Mary Lou Williams and feeling the spirit with non-secular music

No. 1271: Mary Lou Williams - s/t

I’m neither a fan of Christmas music nor religious music, which are often intertwined for reasons I don’t have to explain. There are exceptions—my holiday playlist, for instance, which features Can, James Brown and Jimmy Smith is reason enough to suggest maybe the former isn’t as true as I make it out to be. And in the case of the latter, the exceptions that I make are primarily for non-Christian music, but even that’s not a hard and fast rule. (See: Johnny Cash.) And it’s not even necessarily about the preachiness factor; I have a lot of reggae records and, well, there’s plenty of preachy songs about Rastafarianism. (In fact, this Dadawah record is essentially a “religious ceremony,” but like, as psychedelic dub jams. So you know… make of that what you will.) 

Mary Lou Williams’ self-titled 1964 album, which has also been released under the name Black Christ of the Andes, is not a Christmas album, but it is a religious album. However, it feels appropriate to bump this during the holiday season, in part because so much of it is choral—like, old-school, captured on a single central mic, analog with the sort of spooky archival quality that production quality lends to the music. Something you’d see on an old black-and-white TV program. 

Except it’s jazz. Gospel jazz, really. And brother, does it swing. I’m not religious, I don’t subscribe to any religion, and I can’t say that listening to non-secular music gets me any closer to believing, but man, I hear this and I kind of get it. Because this album cooks. 

Mary Lou Williams was a jazz pianist, and for that matter a child prodigy. She could play. Early on she had gigs playing with Duke Ellington and Art Blakey, which should tell you a lot right there, and by 1964 she had made this masterpiece of gospel jazz. It goes back and forth between choral vocal arrangements and instrumental jazz pieces. They’re all pretty much amazing. The vocal pieces, as I mentioned, often have a kind of eerie, uncanny quality to them, but sometimes they just swing like crazy. “Praise the Lord” is one example, where the whole room just shakes and the lead vocalist just lets loose: “EEEEEVERYBODY! CLAP YOUR HANNNNDS!” The same can be said of “Anima Christi,” and while the Latin name might make you think it’s all austere Catholic chanting, friend, it is not. It also has bass clarinet which adds a little extra color. I picked this up at Stranded Records in the East Village in New York, along with a handful of others here, and I while I had heard it before, I wasn’t necessarily looking for it. Perhaps the spirit moved me. 

As I write this, it’s two days before Christmas and it just feels right listening to this album, which as I said is definitely not a holiday album, but it’s at least in the spirit of the season I suppose, and it’s infectious as … well I suppose it’d be inappropriate to say hell, but you know what I mean. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Praise the Lord”

No. 1272: Björk - Post

I recently wrote a lengthy piece as part of the Treble 100 series on Post, so I’ll avoid repeating myself and simply talk about my own experience in becoming a Björk fan and loving this album in particular. Back in the mid-’90s, Post was kind of a big deal if you read about or listened to or watched TV programming about alternative music. Which I did: In spades. “Army of Me” was the first single, and it got some airplay on 91X and KROQ, and while I already knew and liked “Human Behavior” from her first (but not actually first) album Debut, the gnarlier, buzzing industrial trip-hop sound of this song really drew me in. It was darker, heavier, nastier—what’s not to like? 

But Post yielded a lot of singles. Six, in fact, and I remember seeing the videos for several of them on MTV. “It’s Oh So Quiet,” a cover of a campy Betty Hutton song, was one of the biggest ones, with a video directed by Spike Jonze featuring some crazy stunts like what appears to be Björk running up a wall and doing a backflip. (Side note: A friend of mine who used to run a karaoke night said he hated it when people picked this song because it was just an excuse for them to scream.) And “I Miss You,” which featured animation from Ren and Stimpy’s Jon Kricfalusi, who I think did got canceled for something but I don’t really care and I’m not going to look it up. The song slaps though. 

The enduring standout song that seems to be the critical favorite is “Hyperballad,” which I mean, who am I to argue? It’s a moving song, emotionally speaking, but the “hyper” part is all the indication you need that this, too, slaps. However, the second single was “Isobel,” which made zero impact in the United States, probably because it was a combination of being too subtle, and too much of an orchestral art-pop piece for the buzz bin tastes at the time. That said, it’s maybe my favorite song on the album, Björk at her ambitious best, crafting a work that predicted the ornate pieces on her next album Homogenic.

I saw a lot of these videos on MTV’s 120 Minutes and I think that’s what ultimately made me a Björk fan, along with a growing interest in electronic music. But Post, while heavy on club-influenced sounds, is more than that. There’s ambient balladry, there are big, buzzing dance songs, there’s sample-laden experimental pop. And there’s “Possibly Maybe,” which was sampled by DJ Shadow. Just a front-to-back masterpiece. Rating: 10.0

Listen: “Isobel”

No. 1273: Jenny Hval - Classic Objects

Here I am, writing about Jenny Hval again, the second of three in just a matter of a few posts. This happens to me a lot: I get into an artist’s new album and there’s a snowball effect wherein it seems absolutely necessary that I end up picking up the rest of their records. Same thing happened this year with Mount Eerie. Sometimes it’s just because you forget how good a band is, you know? It’s good to be reminded.

It took a while for Jenny Hval’s music to take hold for me, because so much of it is capital-a Art, like these sometimes aren’t pop records to be enjoyed but a master’s thesis with three chords. It doesn’t help that the album that seemed to be her critical breakthrough and landed on Pitchfork’s best of decade list back in 2019, Apocalypse, girl, is for my money her least satisfying album by a pretty good distance. It has its moments, but it feels like a statement in search of a good song. 

But that’s fine because she has a bunch of really good albums. Classic Objects is the opposite of Apocalypse, Girl, in that there isn’t a concept so much as just a bunch of good songs that fit together. I fell in love with “Year of Love,” the first single, when it was released in late 2021, its sort of sophisti-pop, rocksteady rhythm kind of like her take on Roxy Music’s Avalon or something, which I’m 100 percent on board with. The older I get the more affection I have for smooth ‘80s art pop (Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, etc.), though that’s not to be confused with something like, say, Level 42, which to me sounds like the canned music you hear while picking up your prescriptions at Rite Aid. (Though sometimes I hear Carly Rae Jepsen circa Emotion, so sometimes I’m on board with the Rite Aid jamz.)

“Year of Love” is, I should note, 100 percent a Jenny Hval song: It’s a groovy, kinda sexy song about how conflicted she is about getting married because of what it says about her endorsement of patriarchal capitalist systems. It’s so earnest! I’m half curious about what it would be like if she just made a purely hedonistic record, but maybe that’s where her Lost Girls project comes in, which is all progressive dance music. It’s also very good! There are other excellent songs here, like the title track, which includes a long list of items of trash and things on the ground (“gum, gum, gum, gum!”) or the long, spacey “Jupiter,” or “American Coffee,” which is one of the more lyrically dense tracks, intertwining a touching story about her birth with quotes from philosophers and a story about having a UTI, ending with an open-ended meditation on who she could have been rather than who she is now.

That depth in “American Coffee” is in part why I come back to Hval’s music, but it also helps that it’s such a phenomenal song, musically. That she pulls off both so beautifully is why Classic Objects is her best album. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Year of Love”

No. 1274: Cocteau Twins - Victorialand

Wow, we’re definitely in a section of “Jeff writes about artists he writes about a lot” this week! And I’ve written about Cocteau Twins a lot. There’s good reason for that—they’re a singular group, the kind of band that inspired many others but whom absolutely nobody sounds like. And I mean that—nobody sounds like them. There are bands who definitely picked up a trick or two, but if you can point me to a vocalist who bears any resemblance to Elizabeth Fraser whatsoever, I’d be very surprised.

If you go backwards through their discography they go from relatively accessible to much, much weirder and eventually pretty goth. In a few weeks I’ll write about one of those goth records, and one that I think has a strong case for being among their best. Though the group’s own opinions about their work veers wildly from that of critical consensus. Treasure, for instance? The one that I’d say is a perfect 10 and a uniquely haunting listen—and a favorite of David Lynch if I’m not mistaken—they don’t like. At all. Simon Raymonde referred to it as “artsy-fartsy pre-Raphaelite bullshit” or something along those lines, and well… we’re not on the same page on that one! But that’s fine, not every band needs to love the records they made. 

Victorialand is one of the band’s weirdest. In the simplest terms it’s the one that everybody refers to as “the one without drums.” Which is kind of true. It does have drum machines on about half the songs, but the production is softer and subtler, and in general this is more ambient-pop than the dreamy post-punk they started off with, but by no means the sound of dream pop perfected on Heaven or Las Vegas. It’s a gorgeous album in any case, one I grabbed in the same batch of Stranded NYC finds and purchased, much like the Mary Lou Williams album, on a whim. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “The Thinner the Air”

No. 1275: Thelonious Monk - Monk’s Dream

And here we have another Thelonious Monk album! I’ve written a lot about him before, and he was included in last week’s roundup, and I’m not sure I have a ton to add here, other than that this was my first experience with Monk’s music. Or first knowing experience with Monk’s music, I should say. He’s written a lot of standards that get played a lot in jazz circles, one of the best known being “Round Midnight,” which was recorded by Miles Davis in 1957, a legendary and beautiful version of that song, as well as the anchor for one of his first front to back great albums.

Monk’s Dream, released in 1963, comes after the famed pianist and jazz bandleader had been playing for a while, and it contains some then-new recordings of older material, with a band that played together “telepathically,” as the historical record often retells it. It’s an accessible but looser, playful record that makes kind of a perfect first Thelonious Monk album for anyone to get into, and the title track itself is an all-time great. Highly recommended. Rating: 9.5

Listen: “Monk’s Dream”

No. 1276: Son House - Father of Folk Blues

Something I confessed over 300 records ago that I think is worth reiterating: One of the biggest gaps in my musical knowledge/understanding/whatever you want to call it, is blues. On one hand, it’s so interconnected with popular music, from rock to jazz and R&B (the B stands for “blues,” after all), that most of us hear some vestige of blues’ influence all the time without really thinking about it. But blues itself is a style, a genre, a culture, that has very little presence in contemporary popular music, despite handing down its songwriting forms. 

The first proper blues record I bought on vinyl is Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud, which represents the wilder, psych-inspired electric end of blues. The second is this, Son House’s Father of Folk Blues, which is all acoustic Delta blues. It feels sort of inevitable that I’d end up here, since the first blues that actually resonated with me was Robert Johnson’s lo-fi-as-hell archival recordings, which are old and crackly enough to sound like each of them is inhabited by ghosts. And to some degree they are—blues can be, at its most impassioned, an act of musical exorcism. 

Prior to this album, which was released in 1965, Son House had never released a studio album. In 1963, Folkways released an archival set of Son House recordings from 1942 along with J.D. Short, which aren’t as high in fidelity as this record. And those were released following some 78s he released in the 30s, as a younger man, including “Preachin’ the Blues,” which appears here. 

Father of Folk Blues finds Son House at age 63, more weathered and wizened, but with the gravitas to make these simple, stripped down songs hit that much harder. There’s not much here, technically speaking. Just voice and guitar, and that’s all they need. In fact, sometimes it’s just voice and hand claps, as on the a cappella “John the Revelator,” which is compelling and haunting enough with only House’s voice guiding it. 

But that influence of blues on popular music becomes all the more apparent when you hear this album. The White Stripes, a band that wore the blues proudly, covered the incredible opening track “Death Letter,” while The Gun Club turned “Preachin’ the Blues” into a wild punk blues raveup. Plus “John the Revelator,” if I have my facts right, inspired Depeche Mode to sort of reshape it into their own song on Playing the Angel. That’s an interesting spread in just three songs, and a reminder of how deep the blues go, even this far down the road. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Death Letter”

No. 1277: Miles Davis - ESP

A funny thing happened on the way to writing about Miles Davis’ ESP: My whole bit was going to be about how the beauty of someone with a catalog as huge as his is that you can kind of just keep writing about his music indefinitely. But in order to do that, I had to look up how many of his records I had already written about, which was eight albums. Here’s the problem: I inadvertently left one out. Because I have 10, and this is the last one I bought. The one I skipped? Filles de Kilimanjaro, which will almost certainly have to be in the next post because I can’t very well leave an album out, can I? So expect that soon, I suppose.

But hey, there is a certain sense of wonder to behold with a catalog as big as Davis’. Now, I won’t write about his music indefinitely, because there is a limit to what I will acquire, and that limit is the 1980s. There are defenders of his ‘80s records, and I’m sure there are good reasons to do so, but I’m not one of them. I don’t like them, not even really a little bit. But I did enjoy his appearance on Miami Vice. (Not quite as much as Frank Zappa’s appearance, but hey, still not bad.) 

But here’s where I’m at with the Miles Davis catalog: I have all my absolute favorites, so everything else I grab will just be whatever I find at the right time through my usual rummaging through the crates. As I’ve done here. ESP is an excellent album, and actually a lot more chill than I remember. It came out in the mid-’60s, which is before he pulled the rug out from under jazz’s foundation with his fusion experiments but well after his celebrated late ‘50s era that yielded Kind of Blue. (Still don’t have that on vinyl—this is starting to become a bit at this point!)

When I first heard it, what stood out about ESP was the kind of weird pre-fusion sounds of songs like “Eighty-One”, which has less of the bluesy swing of his hard bop era and begins to slip into the more sort of collagist approach of his ‘70s era, but with occasional punctuations of bright trumpet (after that initial riff, then collapse, that open space being interrupted with a “BLAP!” is almost comical, but I love it nonetheless). But a lot of the album comprises more vibey ballads and such, and it’s great late-night listening. I remember a while back when a box set of Davis’ mid- to late-’60s live performances was released, Fresh Air’s Kevin Whitehead marveled at how weird this period was for Davis, though this was a couple years earlier—not quite to the heights of bizarre he’d achieve. It is peculiar in fun and stimulating ways, though, which is part of what keeps me coming back, at least until I get to the ‘80s. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Eighty-One”