Catch A Fire

Probably the best album cover in the world...

Well, it's a very pleasing affair, certainly. Pull back the top half to reveal the workings of a Zippo lighter. Such a simple, but such a clever concept. It certainly set the album apart.

£2.29 reduced from £2.99. I probably bought it quite soon after its release in 1973. Certainly not long after seeing The Wailers perform 'Concrete Jungle', the stark and slightly mysterious opening track, on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Up until that moment, I had associated reggae with artists like Desmond Dekker and Ken Boothe. It seemed slightly sappy and not something that a serious teenager would take seriously. But this seemed... serious, and different. A front line of Bunny Wailer, the gaunt Bob Marley and the tall, lean, dangerous-looking Peter Tosh, driven by the bass lines of 'Family Man' Barrett and his brother Carlton on drums, singing about modern urban themes rather than love songs or impenetrable parables about Israelites. It was a heady and exciting mixture.

'Concrete Jungle' was in fact a re-working of an earlier song and I later learnt that many of the classic numbers from the early days of modernised Wailers – 'Slave Driver', 'Lively Up Yourself', 'Trench Town Rock' and many more – were reinterpretations of songs from an era when the group was ploughing its furrow, unknown outside their homeland of Jamaica. I dismissed them when these earlier versions were re-issued on snide compilations to cash in on Marley fever, but have subsequently gone back to discover their charm. Less polish perhaps, but more raw soul.

This was Chris Blackwell's masterful entrepreneurial idea when he discovered them and signed them to his Island label. Resurrect the golden oldies and embellish them with modern production techniques. It sure worked a treat.

'Concrete Jungle' is followed by the lazy 'Slave Driver', with its expert hand-claps and cheap organ sound, before the two Peter Tosh originals: '400 Years' and the marvellous 'Stop That Train', so redolent of the early days when the Wailers were a vocal harmony group in the vein of Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions.

If Tosh's voice is not quite that of the dangerous 'stepping razor' he would subsequently sing about, it's harsher and grittier than Marley's sweeter tones that lead on the other numbers. I would subsequently buy Tosh's solo album, Legalise It, as a 'weedy' student, primarily I think because it was the hip thing to do and I believed then, as I do now, that it should indeed be legalised.

'Meet you at your house at a quarter to hate,' Marley sings on 'Baby We've Got a Date (Rock it Baby)', which ends the first side on a lovely old-fashioned note, with the curious addition of what sounds like a pedal-steel guitar.

Then Side 2 fires up with my two favourite tracks on the album: 'Stir It Up' (or 'Steer It Up' as Marley sings it) with its marvellous 'Family Man' bass line, its wah-wah guitars and woo-woo backing vocals; and the glorious 'Kinky Reggae'. 'I went down town to see Miss Brown/She had brown sugar all over her booga-wooga...' I've never been quite sure what that's all about, but it sounds illicit and it doesn't altogether surprise me that Marley 'just can't settle down in a kinky part of town'.

The album ends with two more Marley songs: 'No More Trouble' and 'Midnight Ravers', whose slightly haunting organ sound echoes 'Concrete Jungle' and brings things elegantly full circle. The CD reissue has two bonus tracks. 'High Tide or Low Tide' is fairly innocuous stuff, but 'All Day All Night' sits very nicely thank you in the 'Stir It Up' and 'Kinky Reggae' genre, without quite capturing those heights.

As good as it is, the album has a special place in my heart more because it led me to explore and love the rhythmic and melodic genre that would spread from a small island in the Caribbean to the UK, France, West Africa and all over the world. It took me first to toasters like the 'brothers' Roy, U- and I-; then to the deep spiritual reggae of Winston Rodney, aka Burning Spear; to the disco-infused reggae of Third World and The Royal Rasses; to the 'Cool Ruler', Gregory Isaacs; to the spacey dub sounds of King Tubby and Augustus Pablo; and above all to delicious vocal harmony groups such as The Mighty Diamonds, Culture, The Wailing Souls and The Gladiators.

It was the first and, like girlfriends, it is indelible in that respect. In truth, there are probably better Wailers/Marley albums out there. Burnin', for example, has a lot of proponents. And I really love the excitement captured on Live! (at the Lyceum, London) as a reminder of the unforgettable evening when I saw the band live in the big hall at Exeter University.

Our resident social secretary was a bit of a megalomaniacal self-publicist, but he lured the likes of Chick Corea, Hatfield & the North, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band and John Cale to an outpost of academe in the west of England. Somehow, he persuaded Mr. Marley and crew to come down for a second concert during a flying return visit to the capital. God knows how. We didn't ask too many questions, but gave him our undying gratitude. Strangely and perhaps sadly, our benefactor didn't end up as a concert promoter.

By then, Tosh and Bunny Livingstone/Wailer had left to forge solo careers, so we had to be satisfied with the I Threes – Judy, Rita and Marcia. Not too shabby, really. I was part of a seething mass of humanity easy-skanking along to all the by-now familiar numbers on a hot summer's evening. I remember turning at one point to smile at a respectable former student who had settled in the area to found a (probably short-lived) local paper. He was dancing bare-chested with his shirt tied around his waist and a perma-smile spread across his face. We knew that we were witnessing something very special.

Having missed both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in beleaguered Belfast, it seemed the next best thing. It certainly garnered a few Brownie points, which I have been able to spend at dinner parties in the decades that followed. A distant memory now, but the vinyl microgrooves still testify to the truth. The Wailers were damn fine in their prime.

Getz/Gilberto

Normally I remember exactly where and when I have bought my albums, particularly the most important ones. This time, though, the details escape me. It must have been long ago when Stan Getz and João Gilberto came into my life, because I named my first cat, as a nominally independent nominal adult, 'Stan': a beautiful tabby with a white shirt-front who spent his first couple of months bonding with me on my shoulders. After that, he got a little heavy.

So I would have been living in an old railway worker's cottage in Brighton that will now be worth a small fortune. It was my first foot up on the great Property Ladder that stretches from here to eternity. I suspect that I bought it during a visit to Bath to see my parents and grandparents. If so, it would probably have been in a fabulously old-fashioned shop called Milsom's, which was annexed to a music shop that went by the miraculous name of Duck, Son & Pinker.

'The Girl from Ipanema' would have already instilled itself into my sub-conscious mind – via tepid versions no doubt by the likes of Perry Como and/or Andy Williams. It's this track that opens this coolest of cool albums, but it's quite a different kettle of easy listening. If you were being unkind, you might describe it as 'soporific', but never 'tepid'. It's one of those songs, like Sly Stone's 'It's a Family Affair' that's barely awake. It sounds like it must have been recorded either early in the morning or very late at night, when the musicians and the crew were still in their pyjamas.

First, João Gilberto sings the refrain in Portuguese and then his wife, Astrud, who had never before sung professionally, made a career for herself by telling in slightly stilted English of the tall and tan and young and lovely girl who goes walking and turns people's heads because when she walks she's like one of the sambas on this album written by Antonio Carlos Jobim with his poetic cohort, Vinicius de Moraes. And when Astrud sings in that voice of hers that's as limpid as a pool of water in early spring, I still to this day go Aaaaaaah.

And then... and then... Stan enters on tenor sax. The word 'mellifluous' was invented to describe Stan Getz's tenor playing. B.B. King, bless his cherry-red guitar, described jazz as 'the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college'. Stan graduated from the West Coast school of cool jazz in the 1950s and he played the most educated tenor on the scene for the rest of his days. He might not have been able to improvise like Sonny Rollins or play with the speed of Johnny Griffin or the intensity of John Coltrane, but he certainly gave his instrument sax appeal (and I told myself that I would resist the pun).

And when Stan enters on sax, it's one of the most seductive bit of heavy breathing that you're ever likely to hear. Off hand, I can think of only one other musical moment in jazz that's quite as sensual: when Ben Webster follows Art Tatum's piano on 'Gone With the Wind'. In fact, the tenor sax of Getz and the voice and gentle acoustic guitar of Gilberto constitute a marriage made in some post-coital heaven.

Jobim, who supplies most of the songs with Moraes, plays piano throughout and one mustn't forget that the unobtrusive drums are played by the colourfully named Milton Banana. Half man, half tropical fruit. Including classics of the genre like 'Desafinado', 'Corcovado' and 'O Grande Amor', there are only eight numbers on the album and they run in total to a measly 30 minutes or so. But that's half an hour of some of the most impeccable small-combo playing ever recorded in New York City – or anywhere else for that matter.

The album won a Grammy for Album of the Year the year after its release in 1964 and the single version of 'The Girl from Ipanema' sold a million. Stan Getz had already made Jazz Samba with guitarist Charlie Byrd in 1962 and had thereby introduced the great record-buying public outside Brazil to bossa nova, but it was Getz/Gilberto that really cemented the 'new trend'. And just as well, because jazz was in the doldrums and the competition for the teenage dollar was fierce. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon to try to rack up a few sales. Even Coleman Hawkins, as venerable a figure in his way as Louis Armstrong, made a bossa nova record (and it's not half bad, in a somewhat derivative kind of way).  

Enthusiasm had long been curbed by the time that I got hip to Getz/Gilberto. But the prime reason why it became such an important album in my own private Idaho was that it led me to the musical treasures of Brazil. To my ears, there is no music on this earth that has such a unique melodic stamp as Brazilian music. Whether it's the keys or chords they use or the combination of notes, I'm not sure, but I only have to hear a bar or two to know that a piece of music derives from Brazil. I'm sure I'm not alone in that respect.

I don't play Getz/Gilberto quite as much these days as I used to, but that's partly because I don't need to. Thanks to Stan and João, I can now choose from the likes of Jobim, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Joyce Moreno, Gal Costa, Jorge Ben, Marcos Valle, Gilberto Gil, Carlinhos Brown and many, many others whose melodious rhythmic music makes my soul sing with joy.

When I walk, if I remember to, I try to be like a samba.

Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmun Umyun)

One night a DJ changed my life... It was Pete Drummond, who would go on to reach the dizzy heights of presenting Rock Goes To College for BBC2. I was listening to his late-night show on my dad's transistor radio, probably with the little white ear piece attached to my shell-like to keep the parents far hence. Turn that thing off; it's high time you were asleep!

I must have been 15 or 16 at the time and fortunately I hadn't drifted off to sleep, because I caught the whole mesmerising 18 minutes of a piece of music that was like nothing I'd ever heard before. Fortunately, too, Pete Drummond was a sensible DJ, who gave out the full information. The sound-scape of mystical music replete with melody and exotic percussion that seemed to rise and fall and then rise and fall again like waves lapping within my head was Pharoah Sanders, with 'Let us go into the House of the Lord', a traditional negro spiritual adapted by the band's pianist, Lonnie Liston Smith.

It was jazz, Jim, apparently – but not as I knew it. I used to watch the Ronnie Scott programme on BBC2 with my dad, partly out of curiosity, partly to keep him company and partly for the thrill of being able to stay up later than normal. Jazz at that point in my life seemed to mean the Johnny Dankworth Orchestra with Cleo Laine and the Buddy Rich Big Band, who were all right, I suppose, even though Buddy Rich himself seemed as flash and as showy as his drumming... and a weird pianist called Thelonious Monk, whose music was intriguing but a little difficult.

There was nothing difficult, though, about what I heard on my dad's red Japanese transistor – apart from the business of getting hold of the album. The title, Summun, Bukmun, Umyun, was taken from a chapter of the Koran and translated as Deaf Dumb Blind. 'Deaf – To the pleas of fellow creatures to harken, Dumb – To spiritual enlightenment and Blind – To the essence of beauty and truth', as Jameelah Ali's sleeve notes explain. And certainly, to someone searching at the time for the meaning of life in the portentous music of Van Der Graaf Generator, this saxophonist who went by the glorious name of Pharoah Sanders seemed to have created something that contained 'the essence of beauty and truth'.

I couldn't find it in Belfast and I was a little reluctant to use the new Virgin mail order service, because it meant that my mother could more easily keep tabs on the amount of pocket money I was spending on LPs. However, I tracked it down in what I believe was the first Virgin Records store, in London, after a few weeks in the summer holidays of picking strawberries in the Fens – to earn some money to buy more LPs. It was an inauspicious little shop on the first floor of a building at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street. And there it was! On the pink Probe label, A great name from ABC/Dunhill Records, USA.

Finally I could listen to it in living, breathing stereo. Which is the only way to appreciate how first Sanders himself on the soprano sax, then Lonnie Liston Smith's tinkling, trebly piano and then Cecil McBee's extraordinary bowed bass carry the beautiful melody through a swirling periphery of bells, shakers, maracas and all kinds of African percussion that creates an impression of a steaming night on a veranda, sipping a cold drink and staring into the heart of a jungle darkness. The music was all-embracing and all-encompassing. You had no choice but to sit and listen. Well, not at that age anyway.

And it wasn't just me. A few years later, I was lying on my bed in a house I shared as a student in Exeter, listening to the same piece of music spinning on my BSR MacDonald deck. I was waiting for my man, my disreputable friend Simon, who was late as usual. He was due back from London on his old, impossibly noisy Ariel motorbike. Suddenly he was there standing transfixed at the door that led from my bedroom into the conservatory and thence into the back garden. Looking a little like an elongated Richard III, with his thin lank body and his long limp hair – but covered in oil after another misadventure with his bike – he was riveted by the music.

He had never heard anything like it, either. This was someone who listened predominantly to rock music by the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who. Someone who once set light to his waste paper basket across the corridor in our Hall of Residence, just for a bit of atmosphere while he played some Pete Townshend air guitar during 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. Black smoke billowed out of his window and the communal fire extinguisher had to be employed. This was someone who would not have had any truck with jazz.

If I remember correctly, he didn't have enough patience for the 22-minute title track. I, too, found it a bit protracted and certainly not up to Side 2. Significantly, it was edited to half the length on the double-CD Pharoah Sanders anthology of 2005. Later, I would come to appreciate that it's effectively an extended Afro-Latin jazz workout for three horns (Sanders, Woody Shaw on trumpet and Gary Bartz on alto sax) and piano powered by congas, assorted percussion and Cecil McBee's fat (I suppose I should spell that 'phat' these days) resonant double bass.

Some 20 years or so later, I would finally catch the Pharoah in concert at the Leadmill, Sheffield: a smallish, quite intimate venue that offered a good view of the four- or five-piece band and the great man himself. In fact, John Coltrane's pupil, sporting what would become his trademark bushy white beard, was not the physical titan I had envisaged. He played more tenor than soprano that night and no one I've ever heard roars on the big sax quite like the Pharoah does, but he was significantly shorter than his tone suggested.

The album still smoulders and captivates today as it did 45 years ago when it came out. Pharoah Sanders led me musically to Africa and the joy of riddim. Deaf Dumb Blind helped teach me to listen and hear, to be around and be aware, and to look and see.

Hot Rats

My daughter thinks this is a really cool cover

'I'm a little pimp with my hair gassed back/Pair a khaki pants with my shoe shined black...'

I was too young really when I bought this very grown up album to understand exactly what a pimp was. I missed the clues about the little lady who walked that street and there were still a few years to go before Harvey Keitel and an uncomfortably young Jodie Foster would make it all transparent in Taxi Driver.

However, I did appreciate that 'Willie the Pimp' was a bit of an unsavoury character, that the vocals by Captain Beefheart were like nothing I'd ever heard before and that Frank Zappa's extended guitar solo with its emphasis on the wah-wah pedal was thrilling enough for me to get out the Slazenger Les Paul, 'plug' it into an old 1950s fan heater and play-along-a-Frank. Which became one of the most mortifying moments of my teenage years when my mother came into the room mid-solo. I remember feeling it necessary to explain what I was doing and probably not managing with any coherence.

My mother didn't like Frank anyway. His Rasputin-like features adorned the walls of my bedroom and she thought that he, like Roger Daltrey before him, was the Devil incarnate. It probably alleviated the situation slightly when I explained that he was Jewish – like Saul Bellow, her favourite novelist, and like all those millions of people persecuted by the Nazis and others throughout history – and that he was a family man. I don't think I bothered to reveal that he called his children Moon Unit and Dweezil, if I remember correctly. Gee, thanks Dad.

It wouldn't have made any impression if I'd told her that his music was some of the most literate of the time. There weren't many poking fun at flower children and writing about the thought-police in those heady days, and there weren't many capable of composing something as multi-layered and as richly melodic as 'Peaches en Regalia', the track that kicks off the album with a drum roll and an unforgettable bang. His music would probably have come under the same category as my simulated guitar playing, an 'awful racquet'.

But 'Peaches en Regalia' was the kind of song that I would have wanted to try out on the unconverted – parents, even grandparents. Which just goes to show how naive one can be in your mid-teens. Yet it did have an instantly recognisable tune and, like 'Son of Mr. Green Genes', the track that sandwiches 'Willie The Pimp' on the brilliant first side, it seemed to be orchestral in a way that older generations' ears might recognise, even though it used few of the instruments they would have recognised as 'classical'. My father seemed to quite like it, in any case, though he didn't stay on to listen to 'Willie The Pimp'.

'This movie for your ears was produced & directed by Frank Zappa' the credits proclaim and I knew enough to recognise that Zappa was not simply a great guitar-player, but a kind of presiding genius and creative consultant in the manner of later heroes like Charles Mingus and Gil Evans. I probably didn't recognise, however, just how important a role Ian Underwood played in providing many of the exotic sounds that were assembled into Zappa's aural movie: piano, organus maximus (whatever that was), flute, clarinets and saxes. Ian and his wife, Ruth, were both regulars in The Mothers of Invention and both, I believe, were trained as jazz musicians.

That's Ian on the right of our Frank

As indeed were several of the other luminaries that Zappa employed on Hot Rats. People like the bass player, Max Bennett, and the French violinist, Jean-Luc Ponty, whose King Kong I would investigate soon after. The jazz element is particularly pronounced on the second side.

It would have been very hard to come up with something as good as the dazzling first side, and the second side is, I suppose, a slight disappointment. The two jazzier numbers, 'Little Umbrellas' and 'It Must be a Camel', are just fine and can live happily with 'Son of Mr. Green Genes', but 'The Gumbo Variations' do go on rather. They also feature to an excessive degree the shrill violin of Don 'Sugarcane' Harris, one half of the Californian rock 'n' roll act, Don and Dewey. Even though I was a fan of bands at the time that featured the electric violin, like Curved Air and It's A Beautiful Day, all that string-scratching was and is too much for my tender ears.

Still. One weaker track would not debar Hot Rats from the Hall of Fame. It is generally considered as Zappa's masterpiece and, while his brooding hirsute features no longer grace my bedroom wall, the album has never figuratively left my side. Apart from the quality of the music itself, one reason I think why it had such a huge impact on impressionable mini-me was simply the fact that it was – apart from the Captain's banshee yips and squawks on 'Willie The Pimp' – an instrumental album. Groovy music didn't have to have words. So, in that respect alone, the album opened up my gates of perception. Once opened, I would stumble my way into the secret garden of Jay-azz.

Hot Rats came out on Zappa's own Bizarre label, part of the Warner Seven Arts conglomerate. The bizarre thing is that I have never even heard the album's supposed follow-up, Waka Jawaka. I think that Zappa's visual movie, 200 Motels, and its deeply disappointing double soundtrack album, made me tread more warily when it came to our Francis Vincent Zappa. I sold the album to Peter Metcalfe from my A-level English class. I hope he found something more to enjoy in it than I did.