Steve Miller: Born 2B Blue

Every now and then a record emerges from left field that seems to bear little or no relation to what an artist has done before. I can think at once of Linda Ronstadt's delightful trilogy of standards from the Great American Songbook arranged and orchestrated by Nelson Riddle, or Ray Charles' not-so-delightful country & western album that confounded fans and critics alike.

Hardcore fans of Steve Miller might find Born 2B Blue frilly and lightweight in comparison to his classic output. But I don't. Since I took but a passing interest in his career, this album sneaked up behind me and has consistently refreshed the parts that others have failed to reach.

It's now even more refreshing, following a recent guided visit to a cramped Aladdin's record shop in Limoges. The unprepossessing shop front didn't even hint at the lifetime's collection to die for within, with each wall covered by signed copies of LPs by the likes of Little Richard, James Brown, Dr. John, Etta James, Irma Thomas and Van Morrison (who was described by the proprietor, not unsurprisingly, as a 'son of a pig').

There I found a pristine vinyl copy to replace the cassette tape I bought during a claustrophobic work-related exile on Jersey. I've always championed the humble cassette – partly because I spent so many hours in the 80s and 90s making compilations, which still sound mainly good to my ears – but, now that I've invested in a good turntable with a more pricy cartridge, the record is as effervescent as the tape is flat, tired and muffled.

It's not that I didn't like the West Coast version of Steve Miller, who somehow managed to by-pass the conventional hippy trail taken by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, but it was more the individual songs rather than whole albums that made their mark. Classy easy-rocking stuff like 'Living in the USA', 'Quicksilver Girl', 'Space Cowboy', for example, and the spacey 'Children Of The Future'. Moreover, the splendid Boz Scaggs served his apprenticeship in Miller's band.

None of it, though, seemed to suggest the kind of repertoire found on Born 2B Blue. 'Miller's gift,' writes the reviewer in my dog-eared Rolling Stone Album Guide, '    is in making the familiar sound fresh'. As soon as you hear the opening track of the album, you realise just how spot-on this assessment is.

'Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah' was always just a clip in Christmas editions of The Wonderful World of Disney, sung by Uncle Remus in the most politically incorrect of all Disney's oeuvre, Song Of The South. Miller – in the company of co-producer and keyboards player, Ben Sidran, the jazz pianist and perennially literate hipster fashioned from the mould of Mose Allison – transforms the song into the perfect vehicle for his laid back vocals. His dulcet voice throughout, somewhere perhaps between Chet Baker's androgynous melancholia and Mel Tormé's 'velvet fog', is as Sidran describes it 'like a fresh breeze [that] can breathe new life into anything it touches'.

The cover shows Miller in dark suit and tie playing the kind of beautiful chunky jazz guitar that Wes Montgomery might have wielded, and this is primarily – despite songs like Lee Dorsey's 'Ya Ya' and Ray Charles' 'Mary Ann' – a jazz vocal album, with a quartet led by his guitar and augmented by jazz musicians of the calibre of Milt Jackson on vibes, Phil Woods on alto sax and, curiously, Bobby Malach on tenor sax. 'Curiously' because Georgie Fame employs Malach's services on his much later album, A Poet In New York, which in some ways Steve Miller's record most closely resembles.

Both men, for example, choose to include a 'vocalese' version of a Horace Silver number, the piano-playing pioneer of soul-jazz. Steve Miller goes for the spritely 'Filthy McNasty', which is sandwiched between the exquisite title track and a lovely version of Billie Holiday's 'God Bless The Child', which I've often otherwise found a little mawkish.

In fact, just one of the reasons I love this album is the way that he juxtaposes without a single jarring note jauntier numbers – like 'Just A Little Bit' and Lionel Hampton's classic 'Red Top' – with those, like 'Willow Weep For Me' and 'When Sunny Gets Blue', which seem to emerge from a dream sequence in a film.

There's a feeling throughout that this album was a long-cherished project. If so, then for once it exceeds rather than falls short of expectations. A quirky choice of diverse songs, effortless musicianship, nifty no-nonsense production and some of the easiest, most intimate male vocals on record: what is there not to love about Born 2B Blue – other than the clumsy shorthand of the title? But it was 1988, and that kind of thing was all the rage then.

Tamla Motown Presents: 20 Mod Classics Vol.2

If ever a better Motown compilation came out on record, I never discovered one. It's rare that a second volume surpasses a first, but this one just managed it – and knocked the spokes off The Big Wheels of Motown and all those worthy single-volume Motown Chartbusters in the process.

The packaging was fairly horrible – a big circular Union Jack design was supposed to conjure up the so-called Mod revival – but it didn't matter a jot, because it was the stuff in the microgrooves that counted. And my, what stuff! Twenty original mono recordings that still leap out of the speakers and demand that you slide all over the floor like those baggy-trousered Northern soul types you see on documentary clips. Forget all the fancy drops and back-flips, those guys'n'gals knew how to move, as David Bowie put it, 'like tigers on Vaseline'.

It was as seemingly effortless as the marvellous music on this album. I've never quite got the hang of it, but there are moments during these two sides when you find that your limbs are doing exactly what the music demands. This is exactly what 'dance music' means.

And this LP is so good because these 20 tracks are all about dancing, pure and simple. As a youth, I was far too cool to appreciate the endless stream of hits from the factory in Detroit. They all seemed to be churned out for teeny-boppers and performed by groups whose choreographed steps appeared as ludicrous as those of The Shadows. In the mid 60s, I took the side of the scooter and mohair brigade in the great Mods v Rockers debate, but mainly for the look. I had little idea that they were dancing to this kind of music.

But then I turned into a student at a time when disco ruled the world and I discovered that music was as much about dancing as it was about listening. How wrong could one teenager be? Perhaps if Berry Gordy had promoted Martha Reeves & the Vandellas over The Supremes, I might have seen the error of my ways sooner – because Martha and her backing singers were the best 'girl group' bar none. They knocked Diana and the girls into a cocked hat and then stomped all over them in their stiletto heels.

The proof of the pudding is here on side 1. Even if they weren't in the Class A 'Quicksand', 'Dancing In The Street' or 'Heatwave' category (all there on Vol 1, and that's not to mention 'Jimmy Mack'), the three cuts here are irresistible. Three gems from the no-frills team of Holland, Dozier and Holland: 'Come And Get These Memories', 'Nowhere To Run' and the glorious 'In My Lonely Room'.

In fact, Holland, Dozier and Holland contribute nine out of the 20 belters assembled – including, 'Mickey's Monkey', which is somewhat surprising since the Miracles usually performed Smokey Robinson's songs. But it seems tailor-made for them and right up there with 'Going To A Go-Go' as their most urgent of dance-floor anthems.

The 20 classics cover perhaps the three most intense years of Motown creativity, from 1963 to 1965. Only Kim Weston's fantastic 'Helpless' from 1966 – another Holland, Dozier, Holland floor-stomper (and covered rather dexterously by Manhattan Transfer of all groups) – sits just outside the period in question.

We kick off with 'Little Stevie' Wonder's rousing 'Fingertips (Part 2)', which never fails to make me wonder what happened to Part 1 and which suggests young Steveland's brilliance to come. Only two years later, on the second side, 'Uptight (Everything's Alright)' is possibly the finest flowering of the period before talent became genius, before Music Of My Mind and all those other platinum self-productions.

Apart from the three Martha Reeves numbers, Side 1 also offers Mickey's simian dance-craze and Smokey's 'I Like it like That', as well as the Temptations' perfect rendition of one of Smokey's most perfect combinations of melody and memorable rhyming couplets, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do' (' The way you smell so sweet/You should have been a per-fume/The way you knock me off my feet/You know you should have been a broom/' and so on).

And if that weren't enough, there's Jr. Walker's evergreen 'Shotgun' (written by a certain Autry DeWalt, who must have had a room at the back of the back room at Hitsville, USA), Marvin Gaye's 'I'll Be Doggone' and a little-known Smokey-penned gem from Brenda Holloway, 'When I'm Gone'.

Smokey Robinson has a hand in two more production-line hits on the second side, which takes his personal contribution – as singer, songwriter and/or producer – to seven in all: the much underrated Contours' 'First I Look At The Purse' and one of Marvin Gaye's finest moments, 'Ain't That Peculiar'.

Lest original and revived Mods should for one second feel short-changed on flipping the disc over to Side 2, we get right back into the groove with another pair of Holland, Dozier, Holland productions: Diana Ross & The Supremes' 'Back In My Arms Again' and the Four Tops' 'I Can't Help Myself', which Lamont Dozier, who co-wrote of zipping up his boots and going back to his roots for Odyssey, would re-visit on Reflections Of..., a marvellous and surprising collection of personal interpretations of his best-loved Motown classics.

If that's not enough for your 'pedal extremities', the same song-writing trio give us two crackers by Kim Weston and leave us with one of the greatest ever Motown smashes, Jr. Walker & The All Stars' '(I'm A) Road Runner' with its indelible honking tenor sax refrain by the younger Mr. Walker himself.

That just leaves enough room for the Velvelettes' splendid 'Lonely Lonely Girl Am I' and the Mk1 Detroit Spinners' 'I'll Always Love You', which is no 'It's A Shame' but quite acceptable nevertheless. For once, it would take a move away from Motown – to Atlantic – and a new song-writing partnership, of Linda Creed and Thom Bell, to bring the band fortune and fame.

At the time I bought this long player – in an HMV Shop sale – it was all about the singers and the songs. Gradually, with repeated listening and dancing over the years, I've come to focus more and more on the house band that propelled these incredible songs. In particular, of course, that stellar rhythm section of Earl van Dyke on piano, Bennie Benjamin on drums and the sublime James Jamerson on bass.

It took a book by Allan Slutsky (who should have been on their roster of musicians with a name like that) and the 2002 documentary by Paul Justman, Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, to give them their full due. But 20-so years before, this compilation revealed and still reveals everything you wanted to know about an astonishing team of writers, singers, musicians and producers at the height of their collective powers.

Mono was never more glorious. Let go of your head and let your feet guide you on a journey across your living room dance floor.

Traffic: John Barleycorn Must Die

There was a YouTube video doing the rounds not long ago of Stevie Winwood, perhaps in his home studio, singing 'John Barleycorn' accompanied by his acoustic guitar. The voice still sounds good, even though he must be closing in on 70. The traditional English folk song, with its simple, melodious tale of harvesting and distilling the barley corn into some potent alcoholic drink of yore, still as compelling as ever.

It seems that Steve Winwood has been with me almost all of my vie en albums. I loved the Spencer Davis band as a kid, and in particular the prodigiously mature impassioned vocals of their keyboard player, the real star of the quartet from Birmingham. And then I loved Traffic when they burst upon the scene a couple of years later. Long before Sergeant Pepper, which I would discover retrospectively, they gave me my first taste of psychedelia.

'I looked to the sky where an elephant's eye/Was looking at me, from a bubble-gum tree...' We thought 'Hole in my Shoe' was an ingenuously naive pop song for childish adults and adult children, but clearly there was more going on that met the eye – especially when that breathy youthful female voice-over talked of climbing on the back of a giant albatross that flew through a gap in the clouds to a land where happiness reigned all the year round... My brother and sisters and I just loved it. I'm not sure what our parents made of it.

I've lived with John Barleycorn for 45 years now and it remains a favourite. By the time of this their fourth album, having shed Dave Mason, their other principal songwriter, not once but twice, Traffic was just a three-piece band: Winwood on vocals, guitars and multiple keyboards; his song-writing partner, Jim Capaldi, on drums; and poor old Chris Wood, who died too young, on flute and saxes.

Winwood had left to form the ill-fated Blind Faith and John Barleycorn started life, I later discovered, as his first solo venture. He was quite capable of playing all the instruments himself, but he missed the stimulus of musicians around him. Wood and Capaldi came back into the fold and thus Traffic was re-born.

By that time, I was a devout reader of Melody Maker. Every week I would devour it from cover to cover. I suspect there was a fair amount of journalistic hoo-ha concerning the second coming of the band, which no doubt prompted me to go out and buy it. Its disarmingly simple gate-fold cover, with its central woodcut image of a sheaf of bound and harvested barley and its faux arboreal lettering, is as sturdy as any album I've ever owned. Still as fresh as the day I first removed it from its Gramophone Shop bag.

It's a record of two halves, which isn't that surprising given the nature of the product. But I mean that metaphorically rather than literally. The two tracks on the second side, 'Stranger to Himself' and 'Every Mother's Son', that sandwich the beautiful title track – with Winwood's acoustic guitar accompanied by Chris Wood's delicate flute –were both apparently recorded as songs for the solo album that never was. The former, with its acoustic guitar tuned to sound like a sitar, reminds me of Traffic Mk1, while the latter suggests a return to the looser bluesier Spencer Davis Band. Neither is outstanding.    

It was Side 1, though, which really ticked the R&B boxes. The first two tracks, which always sound like they were conceived together, pre-figure an extended form of Traffic that would result in the live albums, Welcome To The Canteen and On The Road, which feature long loose-limbed percussion-fuelled jams. The reviews of the latter were not overly enthusiastic, but I wish I'd elected to hang onto it for my dotage.

The opener, 'Glad', is an instrumental powered by Winwood's ever marvellous ever-swirling organ-playing that features Chris Wood's honking tenor sax and a piano motif almost in the vein of Professor Longhair's immortal 'Big Chief'. The band kicks up the kind of riff that you feel you must have heard somewhere but can't identify, and when it winds down inexorably to a kind of cat-and-mouse exchange between organ and wah-wah electric saxophone, 'Glad' segues effortlessly into 'Freedom Rider'.

It's this second track that is quintessential Traffic: that combination of Winwood's stirring vocals and Wood's other-worldly flute, as on '40,000 Headmen', seems like the band's signature.

Side 1 ends with 'Empty Pages', a fine-enough number that again suggests the days of Spencer Davis, but which always seems an anti-climax following the 'Glad/Freedom Rider' musical diptych. When I was lucky enough to pick up in a sale a DVD of the Winwood band in concert at around the time of the excellent About Time album of 2003, it's significant that all three tracks from Side 1 of John Barleycorn are featured. Winwood still sings and plays magnificently, and his version of Timmy Thomas' 'Why Can't We Live Together' is a particular delight.

It was around this time, I think, that I caught the documentary profile of our Steve on BBC4. Who'd have thought that the Traffic country cottage would be transformed one day into a squire's country estate? Mr. Winwood, still blessed or cursed with that faint but discernible Brummie accent, was pictured marking out his territory in green Wellingtons and Barbour jacket. Quite the squire, indeed. Heavens, the man even supports his local hunt.

I approve of his sincere love of the countryside, but prefer to picture him astride the stage at Madison Square Garden, trading licks on his Fender with Eric Clapton: the two of them one ex-half of Blind Faith, but still fully deserving the epithet, Super-group.

The Chic Organization Vol. 1: Savoir Faire

Given the personally enviable task of organising five hours of the best music that the disco era had to offer for a friend's party on Saturday night – to celebrate his 50 years on Planet Earth and at least 30 years of committed dancing – it got me thinking about any albums from those hedonistic times that have lasted the ensuing course.

I couldn't think of any. The nearest I came to pinpointing something specific were the four volumes of Phillybusters, but they're really just collections of singles and lack any kind of long-playing identity. And I suppose that's exactly it: the best disco music was cut as singles rather than albums. I used to spend my time in unlikely places like newsagents, in and around Brighton, sifting through boxes of ex-jukebox 7" singles, or hunting for 12" singles in street markets and record shops.

In any case, I hardly ever listen to disco music now – great as some of it is – unless it's at parties. Except for Chic. Numerically speaking, in terms of both formats of singles, Chic productions far outweigh any other band or brand in my collection. So I took an executive decision: this time I'd cheat.

I never saw the need to own any of the first three albums – Chic, C'est Chic and Risqué – because I had all the singles (along with their excellent B sides). The closest I ever came to owning a Chic album was a cut-out of Norma Jean's eponymous release for Todd Rundgren's Bearsville label. For some reason, I never kept it. Maybe, at a time when I was growing up and listening to more jazz, I got caught up in the 'Disco Sucks' backlash (not for any subconscious homophobic reasons) and felt that I shouldn't be seen dead with a disc by the band's principal female vocalist. Older now and wiser, I realise that the musicians included the likes of ex-Dizzy Gillespie stalwart Jon Faddis on trumpeter and Fania All Stars trombonist Barry Rogers, and I listen to the brilliant 'Saturday' and 'Sorcerer' with a certain regret.

During one summer sale at Cultura, a multi-media emporium on the edge of Brive that specialises in brilliant sales twice a year, I stifled a yell as I beheld a four-disc boxed set of the band's finest for the ludicrous price of €3,99. That's a little less than a euro per disc for everything you would ever want from Chic, Sister Sledge, Norma Jean, Sheila & B. Devotion, Carly Simon, Diana Ross and err... Johnny Mathis.

Now be honest. Who here knew that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had tried to turn Johnny Mathis into a purveyor of funky things to play with? Presumably he (or his management) had hoped that the trendiest production team in town would revive the crooner's flagging career in the same way that they had already done for Diana Ross. The few tracks in question were never released and only go to prove that the Rodgers/Edwards partnership was not omnipotent.

Nevertheless, what a partnership it was while it lasted. These days, Nile Rodgers appears on almost every relevant music documentary as a bandana-clad talking head. The son of beatnik bohemian jazzniks from Manhattan, his wit, bonhomie and breadth of music appreciation are deeply ingratiating. But there's always a sense of Wise without Morecambe or one Coen brother without the other: a man shorn of his partner – in 1996, from a heart attack in his hotel room, during Chic's sell-out tour of Japan.

It was Bernard who named the band Chic. Apparently, he and Nile shared a love of Josephine Baker, who of course loved her adopted country of France. The boys must have loved it, too, even to contemplate an association with Sheila, a former French child-star with seemingly little discernible talent. Like the unlikely associations with Sister Sledge, formerly a rather humdrum family act without a unique selling proposition, and with Diana Ross, whose Motown glory days were fading fast, it worked. Maybe if I'd chosen 'Spacer' instead of 'Everybody Dance' or 'He's the Greatest Dancer', the French contingent at the party on Saturday might have joined the dance.

Each of these three killer tracks shows the brilliance of their production concept: of focusing on what they called the 'breakdown', or the reduction of a song to its basic elements. Ostensibly, it's characterised by Nile Rodgers' unerring ability to come up with a guitar hook that sucks you in and leaves you witless. How can you consciously override your feet, for example, when faced with an introduction like that to Sister Sledge's 'Greatest Dancer'? Im-possible!

Re-listening to my 33⅓ rpm 12" single version of 'Everybody Dance', though, really emphasises the irresistible propulsion generated by Bernard Edwards' nimble bass lines. I guess that's what a true partnership is all about. But it wasn't just the two of them. As Nile Rodgers writes in his notes to this boxed set, 'the CHIC Organization is an inclusive club'. Musicians of the quality of Faddis and Rogers and drummer Tony Thompson, backing vocalists of the calibre of Norma Jean and Luther Vandross, were 'all in [their] big CHIC tent'.

Given the instantly recognisable stamp of their collective sound, you might feel that four CDs is maybe two too many. But there are lesser known gems to discover and re-discover throughout: the almost throwaway Chic stuff like 'Funny Bone' and 'Savoir Faire', Norma Jean's unreleased but splendid 'Hold Me Lonely Boy' and Carly Simon's 'Why', which would be sampled and re-invented by A Tribe Called Quest as the sublime 'Bonita Applebaum' ('you got it goin' owe-onn...').

Most disco classics were one-offs and a single is quite sufficient. Groups like Slave and Kool & the Gang put together pretty impressive bodies of work that certainly warrant bargain-priced retrospectives, and Maurice White got somewhere close to creating a corporate sound with Earth Wind & Fire and the Emotions, but no one blended jazz, funk and disco like Nile and Bernard managed. Thus my feet still refuse to keep still every time I hear that crazy yowsah yowsah yowsah call to the floor and so I'll probably be listening still to this brilliant compilation way into my dotage, even if I have to use a stick to help me make the moves.