The Rhythm of the Saints

They're dropping like flies. Now Nana Vasconcelos, the great Brazilian percussionist, is no more. Dead from lung cancer at the tender age of 71 – which would have made him about 45 when The Good Wife and I went to see him at The Leadmill, Sheffield.

Apparently a converted flour mill, The Leadmill is, by popular vote, one of the UK's favourite independent live-music venues. It always struck me as a rather seedy spit-and-sawdust type of place in a rather seedy part of the city centre down by the railway station. This was in the late '80s or early '90s, in the days before coffee bars appeared in the station precinct and the creation of an arts cinema just opposite the ill-conceived and short-lived Museum of Pop Music lent the area some respectability.

I'm not sure that I'd even heard of Nana Vasconcelos nor his band of the time, The Bushdancers. Brazilian music still meant mainly Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto and gentle strum-along bossa nova. But being curious, we went to see him. Probably on our own, since it might have been not too long after we moved oop to the grim north from Brighton: a time when we would have worn our Paddington Bear-style labels on our duffel coats saying PLEEZE BE OUR FRIENDS.

Before The Daughter came along and made us think twice about evenings out, it was a brief but rich era for music concerts. Artists like Hugh Masekela, Gil Scott-Heron, Hilton Ruiz, Pharoah Sanders and the fabulous Bundhu Boys appeared at The Leadmill or the University or what was then still the Poly. Oh, and a band that spun-off Kajagoogoo – but that wasn't our doing: a visiting friend from Manchester persuaded us to go along, much against our better judgement, you understand.

And Senõr Vasconcelos, the dark-skinned native of Recife, with his gourds and bells and shakers, his bird calls, yodels, drums and the one-string berimbau, was particularly memorable. If you half-closed your eyes that evening, you could imagine that the gloomy Leadmill had been magically transformed into a tiny clearing somewhere deep in the Brazilian rainforest.

And it's Nana V's myriad percussion effects that help to turn Paul Simon's The Rhythm of the Saints of 1990 into a masterpiece of modern world music. Only the best for the diminutive New York minstrel. Vasconcelos had already picked up countless critics' awards and worked with the likes of Pat Metheny, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, Brian Eno and Talking Heads when Simon recruited him for his follow-up to Graceland.

Some – including the Queen Mum – would probably argue that Graceland was the better album, but I've only got it on cassette, so it doesn't count. Besides, I believe that Rhythm builds on its predecessor by shifting the whole operation to Rio de Janeiro. While preserving that beautiful singing, ringing guitar sound associated with central and southern Africa, Simon adds to the mix the element of Brazilian percussion – in the form of Nana Vasconcelos and his crop of gourds and the arsenal of home-made instruments (such as a glass rather than the customary wooden marimba) used by the percussion group, Uakti – to create something even more extraordinary.

The quality of the song-writing throughout is as one would expect from a master craftsman like Paul Simon. As a callow youth at university, I secretly sneered at my friend Jacqui's love of his early solo albums – thinking they were every bit as soppy as the Simon & Garfunkel song book – but I came to realise that she was right all along. These days, I'm so liberal and enlightened that I can listen to 'Mrs. Robinson' et al without the slightest sneer, while positively relishing There Goes Rhymin' Simon and all his later mature work.

But it's the guitar arrangements and the percussion effects throughout that take his songs to a new dimension. Consider the glorious, mysterious second track, for example, 'Can't Run But'. There's a fantastic image – 'A winding river/Gets wound around a heart. Pull it/Tighter and tighter/Until the muddy waters part' – that captures for me the way the crystal guitar sound and the ceaseless pattering percussion interweave to suggest something seductively liquid.

Yes, that's it. The Rhythm of the Saints is one mighty Afro-Brazilian river. An Orinoco of percussion. A Niger of guitars. A Limpopo of limpid native sounds. An Amazon of astounding musicianship. Right from 'The Obvious Child', in which the thundering sound of the massed samba drums of the Grupo Cultural Olodum suggest the falls at its source, the album seems to flow effortlessly but relentlessly like an imagined river.

Taking the whole journey and listening to the record from start to finish rather than cherry-picking individual tracks has an effect like some benign and mildly hallucinogenic drug that gently turns your world inside out for 45 minutes. Although he's not there on every track, Nana's there – with the likes of Hugh Masekela, the Brecker Brothers and the great Congolese guitarist, Ringo Star – on the exceptionally beautiful 'Further to Fly', with its 'days falling backward into velvet night...'

Days continue to fall backwards on the next track, the equally beautiful 'She Moves On' – the delicate percussion this time swollen by a powerful bass line and a chorus of female African voices – and on down 'The Cool, Cool River' with all its haunting 'Spirit Voices' as far as the lazy hypnotic title track, where Uakti and Nana Vasconcelos appear together again to steer us through the delta and out into the endless ocean.

Time like the river marches on. Paul Simon keeps going for now and one day perhaps I'll get to see him live, preferably on a summer's day live in Central Park, New York. I suspect I've missed the boat and anyway it wouldn't be alas with Nana Vasconcelos, who teamed up so felicitously with the pint-sized songsmith, with his ear for exotic ethnic sounds and his way with evocative imagery, to create one of the great musical codas to the 20^th century.

Third World

Isn't it a-bout time, as Stephen Stills once sang, to re-appraise Third World's eponymous debut album? No? Well, I reckon it's high time. Time to give the album and the band some due.

The music critic, Dave Marsh, whose The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles ever Made is one of my bibles, poor sad soul that I clearly am, awarded the album a single star in his Rolling Stone review and dismissed Third World in a brief paragraph as purveyors of 'perfectly mediocre reggae... nothing but sinewy dance music, slick but devoid of deep emotion'.

Since his main musical interest seems to be soul music, his primary concern would, I suppose, be feeling. But, reading between the lines, I think his beef seems to be that Third World were a middle-class Jamaican band, signed up by the Jamaican entrepreneur, Chris Blackwell, for his Island label at a time when the re-packaged Wailers had set the international ball rolling. The suggestion being that there's something inauthentic about it – which begs a version of the whole Can white men sing the blues? question.

In any case, the 'inauthentic' newcomers teamed up with their authentic label-mates when Third World would toured the UK as support act to the Wailers in 1976, the year this album came out. They would later go on to tour the US extensively as reggae missionaries, bringing sinewy dance riddims to the heathens.

I bought a copy of the album in the year of its release, intrigued by its distinctive album art and attracted, no doubt, by Virgin Records' introductory special offer. Later, I would buy the more generally approved follow-up, 96^o In The Shade, but thereafter restricted my Third World purchases to the 7" format. Subsequently, however, I go back most consistently to the under-appreciated 'tentative' debut.

Mybee it's becorze I'm a Lundinner who loves to dance. With an extra percussionist in the six-piece line-up, there is indeed an emphasis on 'sinewy dance music'. And it's often very sinewy indeed. Third World – and less successfully, in my estimation, Inner Circle – were really the first Jamaican bands to blend reggae and disco/dance music.

Dave Marsh seems to object in particular to the kind of Santanic dance-oriented slant the band gave to two classic roots reggae songs: the Abyssinians' 'Sette Messgana' and Burning Spears' 'Slavery Days'. But I don't agree that, in so doing, Third World stripped the music of any emotion. It's maybe not the 'deep emotion' synonymous with the kind of southern soul that's a deeper shade of Doris Duke, the equivalent perhaps of roots reggae for purists, but their reinterpretations are atmospheric enough to give the originals a worthwhile new slant.

The two tracks dominate the first side. The LP's other numbers are mainly Third World originals. 'Brand New Beggar' and 'Sun Won't Shine', in particular, are fantastic, melodic songs that make you want to wind up your waist and suggest why they were reputedly such a popular live act. From here, it would only be another couple of albums before they cooked up something of the calibre of that perennial dance classic, 'Now That We've Found Love'.

This album is not a classic by that standard, but there's not a bum note on either side and I've been partial to it ever since my inaugural listen in the record store's headphones. And I think it illustrates an important point: even if the purity of the original music gets diluted in the process, music has to move on and assimilate new influences if it's to evolve and survive.

Just as those rolling middle-class white Stones from South London mixed a little rock 'n' roll with Chicago blues in their musical test tubes to blend a 'new' product for a hungry new audience, so these six sons of rather better-heeled Jamaican parents would fuse dance music with orthodox reggae and create, to quote one of their song titles, 'roots with quality'.

Third World didn't hail from Trenchtown, but their distinctive reggae lite would help to internationalise the music and take it to places like West Africa, Brazil and even, for Jah's sake, New Zealand. That's not something to be sniffed at. So excuse me a moment please: 'love's got me dancing on the floor...'

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.