After the sublime excess of his two takes on William Blake, with Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience, David Axelrod went bonkers and issued the single weirdest record of his career that stands pretty much unparalleled more than 30 years later. Earth Rot is in effect a cantata for the planet, or, in Axe’s own words, “contemporary music with ancient yet timely words set to the theme of ecology.” Those ancient yet timely words come from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible and a Navajo legend called “Song of the Earth Spirit.” There’s a nine-piece choir singing these texts, accompanied by a 15-piece orchestra that includes Ernie Watts, Earl Palmer, Willie Green, and Jack Kelso. Capitol’s Studio B must have been humming with the mojo for these dates.

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Surface, Surface (Columbia, 1986). Three years after releasing the heavenly midtempo boogie track “Falling in Love” on Salsoul, Surface signed to Columbia and released their first album, a Lover’s Lane paradise populated by aching, delicately durable ballads — “Happy” being the absolute hottest. Few of the ten tracks cannot be classified as slow or slowish, including the decent late-period electro of “You’re Fine” and “Lady Wants a Man,” as well as the faintly “Falling in Love”-echoing “Feels So Good.” Otherwise, it’s slow grinding and gentle pleading, none of which is overly dramatic — not by mid-’80s R&B standards, at least. Between this and the first Keith Sweat, modern songwriters and producers aiming to make steamy, electronically-enhanced slow jams have several ideas just waiting to be lifted. (Out of print.)

• Happy
• Let’s Try Again

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Despite what you might think from the title of this post, we are not poking fun at Randy “The Emperor” Jackson’s look 20 years ago, back when the American Idol judge played with Journey and was Narada Michael Walden’s right-hand man. The post is not a salute to his weight loss, either, as commendable as it is. This being the week Randy Jackson’s Music Club, Vol. 1 hits the shelves of record stores and other retailers, we instead acknowledge Jackson’s 30 years in the business with a semi-arbitrary timeline of his activities as a bass player, songwriter, producer, and A&R man. (The dawg of all dawgs has sometimes been credited with “inspiration,” too.) Jackson’s success is as much about range as it is longevity, from being a top-flight fusion and R&B session bassist — you thought it was Louis Johnson or Bernard Edwards on those Billy Cobham and Stacy Lattisaw records? — to accumulating enough clout to get — or maybe even convince — Anthony Hamilton and John Rich to do a Michael Bublé song.

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The truly legendary producer, arranger, and composer Teo Macero passed away February 19, at the age of 82. There have been dozens of obits; our own bio outlines his amazing contribution to music both popular and marginal for the latter half of the 20th century. And while he is best known as the Columbia staff producer behind Miles Davis’s seminal recordings Kind Of Blue, Sketches Of Spain, In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, and On the Corner (and dozens of others since he worked with Davis until he left the label 1982), he did much more; he worked with artists as divergent as Carmen McRae and the Lounge Lizards, Charles Mingus and Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and the Clancy Brothers, Duke Ellington and Michael Blake, actor James Whittemore and Charlie Byrd. Macero was a visionary as both a producer and editor and his entire legacy has been well documented. What follows below is the indisputable evidence of Macero’s genius. It documents a single year in his career: 1959, when he made his indelible mark on jazz. During it he produced some of the most enduring recordings of all time—and, if it matters, three of the best-selling as well. They are presented not simply as indisputable proof of his true artistry but as a deep appreciation for what he left us. If Macero had not gone on to work with so many others over the course of his long career, and simply quit after 1959, he would have gone down in cultural history books regardless. Thank you Teo.

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.

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The Brits Go to Town

England’s obsession with jazz began in 1919, the day the Original Dixieland Jazz Band came to roost in London. The group remained there for over a year, and their success led to a flood of American groups into the U.K., so much so that the crown banned their presence on the island after 1924. Exceptions were made only for Paul Whiteman, who played there in 1926, and Louis Armstrong, who played there in 1932; the ban was finally rescinded for Duke Ellington, who arrived in 1933. Ellington’s impact on British musicians was enormous and long lasting; long after he’d abandoned the whole cause of “tone parallel” Black, Brown, and Beige, a team of British arrangers attempted to reconstruct a practical score of the lost work in the early 1970s. Even before the Duke’s records began to arrive upon England’s shores, however, Britain’s composers were incorporating the sounds of jazz into their works. The earliest to try, it appears, was a very well-known composer noted for a more genteel approach than that of the jazz hybrid.

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