The glamour of the gay night life has lured you To the places where the wine and liquor flow Where you wait to be anybody’s baby And forget the truest love you’ll ever know ~”The Wild Side of Life” H. Thompson
Henry William Thompson (September 3, 1925 – November 6, 2007), known professionally as Hank Thompson, was an American country music entertainer whose career spanned seven decades. He sold more than 60 million records worldwide.
Thompson’s musical style, characterized as honky tonk Western swing, was a mixture of fiddles, electric guitar and steel guitar that featured his distinctive, smooth baritone vocals.
His backing band, The Brazos Valley Boys, was voted the top Country Western Band for 14 years in a row by Billboard. The primary difference between his music and that of Bob Wills was that Thompson, who used the swing beat and instrumentation to enhance his vocals, discouraged the intense instrumental soloing from his musicians that Wills encouraged; however, the “Hank Thompson sound” exceeded Bob Wills in Top 40 country hits.
Although not as prominent on the top county charts in later decades, Thompson remained a recording artist and concert draw well into his 80s.
The 1987 novel Crazy Heart by Thomas Cobb was inspired by Thompson’s life, specifically by his practice of picking up a local band to back him when he toured. In 2009 Cobb’s novel was turned into a successful film directed by Scott Cooper and starring Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges.
From cmt.com – Ronnie Pugh:
Few performers in any era of the music have known and appreciated its history as well, and Thompson, elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989, was a big part of that history. His warm and rich baritone graced hits from the 1940s to the 1970s, as his award-winning Brazos Valley Boys band gave those honky-tonk hits a distinctive flavor of Western swing, much in the pattern followed later by fellow Texan George Strait.
Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body. ~Horace Silver
From Wikipedia:
Birth name
Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva
Born
September 2, 1928 (age 84)
Origin
Norwalk, Connecticut, U.S.
Genres
Post bop Modal jazz Mainstream jazz Soul jazz Jazz fusion Hard bop
Horace Silver (born September 2, 1928), born Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva in Norwalk, Connecticut, is an American jazz pianist and composer.
Silver is known for his distinctive humorous and funky playing style and for his pioneering compositional contributions to hard bop. He was influenced by a wide range of musical styles, notably gospel music, African music, and Latin American music and sometimes ventured into the soul jazz genre.
From allmusic (Chris Kelsey):
From the perspective of the early 2000s, it is clear that few jazz musicians have had a greater impact on the contemporary mainstream than Horace Silver. The hard bop style that Silver pioneered in the ’50s is now dominant, played not only by holdovers from an earlier generation, but also by fuzzy-cheeked musicians who had yet to be born when the music fell out of critical favor in the ’60s and ’70s. … read more -> allmusic.com
From allaboutjazz.com:
When Horace Silver once wrote out his rules for musical composition (in the liner notes to the 1968 record, Serenade to a Soul Sister), he expounded on the importance of “meaningful simplicity.” The pianist could have just as easily been describing his own life. For more than fifty years, Silver has simply written some of the most enduring tunes in jazz while performing them in a distinctively personal style. It’s all been straight forward enough, while decades of incredible experiences have provided the meaning. .. read more -> allaboutjazz.com
Legacy:
Silver’s music has been a major force in modern jazz. He was one of the first pioneers of the style known as hard bop, influencing such pianists as Bobby Timmons, Les McCann, and Ramsey Lewis. Second, the instrumentation of his quintet (trumpet, tenor sax, piano, double bass, and drums) served as a model for small jazz groups from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s.Further, Silver’s ensembles provided an important training ground for young players, many of whom (such as Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, Blue Mitchell,Woody Shaw, Junior Cook, and Joe Henderson) later led similar groups of their own.
Silver’s talent did not go unnoticed among rock musicians who bore jazz influences, either; Steely Dan sent Silver into the Top 40 in the early 1970s when they crafted their biggest hit single, “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number,” off the bass riff that opens “Song for My Father.”
As social and cultural upheavals shook the nation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Silver responded to these changes through music. He commented directly on the new scene through a trio of records called United States of Mind (1970–1972) that featured the spirited vocals of Andy Bey. The composer got deeper into cosmic philosophy as his group, Silver ‘N Strings, recorded Silver ‘N Strings Play The Music of the Spheres (1979).
“He was a happy-go-lucky nihilist…. he took things exactly as they were. No more, no less.” ~Matthew Johnson, the founder of Mr. Burnside’s record label, Fat Possum.
From Wikipedia:
Birth name
Robert Lee Burnside
Born
November 23, 1926 Harmontown, Mississippi, Lafayette County, United States
Origin
Oxford, Mississippi, United States
Died
September 1, 2005 (aged 78) Memphis, Tennessee, United States
R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005),born Robert Lee Burnside, was an American blues singer,songwriter, and guitarist who lived much of his life in and around Holly Springs, Mississippi. He played music for much of his life, but did not receive much attention until the early 1990s.In the latter half of the 1990s, Burnside repeatedly recorded with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fanbase within the underground garage rock scene.
One commentator noted that Burnside…. were “present-day exponents of an edgier, electrified version of the raw, uncut Delta blues sound.”
In the 1990s, he appeared in the film Deep Blues and began recording for the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum Records.Founded byLiving Blues magazine editor Peter Redvers-Lee and Matthew Johnson, the label was dedicated to recording aging North Mississippi bluesmen such as Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.
Burnside remained with Fat Possum from that time until his death.
Burnside had a powerful, expressive voice and played both electric and acoustic guitars (both with a slide and without). His drone-based style was a characteristic of North Mississippi hill country blues rather than Mississippi Delta blues. Like other country blues musicians, he did not always adhere to 12- or 16-bar blues patterns, often adding extra beats according to his preference. He called this “Burnside style” and often commented that his backing musicians needed to be familiar with his style in order to be able to play along with him.
Burnside’s “Skinny Woman” was also interpolated into the song “Busted” by fellow Fat Possum musicians The Black Keys, who have listed Burnside as an influence on their music.
Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released in August 1965 by Columbia Records. On his previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan devoted Side One of the album to songs accompanied by an electric rock band, and Side Two to solo acoustic numbers. For Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan used rock backing on every track, except for the closing 11-minute acoustic song, “Desolation Row“. Critics have written that Dylan’s ability to combine driving, complex, blues-based rock music with the power of poetry made Highway 61 Revisited one of the most influential albums ever recorded.
Leading off with his hit single of that summer, “Like a Rolling Stone“, the album features many songs that have been acclaimed as classics and that Dylan has continued to perform live over his long career, including “Highway 61 Revisited“, “Ballad of a Thin Man“, and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues“. Dylan named the album after one of the great North American arteries, which connected his birthplace in Minnesota to southern cities famed for their musical heritage, including St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans.
Highway 61 Revisited peaked at number three in the United States charts and number four in the United Kingdom. The album has received multiple accolades and was ranked number four on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The single “Like a Rolling Stone” reached number two in the US charts and number four in the UK. It has been described by critics as Dylan’s magnum opus and was number one on Rolling Stone‘s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list. Two further songs, “Desolation Row“, and “Highway 61 Revisited“, were listed at number 185 and number 364 respectively.
Background:
In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling tired and dissatisfied with his material. “I was going to quit singing. I was very drained… I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play,” Dylan told Nat Hentoff in 1966.
“It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.”
Out of this dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote an extended piece of verse which Dylan described as a “long piece of vomit”.He refined this long poem into a song consisting of four verses and a chorus—”Like a Rolling Stone”.
Dylan told Hentoff that the process of writing and recording “Like a Rolling Stone” washed away this dissatisfaction, and renewed his enthusiasm for creating music.Speaking of the breakthrough of writing that song, forty years later, Dylan told Robert Hilburn in 2004,
“It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that… You don’t know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song.”
Highway 61 Revisited was recorded in two blocks of recording sessions, which took place in Studio A of Columbia Records in New York City, located at 799 Seventh Avenue, just north of West 52nd Street.The first session, June 15 and June 16, was produced by Tom Wilson and resulted in the single, “Like a Rolling Stone”.On July 25, Dylan performed his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, where some sections of the crowd booed his performance.Four days after Newport, Dylan returned to the recording studio. From July 29 to August 4, Dylan and his band completed recording Highway 61 Revisited, but under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Johnston.
Track listing:
Side one 1. “Like a Rolling Stone” 6:09 2. “Tombstone Blues” 5:58 3. “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” 4:09 4. “From a Buick 6” 3:19 5. “Ballad of a Thin Man” 5:58
Side two 6. “Queen Jane Approximately” 5:31 7. “Highway 61 Revisited” 3:30 8. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” 5:31 9. “Desolation Row”
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My ratings (0-10):
Reception:
Singer-songwriter Phil Ochs told Broadside magazine, immediately after the record’s release, that Dylan had “produced the most important and revolutionary album ever made”.Speaking to Anthony Scaduto five years later, Ochs said, “I put on Highway 61 and I laughed and said it’s so ridiculous. It’s impossibly good, it just can’t be that good. How can a human mind do this?“
The album cemented Dylan’s mastery of a new genre—combining verbal complexity with a hard rock sound. One 1965 reviewer wrote: “Bob Dylan used to sound like a lung cancer victim singing Woody Guthrie. Now he sounds like a Rolling Stone singing Immanuel Kant“.
The album was a hit, peaking at number 3 on the Billboard 200 chart of top albums.In August 1967, Highway 61 was certificated as a gold record.
Highway 61 Revisited has remained among the most highly acclaimed of Dylan’s works. Scaduto, Dylan’s first serious biographer, wrote that it may be “one of the most brilliant pop records ever made. As rock, it cuts through to the core of the music—a hard driving beat without frills, without self-consciousness.” Commenting on Dylan’s imagery, Scaduto wrote: “Not since Rimbaud has a poet used all the language of the street to expose the horrors of the streets, to describe a state of the union that is ugly and absurd.”
Dylan critic Michael Gray called Highway 61 “revolutionary and stunning, not just for its energy and panache but in its vision: fusing radical, electrical music … with lyrics that were light years ahead of anyone else’s; Dylan here unites the force of blues-based rock’n’roll with the power of poetry. Rock culture, in an important sense, the 1960s, started here.”
In 1995 Highway 61 Revisited was named the fifth greatest album of all time in a poll conducted by Mojo magazine.
In 2001, the TV network VH1 placed it at number 22.
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine, describing Highway 61 as “one of those albums that, quite simply, changed everything”, placed it at number four in its list of the greatest albums of all time.
The Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest songs of all time ranked “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Desolation Row” and “Like a Rolling Stone” at #364, #185 and #1, respectively.
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Yardbird and Bird,was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker acquired the nickname “Yardbird” early in his careerand the shortened form, “Bird”, which continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspired the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as “Yardbird Suite“, “Ornithology“, “Bird Gets the Worm“, and “Bird of Paradise.”
Parker was a highly influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation. Parker introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas, including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. His tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber. Many Parker recordings demonstrate virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines, sometimes combining jazz with other musical genres, including blues, Latin, and classical.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than an entertainer.
From allmusic.com – Scott Yanow:
One of a handful of musicians who can be said to have permanently changed jazz, Charlie Parker was arguably the greatest saxophonist of all time. He could play remarkably fast lines that, if slowed down to half speed, would reveal that every note made sense. “Bird,” along with his contemporaries Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell, is considered a founder of bebop; in reality he was an intuitive player who simply was expressing himself. Rather than basing his improvisations closely on the melody as was done in swing, he was a master of chordal improvising, creating new melodies that were based on the structure of a song. In fact, Bird wrote several future standards (such as “Anthropology,” “Ornithology,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” and “Ko Ko,” along with such blues numbers as “Now’s the Time” and “Parker’s Mood”) that “borrowed” and modernized the chord structures of older tunes. Parker‘s remarkable technique, fairly original sound, and ability to come up with harmonically advanced phrases that could be both logical and whimsical were highly influential. By 1950, it was impossible to play “modern jazz” with credibility without closely studying Charlie Parker. Read more -> allmusic.com
