Lazy Sunday Afternoon - Live (not quite) at Fillmore West

For this week's music feature, a bit of jazz/funk/soul...

If you’re anything like me there’s a good chance you first encountered King Curtis in the film Withnail and I – that’s his smoky sax version of A Whiter Shade of Pale playing as we pan across the squalid flat in the wonderfully atmospheric opening sequence.

The track is taken from the 1971 album Live at Fillmore West, as is Curtis’s almost parodically funky ‘introducing the band’ number Memphis Soul Stew ("and now we need a pound of fatback drums...").

Curtis Ousley (born 1934) started as a New York session musician, playing saxophone for Buddy Holly and Andy Williams, amongst others. Later he headed up the Kingpins, opening for the Beatles at their 1965 Shea Stadium show. The Kingpins of course were Aretha Franklin's backing band, and the Live at Fillmore West recording was made during a run of concerts with Franklin in San Francisco. It was to be King Curtis's last recording. On 13 August 1971 Curtis was lugging an air-conditioning unit back to his brownstone apartment in NY, when he encountered a pair of junkies doing what junkies do on his front steps. Curtis objected and in the resulting dispute one of them, Juan Montanez, stabbed him in the chest. Curtis managed to wrest the knife from his assailant and knife him four times before collapsing. Montanez survived and was eventually sentenced for murder; Curtis died within the hour.

Jesse Jackson adminstered his funeral, at which both Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder performed. He is buried at the Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale, New Jersey - a particularly jazzy graveyard as the remains of John Coltrane and Count Basie are there too.

Unfortunately there don't seem to be vids available from the actual Fillmore Street gigs, but the ones below will give the general idea...

Lazy Sunday Afternoon - Four letters

Being a retroprogressive site, The Dabbler approves of Youtube music videos about snail mail. For this week's music feature, here are four songs about letter-writing to help while away your Sunday afternoon...

The Young/Heyman standard Love Letters is an unavoidable choice. It’s been rendered by scores of artists, notably Elvis in 1966 and Alison Moyet in 1987, who respectively took it to numbers 6 and 4 in the UK charts. Ketty Lester, below, also managed number 4 in 1962 and I've gone for her - even though once Elvis has sung a song, it sort of stays sung - because I never knew what she looked like (rather stunning).

Alex Chiltern, who died earlier this year, had one of the 1960s' great black soul voices - which was quite surprising given that he was a skinny white boy. A suspiciously odd (ie. stoned) performance here from his first band The Box Tops of their most memorable hit, observe in particular the keyboardist's weirdness from about 1m15s.

The White Stripes, meanwhile, are eminently ‘retroprogressive’ with their raw blues played at an earsplitting, 21st century volume and an attention span-deficient speed.

Finally, Please Read the Letter is one of the best songs from one of the best albums of last few years, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Raising Sand. Enjoy.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon – Mad Pianists

The evidence would suggest that piano virtuosity and wild eccentricity go hand-in-hand. This Sunday, here are three of the most troubled Greats (and this is not even to mention David Helfgott, made famous by the movie Shine, or Grigory Sokolov, who takes each piano apart before playing it and makes notes of his observations in a book).

Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997)
One of the 20th Century’s supreme virtuosos, the Russian played at Stalin’s funeral but preferred to give impromptu free concerts at tiny, remote towns. He claimed that his repertoire ran “to around eighty different programs, not counting chamber works” and at a wedding he once played the entire first act of Madame Butterfly from memory for a small group of guests. This prodigious memory was also a curse: a '”terrifying, nonselective memory”. He could recall the name of every person he ever met and if one escaped him he lost sleep over it. He was tormented by a droning melody in his head, which he eventually identified as a version of Rachmaninoff's ''Vocalise'', heard in childhood. At one troubled period in his life he insisted on having in his possession, at all times, a plastic pink lobster. More here.

Here is Richter playing Chopin's Etude no.4 extremely fast.




John Ogdon (1937-1989)
A sadder case, this. Regarded as perhaps the greatest British pianist as well as a prolific composer, Ogdon was a gentle giant. He won the prestigious Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition in 1962 with performances of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, as well as the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto which became his signature piece, but he also had a keen appetite for new, experimental music. He gave the first performance in 50 years of Kaikhosru Sorabji’s four hour epic, Opus Clavicembalisticum, and then offered to repeat the entire piece as an encore. But his life was blighted by chronic depression and mental illness (never fully diagnosed but probably schizophrenia) which led to three suicide attempts: one, gruesomely, by cutting his own throat. He spent long periods in Maudsley Hospital, London, undergoing lithium treatment and electroshock therapy, yet he died at the age of 52 of natural causes connected with undiagnosed diabetes. More here and here.

Here he plays Debussy's La Danse de Puck




Glenn Gould (1932 – 1982)
One of the most notoriously eccentric (to put it mildly) of all pianists, the Canadian called himself ‘The Last Puritan’ and once said that "Mozart was a bad composer who died too late rather than too early". When playing he usually accompanied himself with odd humming (to the immense irritation of many, especially sound engineers during recordings), made strange physical movements and at concerts always insisted on sitting, on a knackered old chair made by his father, precisely 14 inches above the floor. He was obsessive about the cold, wearing heavy clothes even in warm climates, which once led to him being arrested for vagrancy when sitting thus attired on a park bench in Florida. He hated touching other humans, generally refusing handshakes, and such was his hypochondria that when an employee of Steinway Hall tapped him on the back he wore a body cast for a month and threatened to sue the company. He died at the age of 50, after suffering a stroke. More here.

Here is a pretty sublime Goldburg Variations...

Lazy Sunday Afternoon - The Small Faces

Lazy Sunday Afternoon is going to be a weekly feature here at The Dabbler: a bit of musical accompaniment to not doing very much at all. Given its name is taken from a Small Faces song we'll start with them and with that very song (along with a couple of others).

Not many people know that the Small Faces got their name because they were literally small ('face' was Mod slang for a cool customer). Tiny they were. But Steve Marriott (right) sang big - his was one of this country's great soul voices.

'Was' as he died in rather sad circumstances nearly twenty years ago (blame the usual ongoing DDH*). But he remains worshipped by some. Google him - he has probably the longest and most detailed Wikipedia entry I've ever come across, longer even than Napoleon's. Best Marriott Wiki-fact: he acted in the original 1960 production of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver' and sang the Artful Dodger's part on the album of the show.

But if he was still around I'm not sure he'd thank us for drawing attention to Lazy Sunday Afternoon. The band thought its jokiness led to their not being taken as seriously as some of their po-faced contemporaries. They were probably right - but there's nothing wrong with pop in the vein of Madness as I'm sure we music lovers living in a more mature age would agree. Indeed, they were doing something rather interesting in carrying on the spirit of old time music hall, for that was surely a strong influence.

Here it is, followed by two personal faves, Song of the Baker Man and Tin Soldier (all but the last from the splendidly eccentric Ogden's Nut Gone Flake):










* A useful acronym when talking about pop stars, Hollywood actors, that bloke who you see down the corner shop sometimes: Drink and Drugs Hell.