Wessell Anderson Gerry Hemingway Dave Stryker John ... - Downbeat

SubScrIbe
877-904-JAZZ
16 DOWNBEAT JULY 2011
Vinyl Freak | BY JoHn corBETT
red Garland
Quintet
Red’s Good Groove
JAZZlAND 7-iNCH, 1962
AMM
At The Roundhouse
INCUS EP, 1972
I’ve been thinking about jukeboxes lately.
Strictly in terms of musical selection,
my iPod now does the job of a jukebox.
A sort of hyper-juke, in fact, given that I
have about 15,000 songs loaded up and
can simply put it on “shuffle” and let my
little selector do all the work, keeping me
entertained for hours at a stretch, consistently
teasing my brain by introducing impromptu
Blindfold Tests into my day. But
shuffle only really works for me if i pay attention
to it. If it’s just background, it takes
all the interest away and can homogenize
even the greatest music. If I need background,
I prefer to listen to something
more concentratedly programmed, like
an album or an artist or even just a genre.
On the other hand, by shifting my
attention, the activity of shuffling can
take on a different significance. in recent
months, I’ve taken to pretending that
my iPod is a disc jockey. That way I can
judge its performance. Sometimes it’s in
the zone, and sometimes it loses the thread.
But when I attend to the iPod as a sort of
miniature DJ, there’s something at stake in its
juxtapositions, transitions, good choices and
fumbles. My colleagues might think I’m weird
when i blurt out: “iPod is on fire today!” But
that’s how I feel when it abuts two things that
somehow work but would never have seemed
like a match.
Looking through my singles recently, I
thought a little about how much jukeboxes
were like that, how they were harbingers of
the possibility of random play, the idea that
a machine could make cool decisions. Here
you have a format, the 7-inch single, which is
a standard unit. Anything could be put on it;
wildly divergent music could be programmed
using the same automaton. Two record covers
caught my attention, and I immediately
imagined them played back to back on a
jukebox. Here’s the Red Garland Quintet, with
the beautiful graphic of a record profile, with
a nifty arrow pointing down into the groove
like a stylus. Super bad hard-bop, with a topflight
lineup, Blue Mitchell’s trumpet, Pepper
Adams’ baritone sax, along with Sam and
Philly Joe Jones on rhythm along with their
leader. It was, quite literally, music made for
jukeboxes, a black-and-white picture sleeve
released alongside the color LP version.
Now switch radically to a beautiful, extremely
rare single by the British improvising
group AMM. This gem, which, like the Garland,
has been reissued on CD, featured short
excerpts from a 45-minute performance by
the duo version of the group, with Lou Gare
on tenor saxophone and Eddie Prévost on
drums. I love the idea of a groovy jazz session
interrupted by a spacious, noisy spate
of freely improvised music. It’s the kind of
thing that my iPod might kick up, but there’s
the added thought of the actual vinyl whirling
around in the juke, the heavy tone-arm
slapping down on the disc, the vinyl living its
ephemeral life, serving its life’s purpose—to
make us listen, to entertain us, maybe to
make us think and feel something we haven’t
thought or felt before. DB
EMAIL THE VINYL FREAK: VINYLFREAK@DOWNBEAT.COM
More than 60 years separate the first jazz recording in 1917 and the introduction of the CD in the early ’80s. in this column, DB’s
Vinyl Freak unearths some of the musical gems made during this time that have yet to be reissued on CD.