Drum Roll, Please: The 1st Annual & Probably Last Moderate Voice Baker’s Dozen of Great Music
Life got you down, Bunky? Afraid that our Islamofascist president will send you to a reeducation camp? That Rick Santorum will be sitting in your marital bed when it’s time to turn in tonight? That the price of gasoline will continue going through the roof? Well, we feel your pain. But don’t fret because you can join us for the 1st Annual & Probably Last Moderate Voice Baker’s Dozen of Great Music.
To get the ball rolling, here is my list and explanations about why each of these selections means so much to me. Please return the favor by listing your favorites — as many or few as you like — and why they are.
AMELIA: It’s tough to name just one Joni Mitchell song given this folk-rock-jazz singer-songwriter’s incredible catalog, and this pean to the aviatrix Amelia Earhart is just one of the many terrific cuts on Hejira, which is my favorite Joni album with the added treat of the beautiful accompaniment of Jaco Pastorious on fretless base.
BRANDENBURG CONCERTOS: I will for ever associate these six J.S. Bach instrumental works with family Christmases. My favorite version is by the Philip Pickett-led New London Consort and is performed on period instruments.
EXODUS: The range of reggae superstar Bob Marley’s repertoire is amazing and to think what he might have done had he lived longer. “Exodus” is the title track of Marley’s masterpiece album and brilliantly distills the most mundane of human feelings with universal truths through words and music that are once simple and deeply complex.
EYES OF THE WORLD: If I have a personal anthem, this Grateful Dead song is it. Over the years, I probably heard it played live 40 or so times — primarily in the Dead’s heyday in the 1970s — and each time it was a little bit different. The Robert Hunter lyrics are chockablock with beautiful imagery and for me evoke the grasslands above the Pacific Ocean near San Simeon in California.
I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO: Tony Bennett’s signature song works every which way. It is beautifully sung and brings back fond memories of my years living in the city by the bay. It also contains what may be the best lyric in the American songbook: “To be where little cable cars/Climb halfway to the stars.”
KIND OF BLUE: For sheer atmospherics, its hard to beat this great Miles Davis song from the eponymously named album, which is the best-selling jazz disk of all time. Think of a smokey room late at night. Kind of Blue — song and album — marked the outset of Davis’s modal approach to jazz, as opposed to the hard bop that had made him popular.
MERCY MERCY ME (THE ECOLOGY): This was a breakthrough song on a breakthrough album, 1971′s What’s Going On. The great soul singer tore off the shackles that the Motown label had imposed on him and made an album the way he wanted to with songs that moved beyond the usual soul treekle of that era.
OUR DAY WILL COME: Amy Winehouse’s posthumously released version of this love song has become a hit and deservedly so, but the original by Ruby and The Romantics, which was a No. 1 hit when I was in high school, remains my favorite version.
STARDUST: I used to hum the idiosyncratic melody to this Hoagy Carmichael song to myself as I laid awake in bed as a youngster and it wasn’t until years later that I realized that this “song about a song about love,” as it has been described, had lyrics. I continue to adore it both with and without.
TAKE THE “A” TRAIN: This Billy Strayhorn classic became Duke Ellington’s signature song and has been oft covered. Ella Fitzgerald’s rendering of the lyrics is my hands-down favorite, but there are many great covers out there and I heard Wynton Marsalis’s Quintet knock their version out of the park only last year.
WHIPPING POST-MOUNTAIN JAM: The Allman Brothers were and continue to be a nonpareil jam band and I was fortunate enough to hear the original ensemble before brother Duane packed in. This stupendous jam from the band’s legendary Filmore East concert actually appeared on two albums — opening with the closing track to Live at Fillmore East and finishing with one of the two Eat a Peach disks.
WHO DO YOUR LOVE: No offense to Bo Diddley, who wrote and performed this blues classic, but Quicksilver Messenger Service’s 25-minute live version from their Happy Trails album remains my favorite because of the incredible jamming, including John Cippolina’s smoking guitar work.
WINTER IN AMERICA: The late poet and signer-songwriter Gil Scott Heron is the largely unrecognized father of hip hop. The hauntingly sung title song from the 1973 album with collaborator Brian Jackson concerns the economic, racial and social malaise of the early 1970s. “Winter in America” would not be on Rick Santorum’s list.
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No blues on the list. Rock and reggae wouldn’t exist without it’s blues origins. No Rolling Stones to gather moss…
rudi:
I knew that this post would smoke out your musical self.
I actually am conscious of there being no blues on my list and was going to bump one of my jazz picks for Crossroads (aka Cross Road Blues) by Robert Johnson.
What are your faves and why?
No favorites, but enjoy, Buddy Guy, MW, Howlin’ Wolf, BB and Albert King to name few.
The Dead’s blues incantation borrowed havily from the list above.
You even ignored country, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams SR…
So much great music to choose from and so many musical influences, memories, etc. – which is to say any list will be very, very incomplete.
Here are a few of my own pics in no particular order:
(Hush, Brownsville/Mockingbird) Joy of Cooking
(Memory Pain) Second Winter ~ Johnny Winter
(Ride the Wind to Me – also, I Know Why the River Runs) Broken Things ~ Julie Miller
(Sometimes I Slip) Allright Again ~ Clarence Gatemouth Brown
(anything on this album) Discipline ~ King Crimson
Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack ~ Dr. John
(Fields of Gold) Eva Cassidy ~ Songbird
(Echoes) Meddle ~ Pink Floyd
(Hard Core Troubadour) I Feel Allright ~ Steve Earle
(anything on this album) St. Dominics Preview ~ Van Morrison
Surfer Rosa ~ The Pixies
Leige & Lief – also What We Did on our Holidays ~ Fairport Convention
Happy Trails is also on my list. I wore out the album 40 years ago. Cippolina is no longer with us btw. Playing that great gig in the sky no doubt.
I’m A traildragger/ The thrill is gone/ Green onions/ gatemouth/ bb/ howlin/ muddy/alfred/koko/4 alarm man/ lefthanded woman/ big thigh woman/ sqeeze my lemon baby/ down down down down/ slow hand-twitty/ the mink: willie de ville: stand by me/ leonard skinner/ the other leonard (cohen) I’m your man (I’ll crawl to you, wear a mask for you…”… fuentes, b tribe, escala )cantaora flamenco), early dylan, old seeger, the incomparable mclean as balladeer, mcCartney Mother Mary, and more, Griffin, Mary… you’re covered in ashes, in scars, in roses. I could go on all day and all night. Thanks Shaun… music, the World Heart still beating
dr.e
there’s too many Shaun: Janis ball and chain, take a piece of my heart, stones; jumpin jack flash, gene krupa anywhere anytime, the shondelles, the pharoahs, duke of earl, old cape cod, benny and the jets, black mombasa, soweto, proud mary, native american war ceremony, tibetan ghost exorcism ritual. There are so so many, I cannot keep up
franz lizst, la traviata, carmen, corridos of the 19th century, so so many acapella singers, slide guitar in all of Lomax’s work/prison songs/ field songs all Lomax/ folkways lps/ the night tripper/ ghost shirt/ and over and over especially, IZ.
I have to go with some others (but then again, I grew up in the 70′s and 80′s, so not quite as old as Shawn).
1. Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)(or substitute ‘Your My Best Friend’)
2. Something by McCartney (or John & Paul): Long and Winding Road, Hey Jude, Silly Love Songs, Band on the Run (amazing transition sections)
3. Something by Elton John (the guy has the current longest running streak of top 40′s ever–beating out Elvis and the Beatles) Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me
4. Something by Mozart (I’ll take Eine Kleine Nacht Muzic or however it is spelled)
5. Ode to Joy
6. Theme to 2001 Space Odyssey
7. Dancing Queen (Abba)
8. In the Air Tonight (Phil Collins)
9. In the Mood (Glen Miller) Most memorable tune from that era)
10. Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (Andrews Sisters)
11. Something by Harry Chapin (Taxi, Cat’s in the Cradle, Mr. Tanner, 30k lbs of Bananas, A Better Place to Be)
12. Eye of the Tiger (Survivor)
13. Princess Leia’s Theme (Star Wars, John Williams)
I’m sure I probably left a WHOLE LOT of them out.
Great responses! Keep ‘em coming as we’ll be reposting this through the week.
zephyr:
I wanted to include “Echoes” as (em>Meddle is my favorite Pink Floyd album. I reviewed it here:
http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com/2009/08/album-review-pink-floyds-meddle.html
Shaun, I was lucky enough to see Pink Floyd in concert after Meddle (but before Dark Side of the Moon) fall of 71 at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, tickets were 3 bucks I kid you not. (The concert was amazing – saw them again in 75).
Dr E. – another Mink DeVille fan here! As you say, there are far too many to list.. Another notable I failed to mention is Peter Green from ‘Then Play On’ and before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxux5LdmjQU&feature=player_embedded#!
Played classical piano when young (still have an old upright with the keys worn down) and my mother loved musicals – played them on the stereo and sang the songs from them. Also listened to the radio late at night – as many of us from that era did. Oldest brother was a folk music devotee guitar player, next brother down was a drum major and sax player. First big concert I saw was Harry Belafonte at the Fisher Theater in Detroit -I was probably 11 or 12. I still remember that huge voice.
I couldn’t imagine living without music. It would be like living in one dimension.
zephyr:
I too caught the Floyd on that tour, which along with an Allman Brothers concert, both at the Rectum . . . er, Spectrum in South Philadelphia, were my reintroduction to big-hall music after a few years in the Far East, many an evening spent in intimate jazz clubs in jazz-crazy Japan.
Like you, if I can riff a bit on your thoughts, music has been my one nearly lifelong companion. It is there for me if I am happy or sad.
@Z
Remember WABX and WKNR. FM before the suits took over…
http://atdetroit.net/forum/messages/76017/88737.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WABX
rudi:
As I a little or a lot older than you, I spent late nights as a teenager listing to Joey Sherman on 50,000-watt giant WKBW in Buffalo, New York from my bedroom in Delaware. This is well before FM had any impact.
When FM eventually had impact it was because a few stations were playing music well out of the mainstream. Like Pink Floyd and Joni Mitchell and Jackson Brown and Little Feat. For me they were WDAS and WMMR in Philadelphia and WNEW in New York City when I visited friends in North Jersey.
Today webstreaming has changed the equation. I have little interest in downloading iTunes because I still love the good FM music radio. We webstream a dozen or so stations from across the country and as I write this I am listening to KJZ, a jazz station in Long Beach, California, which is 3,100 miles from my computer.
It sometimes gets a little confusing. We were experiencing a snow squall white-out one day last weekend and the KJZ announcer was extolling the wonderfulness of a sunny 80-degree day.
SM
Not so much older. I grew up in Detroit and listened to AM from around the area, which included CKLW in Windsor.
I even remember The 5th Estate newspaper…
i spelled skynerd wrong. I dont know how to spell it, but his music is blood. Also, we had Dick Biondi out of WLS chi-town, and also the inimitable Wolfman. “this song goes out to…”. Man it was a time
I forgot, dr. soul broadcasting from where I do not know… and the famous “soul injection” with screaming in the background, and then the radio stations in tenn and ark and ky that would come buzzing in at night playing down home blues