A few words, In Ten Tracks: Elvis Costello, Bill Evans & Self-Confidence
Who I Am and Why I Do This
Hello, and thanks for signing up and being a regular reader of New Directions in Music. I thought this week that I’d do a little intro to give you all an idea of what I’m about and why I’m doing this.
My name is Marshall Bowden I’ve been writing about music for the last eighteen years, beginning with a stint as the first Classic Jazz guide at About.com in 2000. In 2002 I started my own website, Jazzitude, which ran successfully until 2010. I’ve also written for a variety of print and online publications, including JazzIz, PopMatters, Jazz Times, All About Jazz, and Medium. Besides NDIM I also run a blog called Eat a Tangerine that talks about mindful and conscious living, yoga & Buddhism, and health/wellness.
I grew up reading some of the greatest journalism and writing about music in magazines like Rolling Stone, Creem, NME, New York Rocker, Spin, Down Beat, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, and others. I read reviews and profiles by the great music writers who invented the game—Lester Bangs, Kurt Loder, Greil Marcus, Nat Hentoff, Ira Gitler, Lilian Roxan, Leonard Feather, Ellen Willis, Lisa Robinson, Ted Gioia, Doug Ramsey, Nick Kent, Ben Fong Torres, Cameron Crowe, Hunter S Thompson, Harvey Pekar and others too numerous to name.
Like a lot of the music business, music writing was hit hard by the disruption of digital media. It was a one-two punch: first the recording and distribution of the music itself changed, making it less necessary for writers to offer their opinions on the latest releases, and in addition, the world of published media was undergoing its own disruption as music magazines and the stores that sold them disappeared one by one. With a certain degree of stabilization, music writing is making a real comeback. Most of it is in the digital space, but the level of writing right now is amazing and there is something for everyone out there.
I love music and I love researching and writing about its creators and the way their music fits into the social and political history of its region, how it is influenced by the technology of recording and delivering it, the instruments, innovations, and new directions that it pushes all of us into when we hear something that makes us take notice.
That’s the reason I started publishing NDIM, and my guess is that’s the reason you started reading it. If you enjoy pieces in the newsletter, please like them with the little heart under the post title, and also feel free to comment on what you like and what you’d like to see more of here.
Now let’s get to the newsletter. This week I’m starting with a first time feature called ‘In Ten Tracks.’ It’s a selection of tracks by an artist together with a YouTube playlist and a Spotify playlist of ten tracks that I really love by an artist. These will tend to be deeper cuts, not to be found on the artist’s Greatest Hits, but there will no doubt be familiar, popular titles as well. For this inaugural edition, I’ve chosen to focus on Elvis Costello.
Elvis Costello: In Ten Tracks
Note: Due to licensing issues, “I Almost Had a Weakness” and “Ship of Fools” are not available via Spotify. These are replaced with the tracks “Battered Old Bird” and “American Without Tears.” In addition, the Bill Frisell edition of “Love Field” is not available and has been replaced with the original album version from Goodbye Cruel World.
45 No, it's not about the current occupant of the White House. This song was from Costello's 2002 album When I Was Cruel and was written on the occasion of his 45th birthday. The term '45' applies to the year, to a 45 rpm single, and to the caliber of a gun. The song looks back on the years of Costello's life in 9 year intervals from the hear of his birth to his 45th birthday. "There's a stack of shellac and vinyl/Which is yours now and which is mine?"
I Almost Had a Weakness This song cycle (The Juliet Letters) for strings and voice was released in 1993, a collaboration between Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. The conceit was that the songs are all letters of different kinds--love letters, hate letters, a suicide note, a request for help from Juliet Capulet. The piece was a true collaboration, in that all five musicians contribute to both the composition of the music and the lyrics. "I Almost Had a Weakness" is a rant by an aunt about her 'bastard' nephew and his no-neck monster kids: "Cause when I die, the cats and dogs will jump up and down/And you little swines will get nothing/Though I almost had a weakness."
The Other Side of Summer 1991's Mighty Like a Rose was the first new Costello album I purchased on CD, and this lead off song has always been a playlist favorite. Costello's lyrics skewer the idea of the perfect summer with a song about all the darker aspects of the season from homelessness to unwanted pregnancy to not being good looking enough, all with Beach Boys-inspired background vocals. The lyrics "Madman standing by the side of the road saying/'Look at my eyes, look at my eyes, look at my eyes, look at my eyes'" always reminds me of a hitchhiking scene from the TV adaptation of Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives. And he famously snarks at John Lennon with the lines "Was it a millionaire/Who said imagine no possessions..."
Veronica One of several songs Costello and Paul McCartney wrote together and recorded demos of. Some of the songs ended up on McCartney's Flowers in the Dirt album, while Costello parceled songs out over several albums. This one was on Spike, one of his best selling U.S. releases, and it's a beautiful and personal portrait of an elderly woman who slips in and out of her memories, based on Costello’s own grandmother. "It was a strange thing to have been called in to cowrite songs for Paul ‘s next record and to start out with something so personal, as it would have been so very easy to set these words to slow melancholic music of my own. I wanted the song to defy the decay and have some sense of joy, and I suppose the music that Paul and I wrote together even ended up smuggling the story of ‘Veronica’ onto the radio."
Accidents Will Happen This version, recorded live at Hollywood High in 1978, was released as a seven inch EP along with original pressings of Armed Forces. Costello sings the song at a slower tempo, accompanied only by Steve Nieve at the piano. From the beginning Costello and Nieve had a special musical relationship, with the keyboard player's staccato organ and rococo piano fill-ins providing the perfect foil for Costello's lyrics. Eventually the duo went out on the road together in an intimate tour to promote Costello's 1996 album All This Useless Beauty. Those dates were recorded and released on five promotional-only CDs, which were later collected in the box set Costello Nieve. In 1978, this performance put the world on notice that Costello was much more than a one trick, new wave, angry young man.
Waiting For the End of the World The final track from Costello's debut album My Aim is True, this song has all of the in your face immediacy that Elvis Costello was initially known for. In this '78 live performance he's backed by the Attractions, though on the album he's backed by a pickup band, Clover, that later turned into Huey Lewis' the News.
Love Field Version with Bill Frisell recorded live at the Meltdown Festival in 1995. Frisell's gently moving, cloud-like background is perfect for this dreamy song that came from Goodbye Cruel World, which Costello has declared to be the worst album he and the Attractions made together. The songs are good but the production is weirdly off, and the arrangements don't have their usual sharp focus. But this song...it creates its own bubble of feverish fantasy and dreamscape, not at all like anything Costello had done before or, really, since. It says something that Costello selected this song to include on his 2-CD hand-curated greatest hits collections Girls Girls Girls.
Ship of Fools Originally recorded for the Grateful Dead tribute album Deadicated, Elvis makes this song his own, simultaneously giving respect to the Dead's performance and putting an extra shine on one of Garcia's most beautiful songs. He revisited the song with Steve Nieve in a May 5, 1995 performance at the Filmore in San Francisco. This version is the final track on Disc 2 of the 5 disc U.S.-only release Costello and Nieve, recorded at dates in five American cities.
In the Darkest Place Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach have individually created some of my favorite pop songs, so it is no surprise that I loved the 1998 release Painted From Memory, a collaboration between the songwriting giants. There are so many great songs on this album it's difficult to single one out, but the album's opening gambit, "In the Darkest Place" serves as a wonderful overture. Featuring Costello's tortured lyrics over Bacharach's aching melodies and sunny California pop arrangements it's perfectly balanced between the two artists, as though they were meant to work together.
Shipbuilding The most poetic, observational anti-war song ever, written during Great Britain's Falkland Islands conflict. Robert Wyatt recorded it first, shortly after the conflict ended, and Costello released his version on Punch the Clock (1982). Costello's version features a gorgeous string arrangement by David Bedford, who orchestrated and conducted orchestral versions of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and Hergest Ridge. Costello also brought in jazz trumpet player Chet Baker, who was in the twilight of his career. Baker played and sang Costello’s “Almost Blue” in performances throughout the remaining six years of his life.
Feature Article:
Bill Evans and Self-Confidence
I’ve been listening to the Bill Evans Complete Riverside Recordings box set and thinking about jazz musicians and self-confidence. The environment of jazz has always been competitive and therefore required a lot of belief in oneself and what one was doing in order to just continue to play and develop.
Take Miles Davis, a supremely confident musician if ever there was one. But when Miles first climbed on the bandstand, was first recording with Charlie Parker, he couldn’t really cut it. It doesn’t take more than a cursory listen to those early sides to realize that Miles was not a gifted bop player. Davis had a couple of choices: he could woodshed until he became a consummate bop improviser, he could pursue his own style and sound, or he could pack up and go home. I think there’s little doubt about the path he chose.
Bill Evans chose a similar route. Evans doubted his own abilities, particularly early in his career. Growing up with an alcoholic father cannot have done much to give Evans a secure sense of self. An avid reader and one of jazz’s most articulate musicians, Evans admitted to an early lack of confidence in his playing and his vision. Believing that he lacked the talent of other musicians he listened to, Evans felt he could make up for the perceived lack of talent by working extremely hard. He didn’t satisfy his professors at Southeastern Louisiana College, though: they faulted him for not practicing exercises and scales, even though he was able to master the required pieces with ease.
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