Brant was an exceptionally hard working composer whose compositions could involve hundreds of musicians. For example, Autumn Hurricanes (1986) calls for eight string groups, six string soloists, a wind group in threes (though including five horns), four percussionists (including three steel pans), two pianos with four players, organ, a full jazz band, a separate group of seven brass with its own drum kit, chorus, soloists and five conductors. By its very nature, Brant’s work led to combinations never before heard in music.

Brant earned nearly every accolade an American composer could hope to accumulate, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his work Ice Field. When interviewed for a Classical Corner feature in 2005, Brant evinced a sort of bitterness about the lukewarm reception his music accorded him in many circumstances; sometimes he broke out into a Bob Dole-like tirade where he spoke of himself in the third person: “So we have Henry Brant –- who is this Brant? Is he any good and why should I like him?” No matter how eccentric and crazy his detractors may have thought he was (and many of them were in the very academic circles where he plied his trade) Spatial Music is a significant development that has been adopted widely in Europe, from Karlheinz Stockhausen right on down the line. Brant also forged a living link to a musical past that seemed almost unthinkably remote: he attended the premiere of Colin McPhee’s Concerto for piano and eight winds in 1928, took composition lessons from George Antheil, and made arrangements at CBS Radio when figures like Bernard Herrmann and Raymond Scott were also working there. However, Brant tended to foil most attempts to take him down memory lane; he was always more focused on the present. When last interviewed, he was interested in getting a recording out of his orchestration of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, which ultimately did appear in Innova’s excellent series The Henry Brant Collection. This series helped to open the door to the public to a great deal of Brant’s work, as very few recordings of his music appeared during the better part of his life.

Below are a few choice samples from Brant’s work and a link to the Classical Corner interview from April, 2006. Henry Brant was a true American maverick, and though it might be awhile still before his work is considered mainstream, if it indeed ever attains that status, it represents a visionary statement with an audience — out there, somewhere in the future.

Classical Corner Interview

The New York Flute Club - Brant: Angels and Devils (1931)
Music for a Five and Dime Store (1932)
Brant: Meteor Farm (1981)
Brant: Autumn Hurricanes (1986)
Brant: Homeless People (1997)
Brant: “Thoreau” from A Concord Symphony after Charles Ives (1958-1996)

Davis had two big hits in 1982 with the gorgeous “Cool Night” and the irrepressibly goofy “‘65 Love Affair” (whose doo-wop pastiche didn’t quite match the year Paul celebrated in the title, but when it comes to nostalgia, who really nitpicks?). The ’80s surely weren’t his decade; the ’70s were, and his career had the trajectory of so many singer/songwriters from that decade. He began in the country-rock circuit, where he was discovered by the legendary Bert Berns, who signed him to Bang as a solo act. He scored his first big hit in 1974 with “Ride ‘Em Cowboy.” Despite the title, the song didn’t feel country. It was gentle and hazy, a soft-rock song through and through, and it helped set the stage for his defining hit, “I Go Crazy,” a sweet lovelorn ballad that entered the charts in August of 1977 and stayed there for a record-shattering 40 weeks (a feat unheard of at the time). With its analog synthesizers, lush harmonies and shimmering surface, “I Go Crazy” effortlessly evokes the late ’70s, which is a large part of its charm, but it’s not an artifact of its time, it’s an emblem of its era, one of the best arguments for all the glories of soft rock. It not only had the sound and feel, but it had a gently insinuating melody delivered unhurriedly by Davis, who managed to croon without getting corny. He cut a handful of singles as strong as “I Go Crazy”: there’s the aforementioned “Cool Night,” but also 1978’s “Sweet Life” and 1980’s “Do Right,” three songs that were equally as soft and soothing as his career-making hit, songs that rank among the best of his genre.

Soft rock started to fade in the early ’80s, one of the many casualties of the shifting fashions of the MTV era. After all, bearded singers did not make stylish videos — if they made them at all, that is — and soft rock turned icy and cold due to the increase of synthesizers. As the sounds shifted, Davis faded into the background, turning first to contemporary country-pop (where such soft, hazy surfaces survived until the late ’80s), but after 1988, he no longer actively recorded, easing into a retirement in his native Mississippi. From all reports he had a low-key retirement that fit his music, and although he wasn’t recording, those songs lived on, as they will continue to do now that he’s gone.

“Ride ‘Em Cowboy”
“I Go Crazy”
“Cool Night”
“Sweet Life”
“Do Right”

“Show and Tell” is not on this disc — for that and his other ’70s singles, turn to Fuel 2000’s 2004 set Show & Telll: The Best of Al Wilson — but its absence is in a way a blessing, as it forces focus on Wilson’s depth as a singer and how these recordings are quite unlike a lot of soul of the time. Part of the reason for that is the presence of Johnny Rivers, the LA blue-eyed soul singer who signed Wilson to his own Soul City imprint and produced Searching for the Dolphins, encouraging Wilson to pursue a lush sound that encompassed mellow Californian pop, folk, jazz, rock & roll, and soul, something that was sonically closer to what Rivers was cutting at the time, but hardly a pop sellout. After all, one of the highlights here is Wilson’s first single (and only UK hit), a hip, swinging version of Oscar Brown Jr.’s “The Snake,” a groovy dance number that deservedly became a Northern Soul staple; it’s not the only funky moment here, as it has a rival in a version of Holland/Dozier/Holland’s “Shake Me Wake Me (When It’s Over).” Also on this album is a slow-burning, late-night reading of Jerry Butler/William Butler/Curtis Mayfield’s “I Stand Accused” and the terrific “Who Could Be Lovin’ You (Other Than Me),” an early Willie Hutch song that strikes a precise balance between the aforementioned funky moments and the luxurious singer/songwriter material that comprises the rest of the record. The title song is an allusion to the Fred Neil ’60s standard “The Dolphins” and Wilson also sings two Jimmy Webb songs (”By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Do What You Gotta Do”) and a pair of Johnny Rivers hits (”Summer Rain,” “Poor Side of Town”), all of which have a smooth, rolling feel as reminiscent of folk-pop as it is as soul. All taken together, Searching for the Dolphins is a unique record, a place where many divergent strands in ’60s pop converge in a way that is perhaps easier to appreciate now than it is then.

As good as this album proper is, the Kent/Ace CD gets really interesting on the bonus tracks, almost all of which are considerably less soft than the LP itself. Sometimes this does mean harder, funkier sides, as on a pair of Willie Hutch tunes from 1967, “When You Love (You’re Loved Too)” and “Now I Know What Love Is.” (Hutch also is responsible for folkier, poppier “Getting’ Ready for Tomorrow, a ‘68 single with nearly baroque harpsichords that’s closer in feel to Searching for the Dolphins than anything else here.) Sometimes, this hardness means that Wilson dips into down-n-dirty rock & roll, as on a phenomenal version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lodi” from 1969 that has a thicker groove than CCR’s original, filled with greasy slide guitars and horns. This isn’t the only time Wilson rocks it hard: he bizarrely replicates Dave Edmunds’ version of “I Hear You Knockin’,” right down to the phased vocals, slide guitars, piano punctuations, and exultations of ’50s rockers in the solo section (funnily enough, he leaves out Smiley Lewis, who had the original hit with this), and even more bizarrely, it works, as Wilson invests this blatant steal with down-home soul A better example of his daring is “Sugar Cane Girl,” a Daniel Cohen song that rocks as hard as CCR, while being funkier. It’s a hell of a song and a lost gem, but it’s also clear why this and “Lodi” didn’t click at the time — they’re fully rock and fully soul, so they didn’t fit comfortably in either format. More of their time was the dirty fuzz funk of “Falling in Love with You” and “Bachelor Man,” a quite wonderful evocation of swinging singledom in the early ’70s thanks to its cascade of strings and harpsichords, all adding up to a loungey vibe scaled toward television. These didn’t sell either, but hearing them next to the driving rock & roll, the jazzy northern soul, the deep soul, and the sun-bleached folk-pop found elsewhere on this disc, it becomes clear that Al Wilson was capable of singing anything; he just didn’t catch the right breaks that would bring him to the top with these singles. Once he did, just a couple years later, he didn’t stay at the top long enough to truly show his versatility. Still, anybody that has now heard of Al Wilson due to his passing should seek this set out, as it proves that he was a superb soul singer who cut music worthy of his talents. The rest of the world is still getting around to realizing just how good this guy was.

Pete Doherty is finally headed to jail. [NME.com]

George Strait tops R.E.M. on the charts, marking his fourth Number One on Billboard’s Top 200. [Billboard.com]

The script for High School Musical 4 is apparently in the process of being written. [BBC]
 
 
Singer Toni Braxton has been hospitalized. [Eonline]

Coldplay puts people to sleep. Well, duh! [Contactmusic]

Born Michael Campbell in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Mikey made the quick ascent from board-op to DJ while working at the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in the late ‘70s. It was there he first presented his Dread at the Controls radio show, becoming a top radio personality in Jamaica and recording #1 singles like “Barber Saloon” in his spare time. In the midst of it all he took the much lower profile gig of audio engineer at the Treasure Isle Recording Studio just to get closer to the music. As amiable as Mikey you could be, you still couldn’t check him with no lightweight stuff and when the programmers at the JBC complained about his rootsy, deep choices, he was out he door and off to Europe with a crate full of sweet rebel music.

Mikey Dread - “Barber Saloon”
Mikey Dread - “Break Down the Walls”

Within a year of landing he had graduated from the National Broadcasting School in London, England and had given the Clash their highest charting single to date when he produced their 1980 single “Bankrobber”. From there it was a steady stream of influential broadcasting gigs, – including host of BBC Television’s revered, six-part reggae documentary Deep Roots – and a new album – always worth hearing — about once a year. He hosted live events across the Caribbean, Europe, and America and collaborated with a long list of artists, mostly reggae-based but with the occasional surprise like Guns ‘N’ Roses’ Izzy Stradlin. The constant was how his uplifting spirit impressed everyone who worked with Mikey, along with those who heard his music and/or radio show. Mikey even contacted AllMusic once to fix some of his credits and he was cordial, friendly, and appreciative, the kind of guy for whom you don’t mind going that extra mile.

The Clash - “Bankrobber”
The Clash - “One More Time”

As of late he had been working on a documentary concerning the Maroon population found in Jamaica and had welcomed the Internet age with open arms, podcasting new Dread at the Controls shows from his impressive website and even offering this amazing flash game where the user can put dread under their own control. The game is amusing and simple – pull a record out of the box, thrown it on the turntable, then drop dub sound effects on top — but it represents how deceptive the seemingly frivolous Mikey could be. Play the game for a bit and it becomes apparent that reggae – the genre where “all the songs sound the same” — is really about feel, groove, and the details. Artists unaware of this fall flat while those who recognize the challenges of this thinner spectrum have a much better chance. Mikey may be “the guy who makes those funny noises” during Clash songs, but his work with the band, along with his radio show, led so many people to reggae he just might take second place behind Bob Marley as far as advocacy. Besides Damian Marley and maybe Shaggy, it’s hard to imagine anyone working the ambassador angle as well as Mikey did. Zylen, your father brought so many people to a deeper appreciation of Jamaican music. While they’ll never feel his loss as deeply as you will, you won’t have to look far to find someone touched by his spirit. Jah Bless.

Mikey Dread - “Roots and Culture”
Mikey Dread - “Positive Reality”

John Adams, London Sinfonietta - Rosenman: “Knife Fight” from Rebel Without a Cause

Born in Brooklyn, Rosenman seemed well on his way to having a conventional career as a modern composer when he met James Dean. He had studied with Roger Sessions and with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles; when Rosenman first encountered Dean he had just completed a master class at Tanglewood with Italian serialist Luigi Dallapiccola. “We met at a party,” Rosenman remembered in 1997. “[Dean] heard me play the piano, and about a month later, my doorbell rings about 11 o’clock at night. I open the door, and here’s a guy I don’t remember all dressed in leather, motorcycle stuff. I said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And he said, ‘I’d like to study piano with you.’” The street-smart, intellectual Brooklyn composer and the soft-spoken and shy but thrill-loving actor from Indiana became unlikely friends, and later shared a flat. Dean convinced director Elia Kazan to use Rosenman on his first assignment, East of Eden, which he only accepted after both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein urged him to. Rosenman’s fears for his classical cachet proved well founded, as according to him, “The year I did my first film, I had five major performances in New York. The minute I did my first film, I didn’t have a performance [in New York] for 20 years. I couldn’t get performances of my works. They would never say, ‘I don’t like them.’ They wouldn’t look at them.”

Rosenman’s résumé reads like a “what’s what” of offbeat film projects: he scored Edge of the City (1957), the film that broke actor/director John Cassavetes, Budd Boetticher’s quirky gangster picture The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), the Oscar-winning avant-garde documentary The Savage Eye (1960), Robert Altman’s first film, the realistic space drama Countdown (1968), the revisionist western A Man Called Horse (1970), gritty war dramas such as Pork Chop Hill (1959), Hell is For Heroes (1962), and the TV show Combat! (1962-1967), not to mention Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of The Lord of the Rings (1978). Rosenman was a “go to guy” when it came to special kinds of film productions, and he never minced words when it came to producers or directors whom he felt had the wrong idea about a scene. His forthrightness in such instances caused Rosenman’s firing from some films, but it was well established in the business early on that when you hired Rosenman, you were getting the best –- and that was enough for many producers in the industry.

The bold experimentalism of Rosenman’s film scoring is easy to recognize divorced from the screen, but his work has the highly desirable quality of invisibility –- no matter how “advanced” his language, the music sinks right into the mood of the picture. This is part of the reason Rosenman’s work was so slow to gain critical recognition, at least in comparison to Alex North or Elmer Bernstein. For all of Rosenman’s achievements and his widely ranging methodology, it is hard to say that in his film work that he ever topped Rebel Without a Cause. It’s an old film now, but doesn’t feel like one, and a large measure of that success is due to the timeless modernism of atonal, jazz-inflected musical score, which sends the tragic events onscreen right to one’s gut. However, Rosenman continued to compose concert works right alongside his film music, which stretched into the 21st century. These remain little known, but titles such as his Dinosaur Symphony (1996) sound intriguing; perhaps if anything of Rosenman is left to exceed the ginormous status of Rebel Without a Cause, it will be found in the concert hall rather than in the screening room.

That visual aspect was exploited, in the best way, in the 1989 cult classic Road House, where he played a sidekick to Patrick Swayze’s leading character Dalton and plays in the house band at the titular road house. Such exposure helped boost Healey’s career, which already had started to take off by ‘89, as his 1988 debut See the Light started to climb the Billboard charts. Undoubtedly, Healey benefited from the album-rock breakthrough of Stevie Ray Vaughan — quite directly so, as he appeared in the video for SRV’s “Look at Little Sister” a couple years before releasing his debut — and he made inroads on rock radio just before his version of John Hiatt’s “Angel Eyes” (one of two Hiatt tunes on See the Light) crossed over into the pop charts, making it all the way to number five in 1989. “Angel Eyes” was big enough of a hit to give Healey a major-label contract for several years, but by the mid-’90s the market for major-label blues-rock started to wane, and so did Jeff’s placement on the Billboard 200, although he did manage to have his 1995 album Cover to Cover top the blues charts.

By that point, Healey himself was less interested in performing mainstream blues-rock and started a slow transition over to the traditional blues and jazz that he loved and collected. Over the next decade, he redefined himself as a musician that kept tradition alive. His 2000 record Get Me Some was the last time he cut an all-out mainstream-oriented blues-rock album — he does have a completed blues album called Mess of Blues scheduled for release this spring — but this decade he spent more time touring with the Jazz Wizards, who played jazz dating prior to World War II, and he hosted a regular jazz radio show on Toronto’s Jazz-FM, playing selected sides from his vast collection of rare 78s. That love of jazz was also heard on record, on the 2002’s Among Friends, ’04’s Adventures in Jazzland, and the live ‘05 album It’s Tight Like That which featured Chris Barber. On these albums, Jeff Healey finally had the opportunity to show his true range as a musician and his deep, infectious love for jazz and blues, standing as perhaps the best testament to his uniqueness as a musician.

Di Stefano’s operatic career was comparatively short, starting in the late 1940s, hitting its stride in the 1950s, and effectively ending in the mid-1960s, but he did continue to sing in public in a limited capacity until the early ’70s. Di Stefano’s voice did not age well, arguably due to his choice to sing heavier dramatic repertoire that wasn’t suited to his essentially lyrical gifts, but in his prime he was one of the finest Italianate voices on the international scene. His 1953 recording of Puccini’s Tosca with Maria Callas in the title role and Victor de Sabata conducting is his most recognizable recording, and it was his continued partnership with Callas that cemented his status as a leading tenor. Ironically, or perhaps just fittingly, appearances with Callas on her farewell tour in 1973-74 — when both singers were suffering severe vocal decline — marked the official end of di Stefano’s public career.

Less well known to casual opera fans are di Stefano’s early recordings, many just with piano, that capture his voice in its youthful prime. He had an innate feel for Neapolitan song, Italian art songs, and arias in French as well as his native language before he gained real fame. Revisiting that time is as good a way as any to celebrate the life, and commemorate the sad death, of a well-loved singer.

Puccini: Tosca — Act One, “Ah, Quegli Occhi…”
Puccini: Tosca — Act Three, “E lucevan le stelle”
Paulo Tosti: L’ultima canzone
Massenet: Werther — “Pourquoi me réveiller”
Bixio: Mamma

Kind Of Blue, the record that bonded Macero and Davis for 20-plus years. They had worked together previously, but this moment changed jazz history and the pair would continue working together until Macero left Columbia in 1982. “So What,” with its striking Paul-Chambers bassline, Bill-Evans arrangement and sparse, chord voicings, Philly Joe-Jones restrained kit work and the nearly hushed front line with Davis, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley in the midst of all that space is arresting from its very first note.

Gil Evans and Miles Davis had worked together on two albums previous to this one, but Sketches Of Spain is undeniably their greatest moment. And while the collaboration between Evans and Davis is rightfully celebrated, Macero was the glue here; his sense of economy, texture, color and space works as a mercurial element that makes this album such a transcendent recording. This period in the careers of all three men would prove a defining one. Here’s a nibble from the album’s second track, Manuel DeFalla’s “Will O’ The Wisp.”

Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um is one of his greatest recordings. His band at the time included Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Daanie Richmond, Horace Parlan, Wille Dennis and Shafi Hadi. Ever the mercurial persona, Mingus sat in the editing room with Macero to make sure his presence was felt. The album is a pillar in his catalog, as is another one they did together in 1959, Mingus Dynasty. The sample provided here is from “Better Git It In Yo’ Soul,” the joyous riot that opens Mingus Ah Um. (The set also includes “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” “Fables Of Faubus,” and “Open Letter To Duke.”)

Macero worked with the great John Hammond, Sr. on Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji’s Drums Of Passion in 1959, one of the most enduring recordings of African drumming and singing ever recorded. It has been almost continually in print since that time, and legend has it that it was Macero who wanted to keep the recording as raw and natural as possible. Here’s a bit from the title track (”Jin-Go-Lo-Ba”).

Incredibly, as if Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain weren’t enough to solidify Macero’s place in the pantheon, he also produced Dave Brubeck’s smash Time Out. Unlike Davis or even the silent but imposing Mingus, Brubeck insisted on total control over every note in the editing process, but Macero’s sonic approach is still evident in the final mix. Two hit singles came from this record:
“Take Five”
and “Blue Rondo a la Turk”

Shockingly, in addition to the aforementioned albums Macero also produced Everybody’s Boppin’, the Columbia Records debut of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. No other vocal group in America would reach the same heights of popularity until the Manhattan Transfer some 20 years later, but this trio did it first and best. Sure they could scat, but that was only about a tenth of what they did; here are a pair of clips:
“Moanin”
“Charleston Alley”