Two Steps from the Blues

When I heard from a friend that the man we had both known as manager of Brighton Benefit Office had died somewhat prematurely, in his mid '60s I would estimate, I was heartened at least to learn that the funeral was not a mournful affair. True to form, Bill chose as the music for his official departure Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People get ready’, Sam Cooke’s version of ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ and, significantly, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland’s ‘Ain’t no love in the heart of the city’.

It’s significant to me because Bill introduced me to deep soul music. By that time in my life, my mid 20s, I had discovered Marvin, Stevie, Aretha, James Brown and Otis Redding and a few other usual soulful suspects, but deep southern soul from places like Muscle Shoals and Memphis was still somewhere off the chart.

No one came deeper than Bobby 'Blue' Bland: the man from Memphis with the golden baritone and a trademark growl that could curdle milk. The Sinatra of the blues. I would have found my way to them eventually, but Bill pointed me firmly in the direction of Bobby Bland and other favourite R&B giants – like 'Big Joe' Turner, T-Bone Walker, Junior Parker, Little Willy John, Roy Brown, O.V. Wright et al.

My first encounter with my new mentor wasn't exactly propitious. I realise now that his tactic of talking individually to everyone in the office showed genuine emotional intelligence. However, at that callow age, I suspected a ruse. Surely he was some agent of the establishment, some career civil servant, collecting personal information on his minions. So I didn't let my guard down and probably missed an opportunity to bond earlier than we actually did.

Bill was scruffy to the point of shambolic. Usually he wore un-ironed shirts with a loose-knotted kipper tie, flared brown trousers and a pair of Clark's shoes that looked like squashed Cornish pasties. He was often unshaven and he smoked incessantly. He practised an open-door style of management and, when bored by the paperwork, he would do the rounds and chat to anyone who didn't seem too burdened by work. His meetings with supervisors like myself were laid-back low-key affairs where few decisions were made and the buck got passed around until someone agreed to take it.

During one of his walkabouts one day, Bill must have spotted something on my desk that made him stop and talk to me about music. It was then, I'm sure, that he told me about Robert Calvin Bland and it was then, I realised, that Bill was anything but a career civil servant bent on promotion through the ranks.

Au contraire. I recognised in him a similar work ethic. That is, do your level best to ensure that the Great Unwashed (as an under-sized member of staff referred to the unemployed) received the correct money at the right time, then switch off as soon as you walked back out through the door and devote yourself to genuine interests. Bill's particular passion sometimes won him minor prizes in radio competitions. A ticket here, a token there.

The following day, Bill brought me an armful of Bobby Bland albums to listen to, including the classic Two Steps From The Blues. As soon as I heard him sing, I was hooked. And from that moment on, there would be a steady stream of singles, albums and cassettes for my enlightenment – and guilty time-consuming conversations that ate into work-time.

I bought myself Peter Guralnick's excellent books, Lost Highway and Feel Like Goin' Home, for his vivid portraits of unsung giants like Bobby Bland. He is described memorably as 'a genial, slow-moving man whose forty-five years are etched into his pouched brown face'. I learnt that he started out as B.B. King's valet and driver. Later, he played the same role for Junior Parker, whose 'Mystery Train' brought him a little renown just before his stable mate.

Both Parker and Bland recorded for Houston's Duke label, run by the notorious Don Robey ('a czar of the negro underworld'), who would, like so many independent label potentates of the time, systematically cheat his artists out of their royalties – mainly by appropriating others' songs and publishing them under his own name or his nom de voleur, Deadric Malone.

Indeed, the majority of the classic Bobby Bland numbers on Two Steps are accredited to either Robey or Malone, apart from those like 'St. James' Infirmary' which would have been too public to claim. 'You know,' the singer lamented to Guralnick, 'I've been established as a blues singer for over 25 years, but I've never gotten paid... It hurts to know your good years are gone and you haven't really been recognized'.

In fact, when Duke was taken over by ABC/Dunhill in the '70s, our Bobby would finally find some measure of commercial success with releases like His California Album (to which Bill also introduced me). But the singer would wish ruefully that it happened 'when I was much younger, when I was 35, say – 'cause I was really hollering then'.

He probably never hollered better than he did on Two Steps from the Blues, which is generally recognised as a classic. Downbeat voted it no.5 in their list of Top 50 blues albums. Blues with a soulful flavour or soul with a touch of the blues, it doesn't really matter. The album is immortal not only for the songs ('I Pity the Fool' and 'Don't Cry No More' would both be R&B 7" single smashes), but also for Joe Scott's definitive big band arrangements. If Bobby Bland was R&B's Sinatra, then Joe Scott was his Nelson Riddle (and Two Steps was his Songs for Swinging Lovers).

Bill was a real connoisseur. At that stage of my musical education, I understood that you listened to jazz arrangements because it was a largely instrumental medium, but I hadn't really considered the backing bands of Motown vocalists or R&B chanteurs like Ray Charles and Bobby Bland in quite the same way. But Bill would sit me down on occasional evening visits to his music room in Saltdean – where I never got to see the rest of the house, nor his wife for that matter – and get me to really listen to Joe Scott's charts.

Strangely, Bill had all these fantastic records, but a really crappy little record player on which to spin them. Still, I heard enough through the crackles to recognise why Wayne Bennett was considered such a brilliant guitarist and how musicians of the calibre of the original funky drummer 'Jabo' Starks, who would go on to shape the sound of James Brown's Famous Flames, still managed to sound like the equivalent of Count Basie's 16 Men Swinging.

When a promotion took me to ACAS in London, I lost touch with Bill. A Trinidadian pan-man would become my next musical mentor. Pedro also knew and loved Bobby Bland – as indeed do the likes of Van Morrison and Mick Hucknall, who would go on to record a rather earnest tribute album. Pedro moved to Barbados and I moved to France, where eventually I heard the news of Bill's demise. He had a good sense of humour and how swell it would've been if he'd risen out of his coffin at the end of the ceremony in the way that another of his heroes, Screaming Jay Hawkins, used to do on stage.

No such luck, however. I only hope that the undertaker chose to dress him in one of his kipper ties and to seal him up with some of his prize 7" singles for company in the afterlife. Dear old Bill, he was an unsung hero of sorts. I thought about my generous-spirited educator when I watched a BBC4 documentary on our mutual Mr. Bland a few years back. For all the Sinatra-like labels, I'd never seen footage of the great man in concert before, but the programme was chock-a-block. There was even material from the '70s when he sported wide lapels and an Afro. I could have cried.

Surf's Up

I certainly wouldn't claim that this was The Beach Boys' finest album. Far from it. If it's consistency you're after, then one of the many endlessly summery golden greats would represent a better buy. But there's something about this curate's egg that I find very appealing. Besides, it has been with me now for a long, long time. For that reason alone, it secures my affection.

So, if not the best, then certainly a favourite. I like my flawed attempts to reach for the stars, me. It's rather like The Pretty Things' Parachute in that respect. I was talking about just that with my distant friend across the ocean only the other day: the only person I know who still values that particular album. We agreed that half of it has dated badly, while the other half remains simply magnificent.

Ditto Surf's Up. There's a fair share of dross, but there's enough wonderful Wilsonian music to warrant at least three and a half stars and a place in my heart. The surprising thing is that 'Wilsonian' means, for once, as much Carl as Brian. Dennis is there on drums throughout, but reputedly he withdrew his two projected contributions due to a family squabble over the sequencing of the second side.

The second side ends, rightly so, with Brian's exquisite title track: a remnant of the ill-fated Smile project. Anyone who has seen the film Love And Mercy will appreciate why his long lost masterpiece remained lost for so long. Paul Dano played the young Brian Wilson at the height of his creative powers, obsessing endlessly over the tiniest details of extraordinary symphonic works like 'Good Vibrations', while John Cusack played the pale shadow of the man some years later, addled by drugs and medication and haunted by voices and ghosts in the machine.

At the time when Surf's Up came out in 1971, Brian could come up with little more than an ill-fated health food shop, The Radiant Radish. You can imagine how his contemptuous cousin, Mike Love, would have reacted to that venture. By the time that Brian finally oversaw the assembly and release of Smile, it had been so long in the coming that it inevitably failed to live up to expectations. Indeed, my Wilsophilic friend, Peter Bradbrook of Sheffield 10, mixed a more coherent version in the privacy of his own sitting room.

One thing seems clear to me – and it's difficult to find any kind of clarity when faced with Van Dyke Parks' customarily opaque lyrics full of all those baroque 'columnated ruins' and 'dove nested towers' – is that the two most memorable 'movements' of Smile are 'Surf's Up' and 'Child is Father of the Man'. The two are condensed on this album's finale into just over four minutes of sheer musical and vocal ecstasy. Personally, I would have been happy if the coda of close harmonies had taken another five or six minutes to unfold.

If Surf's Up consisted of more of similar quality, then it would be right up there with Sergeant Pepper in most critical Top 100 lists. Unfortunately, it doesn't. But therein, I suppose, lies a compensatory charm. The prime mover behind the album appears to have been the band's new manager of the time, Jack Rieley (who co-wrote three of the strongest cuts). In his endeavour to reanimate the band after the malaise that followed Sunflower's failure, he also suggested that the perennially back-seat brother, Carl, should be appointed Surf's Up's musical director.

Herein lies both the LP's strength and weakness. Surf's Up is less Brian Wilson as a result and more The Beach Boys. But, as is the case with Todd Rundgren's Utopian sideline, musical democracy is not necessarily the best impulse when you have a benevolently dictatorial musical genius at the controls. So, all The Beach Boys bar Dennis get their oar in and the result is a little like cinema in the days when you had to sit through the B-movie to get to the main feature.

In which case, Side 1 is very much the B-movie, made on the cheap with pulp plot and wooden actors. Certainly cousin Mike's 'Student Demonstration Time': a contemporary metamorphosis of Lieber and Stoller's 'Riot in Cell Block #9' that only goes to prove that, once they'd done their surfing, the boys couldn't rock 'n' roll with much conviction.

It's a slightly harsh judgement on earnest Al Jardine, who contributes three songs that don't really stick in the mind: one with Mike Love, 'Don't Go Near the Water', which reflects the album's ecological mood in a clumsy sort of way ('Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath/So let's avoid an ecological aftermath'); the other two with lyrics by a certain Gary Winfrey: Side 1's paean to pedicures, 'Take a Load Off Your Feet', and Side 2's rather more edifying 'Looking at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)'.

The rest is plain sailing. Bruce Johnston's 'Disney Girls (1957)' on Side 1 is both charming and convincing in an early Beach Boys kind of way. Brother Carl also reveals himself as a songwriter of surprising distinction. With lyrics by their manager, 'Long Promised Road' on Side 1 was good enough to have been released as a single. Beginning the second side and sometimes described a little condescendingly as a 'mood piece', 'Feel Flows' with its gently pulsing Moog synthesizer and Carl's fuzz guitar is worthy of big brother.

And then you come to the soft centre that makes the album ultimately such a treat. Brian's three contributions begin with 'A Day in the Life of a Tree': a lovely if depressing song of acid rain and pollution with vocals by Van Dyke Parks backed by Brian on harmonium. It is followed by ''Til I Die'. Fleshed out with vibes and Hammond organ, it's far too short at barely two and a half minutes for such a beautiful song.

Finally, you are left to savour the flavour of the title track: surely up there with the likes of such masterpieces from the pen and troubled mind of Brian Wilson as 'In My Room', 'Caroline No', 'Good Vibrations' and 'Sail on Sailor' (to name but four). Now that I think of it, in fact, the song is so good that it lifts this uneven but perennially enjoyable album from three and a half stars to four.

Kind of Blue

There seems something almost lame in plumping for Miles Davis' timeless classic as the greatest jazz album ever made. It's rather like answering Citizen Kane to the question, What's your favourite film? It's every would-be film critic's movie of choice. In fact, I usually answer Bertolucci's Il Conformiste just to suggest some independence of thought. But it's a very close-run thing anyway.

There's no such equivocation when it comes to jazz albums. I'm happy to go along with every poll, every critic, every lover of modern jazz when it comes to the question of best ever. Kind of Blue is perfection on vinyl: as exquisite and as immortal as a Ming vase. It will be there for generations of music lovers to come, long after time has rendered questions of genre irrelevant.

Post-bop, hard bop, modern, modal jazz? Who cares? It's five long tracks, five improvisations around particular modal scales that amount in effect to one long meditative mood: when lights are low, when autumn leaves begin to fall, when a gentle breeze blows through the house at the end of a hot summer day. Whatever your imagination's fancy.

In some respects, the tracks are virtually indistinguishable. Unless I really concentrate, I often manage to mix up 'Blue in Green', the last track on Side 1, with 'All Blues' and 'Flamenco Sketches', the two tracks on Side 2. I can only ever identify with confidence 'Freddie Freeloader', probably because it was recorded first (with Wynton Kelly on piano rather than Bill Evans, whose romantic leanings dominate the album) and 'So What', probably because it is built around one of the most memorable hooks in popular music.

I didn't believe the hype at first. It couldn't be that good. Besides, my feelings about Miles Davis at that point in my life were coloured by a track from Bitches Brew on the Rockbuster sampler I used to own: 'Miles Runs the Voodoo Down', which seemed just a little too 'out there' for my evolving tastes. I liked the idea of Miles Davis, but I didn't know whether I was sufficiently courageous yet.

It took a visit to New York in the mid 1980s to visit my best friend: at a time when he and his wife were preparing to move from an apartment they rented in Park Slope, Brooklyn to one they had just found in Brooklyn Heights. Park Slope had not yet been as thoroughly gentrified as it has since become. It seemed as edgy as Miles Davis's more recent music. If I hadn't been among friends who seemed to know the lie of the land, I would've been scared.

It was a hot and particularly wet July, with thunderstorms and torrential downpours the signature weather of my fortnight's stay. Apart from a brief sojourn in Long Island at my friend's mother-in-law's, where the two of us one memorable afternoon sat on her veranda and watched the water level of a flash flood rise inexorably and almost swallow the cars parked in the tree-lined street, I spent much of my time exploring Manhattan on foot.

Not too far from the Woolworth Building, once in the early years of the 20^th century the tallest building in the world, I wandered into an old-fashioned and comprehensive record shop that went by the unprepossessing name of J&R Music. Since there was a deal on for three Columbia records, I came out with three Miles Davis records: In a Silent Way, Filles de Kilimanjaro and... Kind of Blue. I took them back across the Atlantic to Brighton along with a pair of two-tone shoes I'd hummed and hawed about for far too long in a Brooklyn shoe shop. I still have the records, of course, and I still have the shoes.

Ah! the cachet that comes from having three of his albums with the red label of Columbia rather than the orange of CBS. Not that anyone other than I did gave a monkey's. Still... It took a little work on my part to learn to love the other two records, but the first airing of Kind of Blue was enough. It transfixed me from start to finish.

It transfixed me from Bill Evans' opening piano motif and Paul Chambers' little bass riff that gradually builds – with some help from Jimmy Cobb's brushes – into that incredible compelling hook of 'So What', right through to the final plaintive notes of Miles' muted trumpet on 'Flamenco Sketches'. Had I only known of it as a student, I would have sat myself down between the speakers, smoked a little herbal substance and gone off on a magic carpet ride that would have taken me somewhere far out into the cosmos.

In fact, I was transported to heaven and back just a year or so later, when I went to the North Sea Jazz Festival in Den Haag. The first act was a pick-up group that called themselves the New York All Stars: Percy and Jimmy Heath, Slide Hampton on trombone, Jimmy Owens on trumpet, the mighty Hilton Ruiz on piano and Jimmy Cobb, a cool, distinguished presence behind the drum kit. How I would have loved to have chatted to him about the Kind of Blue sessions. But they come on, they play and they wander off wither one knows not. A dressing room perhaps somewhere in the bowels of the UN building.

This much we know. It was made in 1959, the annus mirabilis of modern jazz: the year of Dave Brubeck's Time Out, of Charles Mingus' wonderful Ah Um and of most of Ornette Coleman's ground-breaking The Shape of Jazz to Come. It was made with the two survivors of Miles Davis' great quintet of the 1950s, Paul Chambers and John Coltrane, supplemented by Jimmy Cobb and, on most tracks, by Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley on alto sax.

Miles planned the album around the romantic piano playing of Bill Evans and legend has it that he turned up at the studio with brief sketches of the music that he heard in his head based on the way European composers like Ravel and Rachmaninoff used scales in their compositions. His goal, apparently, was to recreate the kind of rural black religious music that he heard as a child on visits to Arkansas.

This is one feeling that Kind of Blue doesn't manage to achieve. And for this reason, even though So What became a permanent part of his repertoire, Miles himself felt that the album was less than a complete success. I for one certainly don't agree and there must be a few million others who don't, either. Every listen provokes the very strong feeling that together Miles and his six cohorts produced some of the most beautiful atmospheric music ever recorded.