenor maestro Coleman Hawkins was on board, with Desafinado (Impulse!, 1962). Next up were Sun Ra & The Solar Myth Arkestra with Sugar Loaf Mountain Bossa Party! (no, I made that up actually, but it might have been).
By the end of the year, the genre was already in danger of becoming a cliché; not least for its reliance on the songwriting of Antonio Carlos Jobim, whose tunes dominated many track listings. But Quebec had the wit to ring the changes with the material for Bossa Nova Soul Sambahe began his time with Blue Note, after all, as an A&R man. The tunes are the real thing, but little known; Brazilian composers are used, but not Jobim; and there are two originals by Quebec ("Blue Samba," "Me 'n' You"), who also, imaginatively, re-arranges Anton Dvorak's "Goin' Home."
Bossa nova was well suited to Quebec's physical and, one imagines, mental states at the time of this recording. It requires no strutting or grandstanding, and lends itself instead to subtlety and ellipsis. The saxophonist plays with heartrending tenderness throughout, sensitively supported by guitarist Kenny Burrell, drummer Willie Bobo and bassist Wendell Marshall.
If you already know Quebec's chef d'oeuvres The Complete Blue Note 45 Sessions (Blue Note, 1959-62) and Blue And Sentimental (Blue Note, 1961), Bossa Nova Soul Samba will enhance your understanding of both, while also providing plenty of enjoyment in its own right. Track Listing Loie; Lloro Tu Despedida; Goin' Home; Me 'n' You; Liebstraum; Shu Shu; Blue Samba; Favela; Linda Fior; Loie (alternate take); Shu Shu (alternate take); Favela (alternate take).
1.1 The name of the artist and/or the group he is leading: Sonny Rollins, Sonny Rollins; Tal Farlow, Tal Farlow Quartet; Lou Donaldson, Lou Donaldson Sextet; Hank Mobley, Hank Mobley and His All_Stars. The information may be limited to the artist's first name and/or include an evaluation, often in the form of an adjective qualifying the artist: Andrew Hill, Andrew; Bud Powell, Bud!; Fats Navarro, The Fabulous Fats Navarro; J.J. Johnson, The Eminent J.J. Johnson; Herbie Nichols, The Prophetic Herbie Nichols; Thad Jones, The Magnificent Thad Jones; Jimmy Smith, The Incredible Jimmy Smith at the Organ (the adjective "incredible" recurs on several albums by Jimmy Smith, suggesting that Smith's use of the organ is "beyond belief"). Insofar as they repeat the name/s of the artist/s already supplied on the cover, these titles answer in redundant manner the question that probably is the most significant in jazz: Who is playing? For jazz, unlike classical music, emphasizes interpreters and pays less attention to composers. In fact, my corpus includes only two titles that foreground the authors of the music on the albums: Horace Silver, Six Pieces of Silver, and Jimmy Smith, Jimmy Smith Plays Fats Waller. Yet Silver and his group are also the interpreters of Six Pieces, and the album featuring Waller's music is intriguing because that music is played by Smith (encounters of this type of course are frequently staged on classical records, leading to a profusion of titles of the type "X Plays/Sings Z").
1.2 The genre of the music: Albert Ammons, Boogie-Woogie Classics; Ike Quebec, Heavy Soul; Kenny Dorham, Afro-Cuban; Art Hodes, Dixieland Jubilee; George Lewis, Echoes of New-Orleans; Charlie Rouse, Bossa Nova Bacchanal; Grant Green, The Latin Bit. These titles situate the album on the map of the types of jazz that are practiced at the time of the album's release. They may confirm what we know about the featured artist: Ammons is a specialist of boogie-woogie piano playing; Hodes, of Dixieland as practiced in Chicago; and Lewis, of the New-Orleans style as it has survived in its place of birth. But titles of this type may also signal that the artist is doing something that for him is unusual: Dorham is not known for his forays into Afro-Cuban; Rouse, unlike Stan Getz, did not convert convert to bossa nova; and Green was a hard bopper at the time of the Latin Bit's release (1962). In other words, titles like Bossa Nova Bacchanal and The Latin Bit do not just inform about the content of the album, showing Blue Note's eagerness to diversify beyond "just jazz." They also set up a confrontation between the music and its interpreters, positing knowledgeable listeners who are curious to hear how such artists as Rouse and Green handle fashionable South-American rhythms. Similar remarks apply to titles that in themselves are inconspicuous but become attractive when they are read in conjunction with with the name of the artist, like Horace Silver, The Trio Sides. Indeed, Silver has worked mostly with a quintet or a sextet. The information "the trio sides" is thus noteworthy for competent listeners, the definite article "the," which shows that all those sides are gathered on the album, being especially appealing to the "completists" who make up a sizeable part of the jazz collectors community.
3.4 A phrase that is linked with the cover art, although it does not play with/on the name of the artist: Donald Byrd, Royal Flush (the cover shows Byrd holding five cards, though toward himself, making it impossible to know whether he actually has a "royal flush"); Sonny Clark, Cool Struttin' (the cover shows a woman stylishly pacing the streets); Lou Donaldson, Blues Walk (the cover shows Donaldson walking); Gil Melle, Patterns in Jazz (the cover shows color patterns--drawn by Melle himself, who at the time was employed by Blue Note both as a musician and a graphic artist); Jimmy Smith, Crazy! Baby (the cover shows a woman in flashy clothes posing next to a luxury sportscar--a Jaguar). Like Good Deal and The All Seeing Eye, titles in 3.3 and 3.4 come as close as possible to being pure "index titles." True, metaphors of height on Byrd in Flight and Lou Takes Off suggest that the quality of the music offered on these records is particularly "elevated." But such worn figures are less likely to attract prospective listeners than the whole concept, which associates verbal and iconographic messages in an engaging manner. Some titles in this category are even misleading, as "cool" in Cool Struttin' (like "blue" in Blue Train) does not describe correctly Clark's music (though the adjective certainly fits the woman's stride), and only two out of the six numbers on Blues Walk are "blues" in the technical sense of the term (a 12-bar structure that follows a specific chord progression). In these instances, too, the point seems to lure potential buyers by combining a catchy title with a high-quality picture, not to supply precise information about the content of the album. Such information, on the Blue Note records, is provided by lengthy, well-documented liner notes, to which inquisitive customers can turn if they want more details concerning the performance.
As I said from the outset, my main purpose here is to establish a typology of the Blue Note titles, not to explain where those titles originated or why they took on the forms I have inventoried. I will thus limit my conclusion to three brief remarks, which should help to contextualize the phenomena I have examined and to situate my analysis within the more general "poetics" of jazz.
I first must emphasize more than I have done so far that titling jazz records (but also other cultural objects like books and paintings) must comply with commercial exigencies. Competition is fierce in the music business, and the way an album is titled can contribute to that album's success or failure. Economic considerations, therefore, certainly account for Blue Note's use of such devices as hyperbolic assertions (The Fabulous Fats Navarro), easily decodable metonymies (Gravy Train), and no less easily understandable puns (Byrd in Flight). But the requirements of marketing may also explain the high number of index titles, whose sole function is to set a record apart from other records, making it stand out in stores, catalogs, and magazine advertisements. Whether such schemes are effective or not is of course open to question. I am not aware of any empirical survey in which listeners were asked, among other things, whether they decided to buy or not to buy a record because of its title. As for sales figures, provided that we could obtain them, they depend on so many elements (the price of the record, its format, its availability, etc.), that it would be difficult to establish direct correlations between the number of copies an album sold and the way it was titled. At the very most, we collectors can attest that the Blue Note records are sought after not just for musical reasons, but because of what we regard as the attractiveness of their jackets (of which titles of course are major components). Thus, we may have acquired Donald Byrd's Royal Flush simply because we liked the game played on this disc's cover between verbal and iconographic messages. Those of us who are most enamored of graphics may even have bought Bud Powell's Bud! because of the title's design, in this case, because the letters forming the word "Bud" are brightly lit against the dark, claustrophobic background of the picture. (The same contrast is found on several other Blue Note covers.) The fact that the Blue Note jackets have been anthologized is relevant in this regard, confirming those jackets' desirability as aesthetic objects that have become independent from the product they are supposed to promote and describe. Blue Note, for that matter, is the only jazz label to which an exclusive picture book is devoted; other anthologies gather the jackets of diverse companies according to those companies' location (e.g., Marsh's California Cool and New York Hot), or they are focused on the production of one designer (e.g., Manek Daver's Jazz Graphics, which collects the jackets drawn by David Stone Martin).
While the titles of the Blue Note records are indicative of the economic requirements involved in producing an album, they also point to the contractual aspects of the information offered on that album's cover. Philippe Lejeune and other literary theorists have described this side of a book's paratext, arguing that such a generic subtitle as "autobiography" establishes a "pact" between a text and its readers; in this instance, the text's author, narrator, and main character are the same "person," who is committed to providing a truthful narrative of his/her life (Lejeune 26). In my sample, the contractual nature of the items that figure on a record's front cover is particularly noticeable in denotative titles: Sonny Rollins's Sonny Rollins must feature Rollins; Albert Ammons's Boogie-Woogie Classics must consist of boogie-woogies; Kenny Dorham's 'Round Midnight at the Café Bohemia must have been recorded at the Café Bohemia; and Introducing Johnny Griffin must "really" be Griffin's first album for Blue Note. Listeners would feel betrayed if they did not get what the titles say they are getting, for instance, if it turned out that Rollins only plays on one number on Sonny Rollins, that Ammons has abandoned boogie-woogie, or that Dorham's disc was in fact recorded in a studio, background noises and applause being added to create the illusion of a club date. (We have all been frustrated upon discovering that the music on a pirate or supermarket label did not match the information supplied on the record's cover.) But the same constraints also apply to connotative and index titles, showing how the (sometimes) conflicting demands of marketing and truth in advertising are the objects of a negociation. Thus, a title like Easterly Winds can only designate soft music (though not necessarily Wilson's music), and it could not be used as the title of, say, one of the McLean's albums of the early 1960s. Such a use would clash with the shared cultural code that associates "easterly winds" with "softness," breaking the contract which is grounded in that code. Conversely, Free Form could hardly become the title of a conservative, "commercial" record, like Turrentine's Dearly Beloved. As for the titles I have labeled ambiguous (Spring) or misleading (Cool Struttin'), they do not really jeopardize the pact with prospective buyers that the information on an album's cover establishes. Rather, they posit an informed audience, which knows that "spring" on a Tony Williams album can only mean "renewal," and that Sonny Clark's music does not fall under the "cool" style developed by Stan Getz and others in the late 1940s (though it certainly can be described as "cool" in the sense of ""chic" or "fashionable"). Irony, in short, is not found in the titles of the Blue Note albums, and the occasional games that are played on those albums' covers remain most subdued. My corpus, at any rate, reveals none of the prankish frauds that are sometimes committed in literature, such as Boris Vian's titling L'Automne à Pékin a novel that takes place neither in the fall nor in Beijing, Eugène Ionesco's calling La Cantatrice chauve a play that includes no bald singer among its characters, or Mathieu Bénézet's naming L'Histoire de la peinture en trois volumes a collection of poems that do not concern painting and are gathered in one 116 page-long volume. The Blue Note catalog, at this point, does not offer a Saxophone Summit to which no saxophonists have been invited, and I am not sure whether the jazz audience is ready for this kind of ludic deception.
Last, but not least, the titles of the Blue Note records point to the larger issue of knowing whether music has a "semantic level" (or a "content plane") and where that level is located (Eco 11). To pose the problem in a somewhat simplistic manner: Do musical signs only refer to other musical signs, according to such relations as "equivalence, contrast, symmetry, and complication" (Nattiez 138)? Or can they can refer to the world outside music, for instance, to "concepts, actions, and emotions" (Nattiez 132)? I am not competent to intervene into a discussion that has involved semioticians, philosophers, and musicologists, pitching the "absolutists," for whom "one musical event... has meaning because it points to and makes us expect another musical event" (Meyer 35), against the "referentialists," for whom "musical meaning... lies in the relationship between a musical symbol or sign and the extra-musical thing which it designates" (33). (These issues are comprehensively discussed, for example, in the essays collected in Scher.) Thus, I will only observe that the titles of the Blue Note records offer different answers to these questions--albeit unintentionally. A few among those titles sidestep the issue altogether. A phrase like A Night at Birdland, for example, involves no theory of musical meaning; it does not claim that the pieces on the record picture the Birdland, only stating that the disc contains (some of) the sounds that were produced there on a certain night. Similarly, Green Street does not assert that the music on the record describes a street or any green object; this title, as I argued earlier, functions strictly as an index, serving to distinguish the album from Green's previous records. Other titles, however, illustrate Meyer's "absolutist" position. Thus, Dixieland Jubilee and Afro-Cuban imply that musical events have meaning in relation to other events in the same semiotic category; proceeding by symmetry and contrast, they describe what the music on these albums is ("dixieland," "Afro-Cuban"), and also what it is not, or not quite ("dixieland" is not truly "New-Orleans" and "Afro-Cuban" not exactly "latin" nor "be-bop"). Finally, such titles as Blue Hour and Feelin' Good exemplify Meyer's "referentialist" position. Indeed, they indicate that musical signs can designate extra-musical "things," just like linguistic signs can designate extra-linguistic objects, actions, and emotions. In these cases, as I surmised while discussing connotative titles, the recordings (specifically the music's tempi) refer conventionally to a certain "mood," which the adjectives "blue" and "good" describe by way of a metaphor ("blue") and a direct qualification ("good").
The Blue Note titles bearing on the "avant-garde" jazz of the early 1960s best pose the problem of the "aboutness" of music. To reframe the question I already asked while examining those titles: Do such phrases as Evolution, It's Time, Right Now, Let Freedom Ring, and A New Conception refer to music, describing the "new," "free" kind of jazz that was developing at the time? Do they refer to the social context, calling for changes in the situation of African-Americans? And, most importantly, does the music on these albums have in itself a social meaning? Kofsky, in the study I quoted earlier, rehearses the familiar thesis that aesthetic and social "revolutions" cannot be separated. According to him, the major transformations that jazz underwent in the 1960s were "responses" to a "massive constellation of social and economic forces," such as the "increased technological unemployment of unskilled Negro laborers," the "consolidation of Afro-American determination to remove, and the white insistence on maintaining, the chains of second-class citizenship," the "movement for African independence," and the "growth of explicit black-nationalist sentiment" (263). Yet Kofsky does not ask whether Rivers's or Coltrane's music can be "about" these phenomena, as a novel, a poem, or a painting can be "about" them. Thus, when he states that the title "It's Time" means "it's time for liberation" (75), he merely interprets the phrase in light of some aspects of the social context; he does not claim that the music on the record actually describes that context, picturing such things as ghetto unemployment or the growth of black-nationalist awareness. Whether music can represent this kind of extra-musical content or not, however, is precisely the issue that the titles under review permit us to raise. If we take the "It's Time" that Kofsky mentions to be McLean's It's Time, numerous musical signs on this record inscribe a "liberation" in areas like song structure (most pieces on the record no longer fall under the 32-bar, AABA pattern), rhythm (the usual 4/4 is frequently broken), and instrumentental range (McLean's saxophone deploys harmonics and shrieks). But this "liberation" is from the conventions of hard-bop, that is, specifically musical (revealingly, the first piece on It's Time is titled "Cancellation"). To extend it to the social sphere, we need a code that tells us how to translate musical signs into social signs, more precisely, how to assign a social signified to a musical signifying like the modal structure that McLean is using in three out of the six numbers on It's Time. Does such a code exist? If it does, is it structured like the linguistic code (as I have assumed by speaking of a "signifying" and a "signified")? And can we learn it, as we learn, besides language, the codes of such components of our social universe as fashion and advertising? The titles of the Blue Note records do not answer these questions in direct, explicit manner. But they they make it possible to pose them, and, in this respect, they contribute to the conversation.
Titles cited