Hear 508 Hours of Songs Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder (1924–2016), the Engineer Who Created the Sound of Modern Jazz

in Jazz, Music | August 31st, 2016

The art of audio engineering is mostly a dark one, an alchemy performed behind closed studio doors by people who speak a technical language most of us don’t recognize. That is until recently. Musicians amateur and professional have had to get behind the controls themselves and learn how to record their own music, a function of decimated studio budgets and easily available digital versions of once rarified and prohibitively expensive analog equipment. As with all technological developments that put more control into the hands of laypeople, the results are mixed: a proliferation of quirky, interesting, homemade music, yes, and artists with total control over their production methods and the means to release their music when and how they please…

But with the democratization of recording technology, I fear we may begin to forget what really great, really expensive, audio engineering sounds like, an unheard-of consideration in the fifties and sixties, when the process may as well have been magic to most record buyers, and when engineer Rudy Van Gelder recorded some of the greatest—and best sounding—jazz albums ever made. A Love Supreme? That was Van Gelder. Also Miles Davis’ Walkin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, Horace Silver’s Song for My Father… Dexter Gordon, Donald Byrd, Wayne Shorter, Art Blakey…. You’re getting the idea. “Thelonious Monk composed a tribute to Van Gelder’s home studio,” writes The Guardian, and “recorded it there in 1954.”

What made Van Gelder’s albums so amazing, his skills so in-demand? Hear for yourself, in the incredible playlist below featuring 508 hours of music recorded by the man. (Need Spotify? Download it here.) We can also let the engineer—who died at his New Jersey home and studio at 91 last Thursday—tell us himself in rare interviews, and demystify some of the intrinsic properties of the recording process. “When people talk about my albums,” Van Gelder said, “they often say the music has ‘space.’ I tried to reproduce a sense of space in the overall sound picture.” His use of “specific microphones” located around the room to create “a sensation of dimension and depth” show us that recording isn’t simply reproducing the sound of the instruments and players, but of the space around them, which is why studio owners spend millions to build acoustically treated rooms.

But for all his professionalism and pioneering use of top equipment like German-made Neumann microphones, we should note that Van Gelder got his start, and did some of his best work, in his bedroom, so to speak. The fastidious recording engineer, who wore gloves while recording and dressed like a corporate accountant, actually worked as an optometrist by day for over a decade, making records, The New York Times writes, “out of a studio in his parents’ living room in Hackensack, N.J. Not until 1959—by which time he had already engineered some of the most celebrated recordings in jazz history—could he afford to make engineering his full-time occupation.”

That same studio in Van Gelder’s parents’ living room is the one to which Monk paid homage in ’54. Not only that, but like many of today’s self-taught home engineers, Van Gelder “was involved in every aspect of making records, from preparation to mastering.” Which goes to show, perhaps, that maybe great engineering, like great musicianship, isn’t about access to expensive gear or highly specialized training. Maybe it’s about something else. Van Gelder “had the final say in what the records sounded like, and he was, in the view of countless producers and listeners, better at that than anyone.” How? Aside from vague talk of “space” and “dimension,” writes Tape Op, Van Gelder “never discussed his techniques,” even in an interview with the respected recording magazine. Maybe there really was a kind of magic involved.

Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Classic Jazz Videos (and Much More)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hear the One Night Sun Ra & John Cage Played Together in Concert (1986)

in Jazz, Music | August 25th, 2016

It’s hard to imagine two figures more representative of two disparate directions experimental music took in the 20th century than John Cage and Sun Ra. Cage’s aleatory arrangements and instruments improvised from radios and TV sets left much to the discretion of the performer. And yet, oddly, he didn’t think much of improvisatory music, writing in his 1961 book Silence that he considered jazz “rather silly” and “unsuited,” notes Seth Colter Walls at Pitchfork, “for ‘serious’ contexts.”

Sun Ra, on the other hand, while a master improviser, left little to chance. He embraced the role of bandleader of his Arkestra with unique vigor, “completely obsessed with precision and discipline.” Cage preferred the plain-spoken, unspoken, and wordless. Ra delivered rococo treatises onstage, dressed in glittering capes and headdresses. How the two would, or could, come together may seem a mystery, but come together they did, for a one-time concert event at a Coney Island freak show.

The resulting album is “one of the most sought after records in either discography,” writes The Vinyl Factory in an announcement of the full performance’s recent release by label Modern Harmonic. Fans can finally purchase that double LP, or listen to the live recording for free below. (If you need Spotify’s software, download it here.) Though it may seem like a bit of a novelty, “the album gradually emerges as something greater than a footnote,” Walls writes, “despite the arms-length embrace, the overall concert has a surprisingly seamless quality.”

Cage’s contributions consist mainly of wordless vocalizations and poignant silences. Ra recites poetry and unleashes solo after solo on his Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, blending “sci-fi movie tones” with “sprightly figures” and “dense chords and drones.” The album’s trailer at the top of the post offers some rare black and white footage of the occasion, which briefly included a couple of additional artists–Arkestra saxophonist Marshall Allen and singer June Tyson. (Tyson’s intentionally strained performance “is beset by amplification problems,” Walls warns, “though the noise-damaged result works, in context.”

Throughout the one-off meeting, Ra and Cage trade solos, each respectfully yielding the stage to the other in turn. While this setup highlights the two giants’ profoundly different approaches to making–and conceiving of–music, Sun Ra’s “ability to meet Cage more than halfway… helps hold the entire gig together,” writes Walls. One of the few tracks on which the two collaborate directly, “Silent Duet,” is, well, exactly that. Since we cannot see the performance, we have to imagine the two of them, sitting side-by-side in silence, as the audience seems to all but hold its breath.

The odd thump of a foot against the mic stand aside, the recording documents almost total dead air. Then this gives way to Cage’s cryptic mumbling and Ra’s restrained keyboard taps in “Empty Words and Keyboard.” The effect is electric, the moment sacred, and the collaboration, though fleeting, reveals itself as genuinely inspired, not only for its careful play of contrasting avant-gardism’s against each other but for the extraordinary instances in which Afrofuturist free jazz and Fluxus minimalism find accord.

Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Mental Hospital; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive

The Curious Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Composition 4’33”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Jazz-Loving Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany

in History, Jazz | July 5th, 2016

Nearly every Western youth subculture in existence eventually gets its own Hollywood film. Like most such films, 1993’s Swing Kids—which tells the story of jazz-loving German youth during the rise of the Third Reich—managed to be both inaccurate and critically reviled. Roger Ebert hated the film’s celebration of “a very small footnote to a very large historical event,” and compared the Swing Kids to “Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.” Ebert’s reaction is uncharacteristic of him; he writes critically of the film, but he also seemed to find its subject—the kids themselves—repellant.

The review prompts us to ask: Were these kids—dubbed Swingjugend by the Nazis—participating in a revolutionary act of cultural resistance, or were they no more than typical, naive teenagers who preferred to “listen to big bands than enlist in the military”? (After all, writes Ebert, “who wouldn’t?”) But the question about the Swing Kids’ political motivations may be less relevant than one about whether their pursuit of a carefree, jazz-scored lifestyle under Nazism constitutes a “small footnote” in history. Should we know and care about the Swing Kids, and if so, why?

A German site called Swingstyle compiles information about the subculture and admits that “the real Swing Kids were politically unsophisticated.” Despite being seen as a “youth problem” by Nazi authorities, they “actually cared little for contesting official policies toward Jews or other matters. They just wanted to have fun at a dark time in their country’s history, and avoid the war if possible.” Or, rather, most of them wanted to avoid joining the Hitler Youth, mandated for all young people in 1939: “We must remember the age of most swing kids was between 12 and 16 or 17.”

But as you can see in the short documentary clip at the top, the Swing Kids’ resistance to the by-now familiarly disturbing, paramilitary regimentation of German young people (see above), was in its way a radical act. “Their casual, fun-loving attitude made a mockery of Nazi control,” the documentary narrator says. They embraced what was “considered ‘degenerate music’ by Nazi ideology,” writes MessyNChic, “because it was often performed by black and Jewish musicians and promoted free love.”

We cannot assume the Swing Kids’ love of the music extended to a love for the people who made it. It’s more so the case that the Swing Kids “admired the British and American way of life,” and the free-spiritedness universally represented at the time by jazz in American and British films and records, to which German youth had some limited access. But in their battle for “self-determination and freedom,” informal groups like the Edelweiss Pirates, the Traveling Dudes, and the Navajos resisted subordination into a homogenized Aryan mass—the mechanism by which Hitler turned ordinary Germans into loyal abettors of mass murder.

Through fashion and music, the Swing Kid clubs—like the rockers or punks of the U.S. and U.K. in later decades—formed in conscious resistance to social and political conformity. The Navajos wrote the following song, for example:

Hitler’s dictates make us small,
we’re yet bound in chains.
But one day we’ll again walk tall,
no chain can us restrain.
For hard are our fists,
Yes! And knives at our wrists,
for youth to be free,
Navajos lay siege.

The references to violence weren’t purely symbolic. Swing Kid gangs fought Hitler Youth in the streets. Some Swing Kids, writes MessyNChic, became known for “tagging public walls with anti-Nazi slogans like ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Medals for Murder!’. Throwing bricks through windows and sabotaging cars of Nazi officials… raiding military bases… derailing trains… even planning to blow up the Gestapo HQ in Cologne.” And as the educational site Music and the Holocaust documents, the Gestapo fought back “with special cruelty” against Swing Boys and Swing Girls.

In Hamburg, Swing Kids “had to endure discriminating interrogations, torture and detention.” They landed in youth concentration camps, and adult and Jewish “swing members… were deported” to death camps in Bergen-Belson, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and elsewhere. MessyNChic claims that “a file compiled by the Gestapo is said to have contained more than 3,000 names [of Swing Kids] already by the end of the 1930’s in Cologne alone. In terms of numbers, that would mean these youths represented a much larger resistance potential than any other opposition group in Germany made up by adults.”

Again, none of this organized resistance constituted an explicit political program. “The Swing Kids themselves never intended to have any political effects,” writes Swingstyle, “they did not understand politics” and “they turned their backs on the reality around them: the Jewish roundups, the death camps and the steady stream of manpower reserves disappearing into the cauldrons of Russia and France.” Swing was a means of escapism and identification with the more relaxed, permissive “paradises” of America and Britain.

Like teenagers living under any regime, Swing Kids were mainly motivated by sex and the search for a good time. But perhaps the anarchic strength of their most primal instincts made these young people some of the most effective resistance fighters against the Nazi obsession with purity and order. Their lives—choreographed to the tunes of Count Basie and Benny Goodman—were “in complete opposition to the perceived National Socialist concept of youth,” concludes Swingstyle: “To the extent that the Swing Kids assumed American ideals of personal freedom, relaxed living, and appreciation of the ‘lower races’… they were a grave threat to the upside-down philosophy of Nazism that sought to insulate Germany from the rest of the world.”

Their embrace of an international, racially-mixed culture—jazz—was itself a radical political act in Nazi Germany, even if they had no theoretical concepts of what that embrace meant for the future of their country. And their violent rejection of the Hitler Youth makes them even more compelling. It seems to me that the Swing Kids do indeed deserve a celebratory place in history—and maybe they deserve a better film as well.

The Nazis’ 10 Control-Freak Rules for Jazz Performers: A Strange List from World War II

Watch Lambeth Walk—Nazi Style: The Early Propaganda Mash Up That Enraged Joseph Goebbels

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A 103-Year-Old Harlem Renaissance Dancer Sees Herself on Film for the First Time & Becomes an Internet Star

in Dance, Jazz, Life, Music | November 13th, 2015

The Harlem Renaissance lives in the form of Alice Barker, a soft spoken lady who just last week received a belated Happy 103rd Birthday card from the Obamas.

That’s her on the right in the first clip, below. She’s in the back right at the 2:07 mark. Perched on a lunch counter stool, showing off her shapely stems at 9:32.

Barker’s newfound celebrity is an unexpected reward for one who was never a marquee name.

She was a member of the chorus—a pretty, talented, hardworking young lady, whose name was misspelled on one of the occasions when she was credited. She danced throughout the 1930s and 40s in legendary Harlem venues like the Apollo, the Cotton Club, and the Zanzibar Club. Shared the stage with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Racked up a number of film, commercial and TV credits, getting paid to do something she later confided from a nursing home bed she would have gladly done for free.

Barker’s chorus girl days had been mothballed for decades when she crossed paths with video editor David Shuff, a volunteer visitor to the nursing home where she lives. Shuff seems to be a kindred spirit to the writer David Greenberger, whose Duplex Planet zines—and later books, comics, and performances—captured the stories (and personalities) of the elderly residents of a Boston nursing home where he served as activities director.

Intrigued by glimmers of Barker’s glamorous past, Shuff joined forces with recreational therapist Gail Campbell, to see if they could truffle up any evidence. Barker herself had lost all of the photos and memorabilia that would have backed up her claims.

Eventually, their search led them to historians Alicia Thompson and Mark Cantor, who were able to identify Barker strutting her stuff in a handful of extant 1940s jukebox shorts, aka “soundies.”

Though Barker had caught herself in a couple of commercials, she had never seen any of her soundie performances. A friend of Shuff’s serendipitously decided to record her reaction to her first private screening on Shuff’s iPad. The video went viral as soon as it hit the Internet, and suddenly, Barker was a star.

The loveliest aspect of her late-in-life celebrity is an abundance of old fashioned fan mail, flowers and artwork. She also received a Jimmie Lunceford Legacy Award for excellence in music and music education.

Fame is heady, but seems not to have gone to Barker’s, as evidenced by a remark she made to Shuff a couple of months after she blew up the Internet, “I got jobs because I had great legs, but also, I knew how to wink.”

Shuff maintains a website for fans who want to stay abreast of Alice Barker. You can also write her at the address below:

Alice Barker
c/o Brooklyn Gardens
835 Herkimer Street
Brooklyn, NY11233

Cab Calloway’s “Hepster Dictionary,” A 1939 Glossary of the Lingo (the “Jive”) of the Harlem Renaissance

A 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cotton Club to the Savoy Ballroom

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is running through November 20 in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Psychiatric Hospital; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

in Health, Jazz, Music | September 11th, 2015

For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, I tend to think the state of a creative individual’s mental health is a topic best left between patient and doctor.

In the case of one Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra—composer, bandleader of free jazz ensemble the Arkestra, and “embodiment of Afrofuturism”—one finds it tempting to speculate about possible diagnoses, of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example. Plenty of people have done so. This makes sense, given Blount’s claims to have visited other planets through astral projection and to himself be an alien from another dimension. But ascribing Sun Ra’s enlightening, enlivening mytho-theo-philosophy to illness or dysfunction truly does his brilliant mind a disservice, and clouds our appreciation for his completely original body of work.

In fact, Sun Ra himself discovered—fairly early in his career when he went by the name “Sonny”—that his music could perhaps alleviate the suffering of mental illness and help bring patients back in touch with reality. In the late 50’s, the pianist and composer’s manager, Alton Abraham, booked his client at a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Sun Ra biographer John Szwed tells the story:

Abraham had an early interest in alternative medicine, having read about scalpel-free surgery in the Philippines and Brazil. The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sonny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music.

Sun Ra had his faith in this endeavor rewarded by the response of some of the patients. “While he was playing,” Szwed writes, “a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out ‘Do you call that music?’” Blount—just coming into his own as an original artist—was “delighted with her response, and told the story for years afterwards as evidence of the healing powers of music.” He also composed the song above, “Advice for Medics,” which commemorates the mental hospital gig.

It is surely an event worth remembering for how it encapsulates so many of the responses to Sun Ra’s music, which can—yes—confuse, irritate, and bewilder unsuspecting listeners. Likely still inspired by the experience, Sun Ra recorded an album in the early sixties titled Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, a collection of songs, writes Allmusic, that “outraged those in the jazz community who thought Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane had already taken things too far.” (Hear the track “And Otherness” above.) But those willing to listen to what Sun Ra was laying down often found themselves roused from a debilitating complacency about what music can be and do.

Hear Sun Ra’s 1971 UC Berkeley Lecture “The Power of Words”

A Sun Ra Christmas: Hear His 1976 Radio Broadcast of Poetry and Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Ralph Steadman’s Evolving Album Cover Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zappa & Slash (1956–2010)

in Art, Design, Jazz, Music | August 4th, 2015

Ralph Steadman will always best be known—and for good reason—as the visual interpreter of Hunter S. Thompson’s druggy gonzo vision of American excess and hubris. As Colin Marshall wrote in a previous post on Steadman and Thompson’s powerful collaborative relationship, it’s hard to imagine a more “suitable visual accompaniment to the simultaneously clear- and wild-eyed sensibility of Thompsonian prose.” But the British artist has had a long and distinguished career, pre- and post-Thompson: illustrating Lewis Carroll’s surrealist classic Alice in Wonderland; creating limited edition DVD covers for the dark cult hit TV show Breaking Bad; making bullet-riddled collage art with counterculture hero William S. Burroughs…. To name just a few of his offbeat assignments over the years.

Today we bring you a lesser-known facet of Steadman’s work: designing album covers. As artist and illustrator John Coulthart notes in a post on Steadman’s album designs, he’s been at it since the mid-fifties, when—for example—he illustrated a release of Conception (top), “an underappreciated masterpiece of cerebral cool jazz” featuring the likes of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Sonny Rollins. Steadman’s abstract expressionist-inspired jazz covers soon gave way to more Steadmanesque, though still relatively tame, covers like that above for The Who’s single “Happy Jack”/“I’ve Been Away” from 1966.

It’s not until the 70s, however—after he’d begun his collaboration with Thompson—that his album covers begin to take on the decidedly crazed look his work is known for, such as in the cover for Paul Brett’s Phoenix Future, above, from 1975.

By 1997, Steadman seems to have perfected his inimitable riot of grotesque imagery, wild color palette, and unhinged black lines and lettering, as in the cover for Closed On Account Of Rabies: Poems And Tales Of Edgar Allan Poe, a compilation of Poe readings by stars like Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Jeff Buckley, and Abel Ferrara, which we’ve featured on OC before. The artists represented here are—as in his work with Thompson and Burroughs—perfectly fitting for Steadman’s sensibility. So, of course, is the clean-living but otherwise totally bonkers Frank Zappa, whose 1997 Have I Offended Someone? received the Steadman treatment, as you can see below.

In the past few years, Steadman has mellowed a bit, if you could call it that, and his work has taken on a slightly more refined character. His Breaking Bad illustrations seem restrained by the standards of his work with Thompson or Zappa. And in a 2010 cover for Slash’s first official single, “By the Sword,” below, he reigns in some of his wilder graphic impulses while retaining all of the stylist signatures he developed over the decades.

Steadman has always been a one-of-a-kind illustrator. In his album cover design, we can perhaps best watch his work evolve. As Coulthart writes, “the style of the early sleeves is markedly different to the angry, splattery creations that made his name, and without a signature you’d be unlikely to recognise the artist.” See many more Steadman album covers over at Coulthart’s excellent blog.

via Feuilleton

See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary

Gun Nut William S. Burroughs & Gonzo Illustrator Ralph Steadman Make Polaroid Portraits Together

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Radiohead’s “Creep” Performed in a Vintage Jazz-Age Style

in Jazz, Music | July 28th, 2015

Smashing Pumpkins’ leader—and sole remaining original member—Billy Corgan is a man of many opinions, most of which I find easy to ignore. But in one of his recent made-for-headlines quotes, he referred to fellow nineties alt-rock superstars Radiohead as “the last band that did anything new with the guitar.” It is, of course, impossible to quantify this not-especially controversial statement, but I haven’t found it easy to dismiss either. After Radiohead’s first three albums, we had maybe a solid decade of musicians looking back to a time before electric guitars to find an alternate path forward (as Radiohead themselves largely traded guitars for synthesizers). That said, in the years since Pablo Honey, The Bends, and OK Computer, Thom Yorke and band’s breakout song, “Creep,” has successfully translated to so many unplugged arrangements that they deserve credit for writing a universally beloved new standard as well as reinventing rock guitar—even if they’d prefer we all forget their first, angst-ridden hit.

There’s Mexican actor Diego Luna’s powerful rendition, as the animated troubadour Manolo in Jorge Gutierrez’s Book of Life. There’s Tori Amos’ characteristically intense, live voice and piano version; there’s Amanda Palmer on ukulele, Damien Rice on acoustic guitar, and Korn—believe it or not—in a very tasteful acoustic cover. Now we can add to these the bring-down-the-house swing arrangement at the top of the post, with jazz singer Haley Reinhart, who slides from playful vamp to an almost gospel crescendo, and all, we’re told, on a first take. This jazz-age cover comes to us from pianist Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, a touring collection of ensemble musicians that Bradlee assembles to re-interpret famous pop songs. He previously recorded a sweet, classic soul cover of “Creep” with Karen Marie, above. The list of other Postmodern Jukebox covers ranges from a “Sad Clown with a Golden Voice” version of Lorde’s “Royals” to a klezmer take on Jason Derulo’s club anthem “Talk Dirty” (with the song’s 2 Chainz rap in Yiddish). We previously featured a New Orleans jazz rendition of “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” with stage actress and singer Miche Braden. As Ayun Halliday wrote of the Guns n’ Roses’ reimagining, the Radiohead covers above are “not without gimmick, but it’s a winning one.”

Patti Smith’s Passionate Covers of Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana, Jefferson Airplane & Prince

Listen to a New Album Featuring Tom Waits Songs in Hebrew (2013)

Hear 38 Versions of “September Song,” from James Brown, Lou Reed, Sarah Vaughan and Others

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Miles Davis Covers Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (1983)

in Jazz, Music | July 27th, 2015

What happens when the Prince of Darkness covers the King of Pop?

Miles Davis’ decision to record a studio version of Michael Jackson’s 1983 hit, “Human Nature,” caused Al Foster, his friend and drummer, to walk out mid-session, thus putting an end to their longtime collaboration. Davis chalked it up to Foster’s unwillingness to “play that funky backbeat,” and brought in his nephew, Vince Wilburn, Jr., to finish the job.

Foster must’ve really hated that song.

Say what you will, “Human Nature” is–like most Jackson hits–an ear worm.

Depending on who you talk to, Davis’ studio track, above, is a either a straightforward homage in which his horn recreates “Jackson’s breathy intimacy” or “flat, schmaltzy elevator music.”

People’s feelings for it tend to echo their response to Jackson’s original, to which Davis cleaved pretty closely.

“Human Nature” was written by Toto’s keyboardist Steve Porcaro, the son of a jazz musician who idolized Davis. He was understandably honored that his dad’s hero chose to cover his work along with Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time,” on 1985’s You’re Under Arrest, one of the prolific artist’s final albums.

Davis’ association no doubt contributes to the tune’s ongoing popularity. Those who want to compare and contrast, can take their pick of reggae, hip-hop, electronica and funked up New Orleans brass versions.

But back to “Human Nature” as rendered by Miles Davis. Most critics prefer the live version, below, captured July 7, 1988, at Montreux. Slate’s Fred Kaplan described it as “an upbeat rouser” through which Davis “prances.”

As Davis himself explained in a 1985 interview with Richard Cook:

On a song like “Human Nature,” you have to play the right thing. And the right thing is around the melody. I learned that stuff from Coleman Hawkins. Coleman could play a melody, get ad-libs, run the chords – and you still heard the melody. I play “Human Nature,” varies every night. After I play the melody, that tag on the end is mine to have fun with. It’s in another key … uh, D natural. Move up a step or so to F natural. Then you can play it any way you want to.

Another remark from the same interview proved prescient:

You don’t have to do like Wynton Marsalis and play “Stardust “and that shit… Why can’t “Human Nature” be a standard? It fits. A standard fits like a thoroughbred. The melody and everything is just right, and every time you hear it you want to hear it some more. And you leave enough of it to know what you want to hear again. When you hear it again, the same feeling comes over you.

Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and “That Sorry-Ass Cat” Steve Miller at The Fillmore East (1970)

Watch Miles Davis Improvise Music for Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear 508 Hours of Songs Recorded by Rudy Van Gelder (1924–2016), the Engineer Who Created the Sound of Modern Jazz

Hear the One Night Sun Ra & John Cage Played Together in Concert (1986)

How Jazz-Loving Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany

A 103-Year-Old Harlem Renaissance Dancer Sees Herself on Film for the First Time & Becomes an Internet Star

Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Psychiatric Hospital; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

Ralph Steadman’s Evolving Album Cover Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zappa & Slash (1956–2010)

Radiohead’s “Creep” Performed in a Vintage Jazz-Age Style

Miles Davis Covers Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (1983)

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