Thank Q

Quincy Jones & Friends - Ai No Corrida

We'll use the holiday designed to most emphasize gratitude -- one of the highest of human emotions -- to celebrate the life-n-legacy of someone whose repertoire contains very few turkeys.

There are plenty of iconic, groundshifting figures in The Arts who are so recognizable and singular, we recognize them by one name alone, no other appellation needed.

There's a whole universe of 'em, from Charo to Sting to Prince to Adele. And Cher. How can I forget Cher? They'll revoke my Gay Card if I exclude Cher, and accuse me of not believing in love or some other scurrilous lie.

Unless we're counting former ballplayer Harold Reynolds -- who often goes by "H," but as far as I know has never played the Rose Bowl, scored a film or organized any globally-charting charity singles -- there is only one whom we recognize by a single letter.

He finally left this terrorplane a few days into November, so I thought -- a few days before the month ends and on the appropriate day -- we should see the man they called Q on his way off the always-limiting 3D grid.

There is nothing I can add -- in terms of what he did in, around and to popular music in our lifetimes -- to the galaxies of tributes that have already appeared across all media in the wake of his departure.

You just go down the list of moments and records and movies and whatnot, and it may as well be a living history of the trend trajectories and tributary territories of the sounds of the last gosh, what? 65 years?

For me, the roads he paved others will forever drive upon begin with that life changing night way back in the early 1990s when, at a friend of a friend's house, I had my eyeballs and earlobes obliterated to ecstasy by the Ray Charles album Genius+Soul = Jazz.

Of course I had been well exposed to Quincy Jones long before I moved to San Francisco and heard that record and those charts and the utterly balls-deep, Rock-n-Roll energy Q's (and Ralph Burns') arrangements contribute to the music.

I think I was allowed to watch Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice at an age they'd call CPS about today, and I had been taken to see The Wiz -- the Broadway show and movie first-runs! thank you culturally Communist parents!!!! -- only slightly less younger than that.

Only time I ever saw Michael Jackson live, and I was all of 11 years old. And of course I was really, really into the credit sequences of Sanford & Son and that 1970s Bill Cosby Show as a child, so much so that I think they considered me for Harmonica Funk Rehab briefly... until I moved on, to their eternal relief, to more adolescent-appropriate ephemera like Dynomite! magazine and Kiss.

But I've Got News For You: that first night with that (still) unbelievable album kind of changed my life around music and it's a moment I somehow have never forgotten, even though it was not any sort of spectacular or special occasion, and we were just hanging out in this guy's apartment across from Barney Burger in Noe Valley, losing our cannabis stash in a series of small fires.

Anyway I think I was discovered in the doorway of Streetlight Records the next morning, camped out and waiting. I don't know that I've ever run out and purchased an album faster than that one that time, and a whole lotta that had and still has to do with Q.

So yeah, not to change the subject but this here concert was masterfully remastered and denoised, from the original pre-broadcast vinyl, by 1bgsky, yet it circulated all choppy and gappy between tunes so I fixed that. I changed almost nothing else, but now it plays like a flowing version of itself that's more worthy of the attention the music -- which features all sorts of luminaries from "Thunderthumbs" Louis Johnson to Patti Austin to James Ingram, as well as that MJ guy -- deserves.

Quincy Jones & Friends

Budweiser Superfest

Rose Bowl

Pasadena, CA

8.1.1982

01 introduction

02 The Dude

03 Love Is In Control

04 Razzamatazz (feat. Patti Austin)

05 One Hundred Ways (feat. James Ingram)

06 Hold On

07 Just Once (feat. James Ingram)

08 Do You Love Me (feat. Patti Austin)

09 Ai No Corrida

10 Stuff Like That (feat. Ashford & Simpson and Michael Jackson)

11 FM outro

Total time: 53:38

Quincy Jones - keyboards & musical direction

Greg Phillinganes - keyboards & vocals

Rod Temperton - keyboards & vocals

Carlos Rios – guitar

Louis Johnson – bass

John Robinson – drums

Ollie Brown – percussion

Jerry Hey - trumpet & flugelhorn

Jerome Richardson - tenor saxophone

George Bohanon – trombone

Vivian Cherry – vocals

Peggy Lipton Jones – vocals

Charles May – vocals

with

James Ingram - vocals, Tracks 04 & 06

Patti Austin - vocals, Tracks 03 & 07

Nick Ashford - vocals, Track 10

Valerie Simpson - vocals, Track 10

Michael Jackson - vocals, Track 10

1bgsky remaster of the Westwood One "Budweiser Concert Hour" pre-broadcast transcription LPs

declipped & retracked -- with all tracks crossfaded and joined properly to be seamless -- by EN, November 2024
387 MB FLAC/direct link

One more thing before we close out November: I spent a few days last week messing around with the roughly 45 trillion film & TV soundtracks associated with the Q-verse, and -- focusing on the funkiest and even several of the less obvious ones -- constructed two hourlong queues of Q's cues. A concoction which may or not be with the concert in the folder for today... I don't dare comment on the grounds it may incinerate me. Or invigorate me. Or something.

And thusly concludes a November to remember. I'm buying a house next week and moving base of operations in December, so I have no idea what I'm gonna be able to post, but before that chaos ensues I wanted to use what I hope is a happy Thanksgiving for all to honor the transformative existence of the late Quincy Jones, and to express a heartfelt thank Q.--J.

3.14.1933 - 11.3.2024

Fifty Leaves Layter: Which Will & Testament

Scott Matthews - Way to Blue

If another Monday Morning chasing predatory capitalism's always-moving goalposts around for basic human dignity like a greased, anxious sliptoad hasn't got you feeling old, well then stick around because Nick Drake died 50 years ago today.

Perhaps the greatest exponent of the "I Will Write Entire Tunes About How No One Will Buy My Records Until I Am Many Years Deceased" school of songwriting, his story is oft-repeated as an example of why you never know why it's a good idea not to take your own life, until you're gazing down from the afterlife at serious commercial success.

He lived for 26 years in an anonymous ignominy somewhat of his own making, essentially all but refusing to tour or perform to promote his own music, then a requisite tool of ladder-climbing.

There are less than 75 pictures in existence of him during his short career, as well as one interview and zero film footage of him as an adult.

Yet he is always in the conversation, on the strength of just 3 records, for consideration as the very greatest songwriter ever to live.

He had mouldered 25 years in his place deep in the Earth, before people started to understand what he was really worth.

One silly Volkswagen advertisement in 1999, and the floodgates opened as wide and as dizzyingly as the Autobahn at rush hour during Oktoberfest.

Now, 25 years have again elapsed and he is as recognizable a music face as any of the last 60 years, with nary a Hollywood blockbuster not featuring his music and a trillion subsequent musicians of now claiming that he didn't just inspire them, he saved their lives.

By most accounts he lived to enjoy none of the fruits of his talents, and overdosed on his antidepressants, likely intentionally, on this night in 1974 after a long downward spiral into total despair.

The story goes he knew how good he was, and just couldn't comprehend how his music went nowhere in the wider world, eventually coming to see himself as an Ultimate Failure.

Had he found a way to have stuck around somehow -- perhaps patient and perserverant, waiting for the public monkeymind to catch up with the way-ahead, futurepast baroque-pop sounds he was laying down -- he'd be considered living musical royalty all over the world. I know I'm not alone in wishing he could have lived to see his Fruit Tree prophecy fulfilled, and that eventually people would come around to not just accept, but to revere him.

I covered the 40th anniversary of his passing 10 years ago when this page was first starting and wasn't really planning to revisit it, as there just isn't much evidence of him outside of those 3 LPs and change.

It's a total testimony to the lasting emotional impact of what he did that this summer, five decades after he left us, the BBC Proms devoted a whole Royal Albert Hall concert to a symphonic tribute to him.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra used the occasion to expand upon the string arrangements on the first two records, and even to create brand new ones for a few of the songs on Nick's famously stark, all-acoustic record of psychic devastation, Pink Moon.

This whole evening's event went out over the BBC3 airwaves as it occurred, but I some kinda way snagged the delicious pre-broadcast tape off of Soulseek when it happened and decided I'd use the 50th anniversary of Nick's tragic death to supply it here, in all its sonically sumptuous glory.

Various Artists

BBC Proms 2024: Prom 8

Nick Drake - An Orchestral Celebration

Royal Albert Hall

London, UK

7.24.2024

01 Elizabeth Alker BBC3 introduction incl. Jules Buckley interview

02 BBC Symphony Orchestra - Introduction (Bryter Layter)

03 BC Camplight - Fly

04 BC Camplight - Pink Moon

05 Marika Hackman - Fruit Tree

06 Marika Hackman - River Man

07 Elizabeth Alker speaks

08 Scott Matthews - Way to Blue

09 Scott Matthews - Day Is Done

10 The Unthanks & Gabrielle Drake - What Can a Song Do to You?

11 Elizabeth Alker speaks & program announcement

12 Olivia Chaney - Hazey Jane I

13 Olivia Chaney - At the Chime of a City Clock

14 Elizabeth Alker interview w/John Wilson & Gabrielle Drake

15 interview w/Scott Matthews

16 Northern Sky (Nick Drake)/Elizabeth Alker introduces the 2nd half

17 BBC Symphony Orchestra - Sunday

18 The Unthanks & Gabrielle Drake - Set Me Free

19 Elizabeth Alker speaks

20 Olivia Chaney - Which Will

21 Olivia Chaney - Things Behind the Sun

22 Olivia Chaney - Time of No Reply

23 Scott Matthews - Northern Sky

24 Scott Matthews - From the Morning

25 Elizabeth Alker speaks

26 BC Camplight - Place to Be

27 Marika Hackman - Time Has Told Me

28 Marika Hackman - Voices

29 Elizabeth Alker speaks

30 Jules Buckley speaks

31 BC Camplight - Saturday Sun

32 BBC Symphony Orchestra - Horn

33 Elizabeth Alker BBC3 outro incl. Jules Buckley announcement

Total time: 2:16:40

disc break goes after Track 14

Olivia Chaney - vocals, piano & guitar

Marika Hackman - vocals & guitar

BC Camplight - vocals & guitar

Scott Matthews - vocals & guitar

The Unthanks:

Rachel Unthank - vocals

Becky Unthank - vocals

Niopha Keegan - viola & vocals

Adrian McNally - piano

Chris Price - guitar

and featuring:

Ross Stanley - keyboards 

Chris Hill - bass

Dan See - drums

Neill MacColl - guitar

The BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jules Buckley

preFM capture, of indeterminate origin, of the Summer 2024 BBC3-FM presentation

spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz

edited, tracked & boosted +3 dB throughout by EN, November 2024
776 MB FLAC/direct link

This in an exquisite program, made even more incredible by the resonant sound and the insightful interviews with conductor Jules Buckley and Nick's sister Gabrielle -- if you're into the UK '70s ITV world of Gerry Anderson, she was the purple haired chick on that bonkers sci-fi soap opera UFO -- who performs two of her mother's original compositions with alterna-stars The Unthanks. Yes, as if Nick himself wasn't an intimidating enough songsmith, Nick and Gabrielle's mom Molly was kind of the alpha/omega singer-songwriter, 25 years before Joni Mitchell dropped her D string.

I'll be back on ThanQsgiving with some photogenically filmic funk, in homage to a superstar of everything who passed away a few weeks ago, after a lifetime hyperspeeding music into a future that was completely unimaginable when they first came on the scene.

Today we'll place our hats over hearts, though, and pay respects to Nicholas Rodney Drake, a man who never got anything but woe for his gargantuan talent and effort whilst alive, but who somehow was still well aware and prescient enough to comprehend that his time would surely come when day was done.--J.

6.19.1948 - 11.25.1974
time has told me
not to ask for more

for someday our ocean

will find its shore

Keyboards of Canada: Diana Krall 60

Diana Krall Trio - Dream a Little Dream of Me

Hello again and happy weekend! Today we'll celebrate a milestone birthday for a star of the modern Jazz scene.

In doing so, we'll also tribute one of her associates who also had a birthday earlier this month, but who sadly passed away too young last year.

Discovered by bass brahmin Ray Brown at the start of the 1980s, it took another decade for her to initiate a launch sequence and make her first record, which hit in 1992.

Once she had, it wasn't long before she began a rapid ascent to the top of her craft, and recognition as one of the rising superstars of the music.

She's been at the apex of Jazz ever since, with record after record topping the charts all over the world.

Along the way she's received numerous awards and accolades, toured the world leading countless groups, and married some guy called Elvis. No, not that Elvis.

When she really started breaking out in the '90s, she tapped another then-rising star to be her guitar player, taking her to a whole other level in the concert setting.

This guy went on to turn the Jazz world upside down in his own right before passing away about 16 months ago at the way too soon age of 60, and his name was Russell Malone.

Speaking of 60, that's the number Diana Krall -- as beloved and topselling a Jazz artist as has existed in our lifetimes -- turns today.

In honor of the approaching occasion, I spent a week putting together a sweet 2 1/2 hour example of the two of them in full flight.

One show here even features bass deity Christian McBride alongside them, as all-star a band as you'll see on any field in the major leagues.

Diana Krall Trio

Le Festival International du Jazz du Montréal

Le Spectrum de Montréal

Montréal, Quebec, Canada

7.5.1996

01 Boulevard of Broken Dreams

02 The Frim-Fram Sauce

03 Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You

04 Dream a Little Dream of Me

05 Hit That Jive, Jack

06 'Deed I Do

07 Straighten Up and Fly Right

08 They Can't Take That Away from Me

09 Comes Love/Fever

10 Russell Malone solo/Route 66

11 Errand Girl for Rhythm

12 Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?

13 I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You

Total time: 1:17:46

Tracks 11 & 12 are bonus cuts from Glenn Gould Studio, CBC Centre Toronto ON Canada 3.2.1996 FM

Track 13 is a bonus cut from Jazz Jamboree '97, Warsaw PL 10.22.1997 FM

Diana Krall - piano and vocals

Russell Malone - guitar & vocals

Paul Keller - bass & vocals

Tracks 01-10 are from a hifi VHS capture of the original CBC-TV broadcast

Tracks 11 & 12 are from a master off-air FM cassette capture

Track 13 is from a master digital off-air FM capture

assembled, edited, denoised & remastered by EN, November 2024
456 MB FLAC/link below

Diana Krall Trio

"Impulse! celebrates John Coltrane"

Village Vanguard

New York City, New York USA

9.28.1997

01 WBGO-FM introduction by Michael Bourne

02 All or Nothing At All

03 My Shining Hour

04 I Miss You So

05 How Deep Is the Ocean?

06 Lost Mind

07 Just You, Just Me

08 I Don't Know Enough About You

09 They Can't Take That Away from Me

10 Dedicated to You

11 Peel Me a Grape

12 Bessie's Blues

13 Bessie's Blues (reprise)/FM outro

Total time: 1:18:45

Diana Krall - piano & vocals

Russell Malone - guitar

Christian McBride - bass

1st Gen DAT clone of a master digital capture of the original WBGO-FM broadcast

somewhat denoised, edited, retracked & remastered by EN, November 2024
428 MB FLAC/direct link to both shows

These performances provide an excellent gateway into the world of this tremendous contemporary artist if you've never heard of her, or a vital addition to her existing canon if you're already familiar with what she does.

I'll return towards the end of the month with the 50th anniversary of the departure of another legend.

In the meantime, don't miss out on these wonderful concerts from the iconic Diana Krall, born this day in 1964 and probably not even at her peak yet as a player and singer.--J.