NB: I wrote this piece in 1993 for esq, but I'm not sure whether they published such a hefty memoir. Now it belongs to the world.
"IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME"
It seems I always do things bass-ackwards.
Beach Boys Concert album in 1964, probably the first record album I ever bought, contained the standout track "Graduation Day." While introducing it, Mike Love explained the song was originally performed by the The Four Freshmen, "a group very inspirational to our careers, because they influenced Brian Wilson and his writing." Mike, seldom a master of understatement, was as accurate as he was gracious, but I didn't take his hint for more than twenty-five years, when I finally began picking up Freshmen records. The moment I heard them, I came to the conclusion that Dick Dale and Phil Spector did indeed shape Brian's music in important ways, but at the root of it all was a vocal and instrumental jazz quartet originally from small-town Indiana, of all places. The Freshmen could hardly have imagined their sound translated into southern California teen music, but the truly odd fact remains that the basic sound of The Beach Boys proceeds less from rock 'n' roll than it does from jazz, especially big-band sectional scoring, filtered through the vocal sound of the Four Freshmen.On one occasion, when asked about his earliest influences, Brian explained it this way:
My mother just pointed out a record on the radio one day ["Day by Day"] and I liked the sound of what I heard enough that I wanted to hear more, so I had to go to a record store and sample some records by the Freshmen to get satisfied. It was satisfying, but it left me really wanting more for some reason. It's just a sound, that's all it was.
Brian wore out the grooves of Four Freshmen records as he progressed from admiration to emulation. With his father he visited the group backstage at a performance at the Cocoanut Grove, one of his earliest thrills, and soon began dropping by their office in Hollywood to borrow copies of their vocal charts. Before long Brian was using the Freshmen's sound in his own way.
The Cocoanut Grove
Brian modeled the voices and arrangements for his group after the Freshmen's lineup, down to the timbre of each individual voice. He himself adopted the high tenor lead of Bob Flanigan, while Mike's bass parts were inspired by the singing (at that time) of Ken Albers. The crucial middle parts assigned to Carl Wilson and Al Jardine mirrored the Freshmen parts executed by brothers Don and Ross Barbour, who along with cousin Flanigan and friend Hal Kratzch, founded the Four Freshmen when they actually were freshmen at Butler University's Jordan Conservatory of Music in Indianapolis in 1948.
"THE DAY ISN'T LONG ENOUGH"
The American Legion hall, an old, white-sided building that looked the part, sat on the shores of Lake Winnebago. Inside, the tables were lined up in long rows beneath a banner welcoming The Four Freshmen. Surely The Beach Boys were never feted in a place like this. Most of the fans were already queued up for beers at a cash bar in an adjoining room.
I found a stool, ordered a bottle of Stroh's, and began eavesdropping on a couple of old guys. "Rosemary Clooney... The Pied Pipers... Anita O'Day... Frank Sinatra..." They were not what I'd call hard-core jazz people, who by and large prefer instrumental music, whether arranged or improvised. Four Freshmen fans seem to occupy an area of the market between jazz and pop, as those terms were understood forty years ago. The defining trends in jazz proper do not greatly interest them.
A half hour later I was standing in the dinner line, where John and Dolores introduced me to Nikki Gary, the manager of The Four Freshmen, Bill Comstock, and finally the man himself, Bob Flanigan, who seemed in a very convivial mood. He invited me to interview each Freshman after dinner. I chose a table out of the way and readied a cassette.
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| L to R: Bob Flanigan, Mike Beisner, Greg Stegeman, Autie Goodman |
AUTIE GOODMAN, now a fourteen-year veteran of the Freshmen, was the first to drop by. He came to the group after a ten-year career with the Modernaires vocal quintet and work with the bands of Ray Eberle and Tex Beneke. I asked Autie if the admiration for the Freshmen by The Beach Boys was mutual:
"I have two sons who were brought up in that era. I hardly listen to anything but Nat Cole and jazz things. I don't listen to any contemporary things at all. I appreciate what they do, but i'm not interested in it because I was brought up in the era of jazz.and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
"I think the Beach Boys got their start by listening to Bob and the group. They got their idea, and they put their own kind of modernization to it. I think the Freshmen are the reason The Beach Boys got the way they are. They put our sound to their style of music, and I think it's a marvelous tribute to Bob and the guys when they first started. I wasn't with them then, but it's a tribute to them that they could be listened to and be copied by a contemporary group. Also, Tony Butala of The Lettermen said they started out singing like the Freshmen before they got to be The Lettermen. So a lot of contemporary people have adapted our style of singing to their own style, and it's a great tribute to the group.
"Bob used to do a put-on of "Surfer Girl" just to show that he could do it, but we've never done Beach Boys songs seriously. We have to play to our fans, and besides it would be silly. It would just sound like us doing their songs. But if they've got something we could do, we sure would do it. I'm sure Bob would like to do it."
According to Autie, the current Four Freshmen arrangements of "April in Paris" and "Li'l Darlin'" were taken from The Modernaires' book. Presently Mike Beisner does nearly all the new arrangements for the Freshmen. "I'm strictly a jazz musician. I don't write any music. I just sing it and play jazz saxophone."
GREG STEGEMAN looks to be going on twenty-eight, though he is actually forty and has had a long career in music since his mother gave him his first cornet. Greg's discovery of The Four Freshmen came was when he was fifteen, and within a few years he acquired all their record albums. A long stretch and many jobs later, he finally joined the group in August, 1989, ably filling in for the absent multi -instrumentalist Mike Beisner.
We began talking about Greg's skills as an arranger:
"I'm just starting to write for the group. I've written in that style in the past, but the Four Freshmen library is so vast, and Mike is such an outstanding writer, that it's tough to squeeze one of my things in. For a while we were doing my arrangement of "My One and Only Love," and "The Meaning of the Blues" is another thing I've brought into the group."
Greg agreed with me that the secret of Four Freshmen harmony lies in its inner voicing. "Some day we'd like to record just the inner parts to see how they move. It's all meant to create one sound. Ideally, not one particular part is supposed to stick out. The absence of vibrato allows the chords to really lock in."
Is Greg a Brian Wilson fan? "I sure am. In fact, given my age, when I was growing up The Beach Boys were the guys on the radio. I had no idea who The Four Freshmen were. That [was] something my parents had in their collection. And then I realized that what I liked about The Beach Boys was their harmony, and indirectly they led me to the Freshmen. In fact, on one of the early Beach Boys albums (Little Deuce Coupe) they did "A Young Man Is Gone," which was "Their Hearts Were Full of Spring" with different lyrics, as a tune about James Dean. That knocked me out more than anything else. That was my favorite Beach Boys song. After I realized that was a Freshmen arrangement, the I knew I'd found my sound. My parents had the original 5 Trombones album, and after that it was all over." Greg also dug the Beach Boys' a cappella on "The Lord's Prayer."
BOB FLANIGAN said he actually recalls meeting the young Brian Wilson. "He was just a very young man with his family, and I wasn't really aware of who I was talking to-- Well, I was, but I didn't know what he would become. Brian was the catalyst for that group. He did the writing, the lead singing, and he was, for my money, the most important part of The Beach Boys in the early days. It's just a shame that things went in the wrong direction for him for a period of time, because he's a very, very talented man, and the group has done some awfully good things.
"Of all the groups throughout the world that have copied The Four Freshmen, The Beach Boys are one of the very few who, when they do something of ours, always give us credit. They say, 'This is something-- "Graduation Day," or whatever it might be-- 'This was recorded by The Four Freshmen.' Which isn't necessary, but I think it's very nice."
Flanigan was recently honored by his hometown, Greencastle, Indiana. It was a short trip from home to the Jordan College of Music in Indianapolis, where the Freshmen spent their formative years in 1948 and '49. "When we first started singing, we had no arrangements. We took each chord, and we harmonized it, the four of us, by ear and then remembered what we had done. We listened to The Mel-Tones, a group that Mel Tormé had with Artie Shaw, and also The Pastels, who were with the Stan Kenton band. They influenced us a lot. But those early tunes were all done individually. A guy would say, 'Let me try this part.' That would work, and then someone else would say, 'I'll try this,' and so on. We'd put those things together.
"We'd sound that way because we were always very influenced by the Stan Kenton band, and as we progressed musically we became even more so. We always wanted to sound as much like the Kenton trombone section as you could sound, vocally. Without Stan, in many ways, we wouldn't have lasted very long. A lot of people think of us as like a sax section or a trumpet section or a trombone section. Because we were all musicians, and everybody that's been in the group is a musician first and a singer second, we think like a section rather than a singing group. That's one big difference between us and most of the groups."
Though The Four Freshmen started as a musical cooperative without a single arranging genius, Dick Reynolds stepped into the picture in 1951, while he was a trombonist-arranger with the Ray Anthony band in Hollywood. "We were working in Jerry Wald's Studio Club. The Anthony band was playing at the Hollywood Palladium, which was just half a block away, and guys would come in and have a drink. We met Dick and became friends, but there was no thought of his writing for us at the time. Then in 1955 we got the opportunity to do a song, "How Can I Tell Her," in a movie called Lucy Gallant. Lee Gillette, our boss at Capitol, said, "You guys remember Dick Reynolds? He's freelancing now in New York, and I think he's the guy that should write this arrangement. So Dick came out to California and wrote the thing, we recorded it, and that was our first experience with Dick as an arranger.
"The association lasted until his death a couple of years ago. In the beginning, Dick was not one of the big names in th business, although he was a great craftsman. He did arrange many fine things for the Anthony band, like "Chattanooga Choo Choo," but nobody knew who he was. When he started writing for us, we became his claim to fame. Then he wrote for Roy Clark and The Beach Boys. He wrote for everybody, including Lawrence Welk. He could write anything, from charts for Welk to charts for the Kenton band.
"Over the years we've used a lot of different arrangers: Dick Reynolds, Pete Rugolo, Nelson Riddle, Billy May. But by that time, we had established what The Four Freshmen were supposed to sound like. And if you get an arranger of that caliber, they know what we're supposed to sound like. There's no problem, go straight ahead. They each add their own personal touch to it, which makes it still The Four Freshmen, but The Four Freshmen presented in many different. ways.
MIKE BEISNER is the youngest Freshman, though now a ten-year veteran with the group, discounting a hiatus in 1989-'90. At the age of sixteen Mike filled a trumpet chair in Stan Kenton's orchestra, and by 1981, when Flanigan recruited him, he had mastered nearly the entire range of brass instruments. When we started talking, Mike was discussing makes and models of flugelhorns and trombones with an admirer standing nearby. I commented that he had contributed many arrangements to the current book, both vocal and instrumental.
"Oh yeah. "April in Paris" is one of my charts, and the Ellington medleys one of mine. "Li'l Darlin'" and several others are too. "The Song Is You" is Kirk Marcy's arrangement; it's the only one he ever wrote, right before he left. I don't think we ever performed that with Kirk. Before joining The Four Freshmen, I had done a lot of writing for other people. One of the first things I did for the Freshmen was the Ellington medley.*** When I joined the group there was another fellow named Ron Henley, who joined at the same time. We were both horn players-slash-keyboard players. The group had just scratched the surface of doing four-horn arrangements, and I saw all this brass sitting around and thought, "Why aren't we using all these horns?" So I did some of the old tunes in the book, like "Angel Eyes," and started writing horn parts. All the four-horn things we do, I wrote.
"Then I started working on the Ellington medley. I had an idea for "Solitude" as an a cappella piece, and I sort of had the medley started. It just evolved with different pieces, and it took quite a while. I've been an Duke Ellington fan for years. Duke used some voicing different from anybody else's. On "Mood Indigo" he used a bass clarinet, muted trombone, and muted trumpet. There's a lot of different colors. That's what I enjoy most about Ellington's band. You know, it wasn't the tightest band that ever worked, but it definitely had a life of its own, and I've always really liked that. The voicing and the melodies that came out of Duke and Billy Strayhorn. Classic stuff."
On Freshmen vocal arrangements: "Maybe forty-three years ago, when they first started, nobody else had ever done that type of harmony. You had your barber shop groups, where the melody or lead voice is in the middle the chord, with harmony on top and bottom, and there were other groups that maybe had two- or three-part harmony with simple, triad-like voicing."
***"Sophisticated Suite" can be heard on the groups's 1986 Pausa album, Fresh!
Here we were interrupted by another well-wisher, and by the time we resumed, the subject had changed to Mike's own path to The Four Freshmen:
"I was fourteen and taking private trumpet lessons from a teacher who had great ears and listened to the right stuff. At that time I was listening to Al Hirt, Doc Severinsen, and those kinds of trumpeters. This guy asked, 'Have you ever heard Maynard Ferguson, in the Stan Kenton band?' I said, 'Well, I've heard the name, but I really don't know.' 'I've got a couple of albums you ought to hear.' And he put on a piece Maynard recorded with Stan. I heard this guy and said, 'That's just not possible on trumpet.' It just blew me away. Then he put on the Kenton set from the Road Show album, and my mind was made up: If I had a big band, this is how I'd want it to sound. And as I progressed as a trumpet player, that's how I wanted to sound, like Maynard in the '50s.
"Then he turned the record over, and this was my first introduction to the Freshmen. 'Who's that?' 'Well, that's a vocal group called The Four Freshmen.' 'Wow. If I had a vocal group, that's how I'd want it to sound.' So that was my eye-opening, awakening experience, in the same afternoon, to Maynard, the Kenton band, and The Four Freshmen. This guy turned my head around for life."
The Four Freshmen, Mike told me, are on the road as much as 240 days a year, not counting the work they pick up working around their home base of Las Vegas, but there have bee some slack periods, such as the idle weeks of the recent Persian Gulf War. Nevertheless, the Freshmen are now on salary out of Bob Flanigan's pocket, fifty-two weeks a year, whether of not there is work. They generally use their off-time to rehearse and hone their sound.
ROSS BARBOUR, in his time the group's drummer, eventually stepped into the role of supplying comic patter between songs (much as Mike Love has functioned in The Beach Boys). He seemed most gratified with the present festivities. "Until now, we hadn't had seven Freshmen together in a room. We have a reunion every year or so, but this is the largest gathering yet of the group itself."
"Sweet Lorraine"
Of his present life in Simi Valley: "Kenny Albers lives a couple of miles from me. I see him once in a while. He drives a limousine, and he never knows whether they're going to call him in the morning and say they need him at the airport immediately, and he's going to be there all day. I do movie-extra work, where I get a call the evening before, saying, 'At seven in the morning, you've got to be at Pismo Beach,' or whatever. With our silly schedules, we can't ever plan to go out for a beer. We're not that organized."
Like Flanigan, Ross is fond of the memory of the group's early days at Jordan College at Thirteenth and Delaware in Indianapolis, which then consisted the William Henry Harrison home surrounded by quonset huts. Like many others, the Freshmen attended college on the G.I. Bill:
"We owed a lot to that G.I. Bill. Because what was the likelihood, first of all, that two brothers two years apart would be freshmen together in the same school, much less a cousin and Hal Kratzch, who was older? I've said often that I think God is a Freshman fan: He wanted to see what we were going to be able to do, and He kept making it possible. He made it obvious to us, right there in school, when we started singing with this group and hearing these sounds. It was the only thing we wanted to hear. We disregarded our classes and made bad grades, all of us.
"Then, to be a professional musician was kind of a wild-eyed dream. I was nineteen when we went on the road, so we didn't really have a developed life-ambition. When Hal brought it up, we thought well, it was something to do. It was better than going back to college again. And that's the choice we made. It wasn't as though we were a group intent on making musical history and influencing vocal groups from then on. We started out singing because we wanted to hear what we were going to sing. We were singing things like nobody else had sung, and we wanted to hear it done.
"We each chose our own notes, and we met in a sort of committee: 'Is that the best chord we can get? Let's try again. You sing higher, I'll sing lower.' Then on to the next chord of the song, and we'd meet on it in the same way. Sometimes we almost came to blows: 'No, we should use a major seventh.' 'Man, then we won't have a ninth to that chord!' Well, we'd finally get it settled, each chord solved by committee, really. And when you've got an arrangement like "Now You Know" or "Poinciana," you've come up with something that other groups didn't take that much trouble to do.
"That was the way we developed the sound. Later, of course, there were arrangers who wrote to make it like that. But we were singing to please ourselves, and if the people liked it, that was okay, too. We've got this sound we've got to develop, got to sing, got to pronounce. Got to hear it. What we were trying to do was a five-part vocal group with four guys and not a girl in it. You have to leave out a note, and it has to be the correct note. There are harmonics in people's ear that you don't have to sing. First of all, you don't have to sing the bass note of the chord, because the bass is going to be playing that. So that relieves one voice from the barbershop requirement of a single tonic. And if you're playing the one and five-- the tonic and the fifth-- your ear accidentally hears the third, so you don't actually have to sing the third, unless you want that to be a pronounced note. So you can sing the ninth, major seventh, whatever's up in there. But you don't have to sing do and one of these obvious notes. If you're singing do and a tenth one octave above, the five becomes what you hear in your ear. So you can leave out certain notes in certain chords. We just had to explore blindly: How do you do this? We weren't setting out to do this, thinking it through; we were hearing it through, trying to hit that chord we'd never heard a quartet sing before.
"So many of the groups had a lead voice in the middle and the other voices above or below. Barbershop quartets are that way. The Mills Brothers and a lot of other groups had the lead in the middle and harmony all around. Well, we had a lead on top, and then spaced harmony notes below that. We were blessed with Hal Kratzsh, who could sing clearly very low, and Bob Flanigan, who could sing clearly very high. Don and I were left with the challenge to for in enough big, wide notes to fill, color the area between the two dimensions. Those middle notes have to be big and round, and a lot of air to fill all the areas. If you're singing like The Pied Pipers, you can play that chord they sing with just your right hand: (sings) 'Dream when you're feeling blue...' That's all one hand. But the Freshmen stuff, you play over two octaves most of the time. Oh, we'll close and then divide into duet, trio, and so on, but the sound people recognize is that five-part sound, where there's one note they're not hearing, and it's part of them. It became a way of life for us.
"When you've got a blend and you've got the right notes, almost like they's got hooks on the sides of them, and they hook together like a chain. You can pull that chain as hard as you want, and that chord is going to ring with that tightness."
I said I thought it strange that four boys from Indiana wound up making a contribution to jazz, and Ross concurred. "It is strange. We were Kenton fans and Woody Herman fans, and of course Harry James and Artie Shaw and all the bands that played. We'd heard The Mel-Tones sing with Mel Tormé and Artie Shaw, and we'd heard The Pastels singing with the Kenton band. But they were five-part groups with a girl on top. And for us to sound like them, we had to make some desperate effort to do without a fifth voice. We never even hired a fifth voice or even discussed it. Oh, in college we tried a girl." Ross chuckled at the memory.
"We rehearsed and rehearsed a bunch of songs, and Hal had a friend at Indiana University who ran a band. There was a dance down there, and the band needed a vocal group. They called us, so we called the girl, 'Okay, we're going to Bloomington Saturday night, and we'll sing. We'll probably be there until one, and we'll be back by two or three in the morning.' 'Oh, my mother won't let me do that.' 'Well, what have you been rehearsing with us for? We've spent weeks! ' We didn't have any girl after that."
On The Beach Boys: "They listened to us, and I know Brian did a lot of studying of the Freshmen, especially of Bob. Brian has pronounced that sound himself, trying to sing like Bob. Bruce Johnston is a good man. He's the only one in the group I really know, whom I've spent any time talking with. We've seen the group and waved and shook hands, bumped into each other, but Bruce is the only one I've really talked to. We saw them once in Salt Lake City, at a ballroom or in an amusement park.
"It's a shame that they aren't getting along now. I know the Freshmen have had disagreements, but still we've been able to sustain our friendship."
SUNDAY MORNING CODA: "I'M ALWAYS" CHASING RAINBOWS"
When I looked at my watch, it was past midnight, and I'd planned to leave early in the morning. I said good night and thanks to John Banks and headed back to the Hilton. After checking out Sunday morning I took a table in the hotel restaurant and ordered the All-American breakfast. While wolfing it down, I heard Bob Flanigan's unmistakable voice rising above the crowd at the other end of the room, and when I finished I found him sitting in a booth, reminiscing with four or five friends. They may have bee up schmoozing all night.
My presence reminded Bob of the put-on The Four Freshmen used to do with "Surfer Girl" (as they can be heard on their Live at Butler album from 1972, now on CD). With a straight face he used to introduce the number with a very serious-sounding bit about how The Beach Boys had asked him to replace Brian Wilson. One night Bruce Johnston was in the audience, and even he was taken in by Bob's b.s.
The more I thought of it, though, it didn't seem such a bad idea after all.
IN ROTATION:
PIGGING OUT IN MADISON, early April, '21
- Sun Ra and His Arkestra, To Those on Earth and Other Worlds (Strut, mid-1950s-mid 1980s)
With some exceptions, most of the selections have been previously released on Ra's albums and singles, mostly upon the El Saturn label, however rare. Gilles Peterson, of the Strut label, wrote the album notes and produced the compilation. Discographical information is as complete as possible.
- Charlie Haden, Jim Hall, s/t (Impulse, 1990)
A complete surprise to me and a most worthy addition to the celebrated string of live sessions Haden recorded regularly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1989 and the '90s, heretofore on the Verve label as "The Montreal Tapes." (An odd crew of industry bedfellows have participated in this release, the Universal Music Group and Impulse!_Records on the one hand, and Blue Note Records overseeing the disc's manufacture.)
A superb set of performances, this guitar/ bass pairing is as mutually simpatico a duet as I've ever heard. No surprise: Jim Hall was in attendance.
- The Kinks, Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)(Pye/ BMG/ abkco, 1969)
"Victoria"
"Lincoln County"
This double-CD set is not the most extravagant tribute to Arthur available (there's a lavish 4-CD box including both mono and stereo versions of the album, plus numerous other goodies) but it suffices; Disc One is dedicated to the album itself, in its stereo version, while Disc Two collects twelve stereo tracks from the late '60s and is subtitled "The Great Lost Dave Davies Album" (the booklet corrects several misattributions of authorship in prior releases). Both discs are filled out with bonus tracks.
Now the album proper: it's one of the finest Kinks albums, which is saying a lot. The natural inclination was, and is, to compare it to Tommy, The Who's so-called rock opera. That release, in a double-LP set, a misconceived epic about "that deaf, dumb, blind kid's" spiritual redemption, was a windy, overstuffed, gassy propaganda track for whoever Pete Townsend's guru at the time was.
Not so Arthur. Conceived as a soundtrack to a television production that was never completed, it tells the story of an ordinary Englishman who has survived both World Wars, the Great Depression between them, and an unhappy present existence in his heavily mortgaged "Shangri-La." Starting with the anthemic tribute to Victoria" and her empire where "the sun never sets," Ray Davies's lyrics do not spare the title character. Arthur's God-and-country idealism is set against the brutality and cynicism of the politicians and military leaders who led an entire generation to the slaughter of war. As the line goes in "Yes Sir, No Sir":
If the scum are going to make the bugger fight,
We'll be sure to have deserters shot on sight.
If he dies, we'll send a medal to his wife.
Life in the UK grinds on through the Twentieth Century, and our ordinary hero chooses to ignore or explain away his servile predicament. "Let all the Chinese and the Spanish do the fighting. They'll never find us," goes the lyric to "Driving," as his family enjoys a picnic in the countryside.
This 2019 remastering is easily the best I've heard.
"Plasticman" in stereo
- Otis Redding, The Dock of the Bay (Atco, 1968)
Cropper, "Duck" Dunn, etc. I love Otis, but except for the title track, I've never heard any of this before. A joyous statement to mark the shortening of a talented life.
- The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Further Out (Columbia, 1961)
Brubeck was an early idol of mine, all the way back to the days Indianapolis radio jock Jim Shelton used the oddly attractive "Take Five" to introduce his "Platter Party" rock 'n' roll program on WIBC each afternoon. (In those days 'IBC was an AM station.)
This 1961 followup to the wildly popular Time Out in 1959 brings the same personnel to another clever and attractive round of unusual and contrasting time-signatures, fine stuff all around. I still fondly remember such tunes as "It's a Raggy Waltz" and "Unsquare Dance" from my long-ago salad days.
" Unsquare Dance"
PIGGING OUT SIMULTANEOUSLY at Amazon
- Fred Neil, Sessions (Capitol, 1968) CD reissue
"Send Me Somebody to Love"
Sessions was my first Fred Neil album, snatched up the year it was released. For its time, it followed the radical concept of creating an album mainly of loose, all-out jamming by Neil and his cohort of studio pros, as if the audience were a fly-on-the-wall observer of the performances, warts and all. The only precedent to this kind of "concept" album I can recall was The Beach Boys Party album in 1965, although that "party" atmosphere was a carefully constructed fake.
For many years it has bothered me that the Sessions tracks contained on the otherwise-unbeatable Collector's Choice two-disc compilation The Many Sides of Fred Neil from 1998 contained an inferior take of the album's opening track, Neil's "Felicity." It used instead a shorter, less interesting take featured on another Neil album, Other Side of This Life. I just had to have the real thing, so I arrived eventually at this pristine CD reissue.
Other than the first two or three tracks, it requires a degree of patience to listen through a presentation of this sort, well-edited though it is. The lyrics to "Merry Go Round" are deep ("Where's the Jim Crow section of your merry-go-round?/ I just can't find the back," and I always feel the same thrill as the band after their finish of "Looks Like Rain"; "Wheeee! Fly United!"
This set is a splurge, but I had to have it: Miles Davis's complete Newport Jazz Festival performances from 1955, 1966 and '67, 1971, 1973, and 1975, spread over four discs.
Miles at Newport, 1955
NEXT: Kimson Plaut
