Recordings

Remember Ray Manzarek? He used to be the keyboard man with the Doors, and now he's a big boy making records on his own. This one's called The whole Thing Started with Rock & Roll Now It's Out of Control (Mercury). And it's an apt title. Ray seems to have this uncontrollable desire to become Jim Morrison--you know, an erotic Rock Poet with a monotonal voice. He's captured the monotone but is light-years away from the charisma that made Morrison's star rise. It's a tedious chore to listen to Manzarek droning his pitiful lyrics over the California-cheap music. One cut, The Gambler, sounds like Vaughn Monroe singing March of the Elephants. His keyboard work is still at the junior high level--OK for 1967, when bands were like gangs of juvenile delinquents; but solo albums mean grownup time. The only decent solo work on the album is by saxophonist John Klemmer. None but a diehard Doors devotee could stand this stuff--unless maybe for old-times' sake.

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Country-music fans will flambé their biscuits on the supertasteful instrumental album Superpickers (RCA), featuring guitarist Chet Atkins and Nashville's finest backup men. Atkins plays with such finesse that you are sure he could drive a grader across an Andrew Wyeth wheat field without disturbing Christina. Beef and Biscuits is acid rock alkalined in brown gravy, while the Chuck Berryesque Sweet Dreams sighs gently like a possum dozing in a chandelier. Which all goes to prove you can take a good ole boy out of the country, but you can't take the country gentleman out of a superpicker.

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It's not giving away any state secrets to say that Joe Pass is one of the finest jazz guitarists around, and Pablo records seems to have cornered the Pass market, as witness a trio of recently issued LPs. The first, Joe Pass: Virtuoso, is a breathtaking solo tour de force. The lack of rhythm accompaniment has fazed Pass not one whit. Without resorting to pyrotechnics, he manages to hold the listener in thrall by the seemingly irrefutable logic of each crystalline sound. There are a slew of standards declichéed by Pass, including Night and Day, My Old Flame and All the Things You Are. It's an album that ends much too soon. Then we have Pass joining fellow guitarist Herb Ellis on Two for the Road. Ellis is if anything even more straightforward than Pass in his musical approach, but the duo has no trouble finding an uncommon common ground. They weave in and out, from melody to harmony to rhythm, with uncanny extrasensory anticipation. We haven't heard anything so good since George Barnes got together with Bucky Pizzarelli. As a case in point, listen close to the back-to-back Seven Come Eleven and Guitar Blues. That, friends, is what it's all about. Last, but far from least, is an album that finds Pass providing the instrumental backgrounds and solo fills for the magical Ella Fitzgerald. Take Love Easy is loaded with lovely sounds, despite some recording problems with the pickup of Pass's guitar, but they prove only mildly disconcerting--the over-all effect is smashing. Miss Fitz and Pass do things with Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You that are sensational enough to be declared illegal. And if that doesn't wrap it up for you, linger over the beauties Lush Life, You Go to My Head and You're Blase. Heady stuff.

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You really have to see Stanley Clarke play the electric bass to appreciate his mastery. He handles the thing as easily as Walt Frazier handles a basketball, and makes music on it that a pair of pianists couldn't make together. He also looks delighted to be Stanley Clarke and doing what he's doing--a most appealing quality in a musician. Clarke is most often seen as one fourth of Chick Corea's Return to Forever, but from the sound of Stanley Clarke (Nemperor), we'd guess that the 23-year-old virtuoso is destined to be a star in his own right. Side one finds him playing electric bass and churning out double-funky jazz rock with the assistance of keyboard star Jan Hammer, nonpareil drummer Tony Williams and a most sure-fingered guitarist, Bill Connors. On the flip side, Clarke--who composed most of the music on the LP--picks up the acoustic instrument and builds some fantastic sound castles against a tastefully shifting orchestral backdrop. You won't find too many records in the same class as this one.

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We wish we had nicer things to say about Lou Rawls and She's Gone (Bell). Rawls, who has one of the better voices around, was one of the first to get the Gospel sound before a wider audience; but much of the material on this album is a waste of time for both Lou and the listener--semipop pap that disappears from memory within minutes while leaving you hungry for something solid. Obviously, Rawls can still get it all together, but in trying for mass appeal he has too often crossed over the dividers between mass and miss and mess. Aretha Franklin skirts pretty close to the same edge on With Everything I Feel in Me (Atlantic). Sometimes the arrangements seem to call for everything but the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but whether it's Franklin's ability to totally project herself into the material or the material itself, which fits her like the proverbial glove, the LP is all of a piece and a welcome addition to anyone's pop-rock-Gospel library. However, special kudos should go to the opening track, the Ivy Joe Hunter-Carolyn Franklin item, Without Love, and the latter's Sing It Again--Say It Again. Terrific.

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"Hey, whatsa dat bigga noise comma from da Coliseum?" "Atsa no noise, stupido, atsa P.F.M.!" Yes, roll over, Puccini, it's P.F.M.--Italy's first rock-'n'-roll export on the big market. The album, P.F.M. "Cook" (Manticore), consists of highlights of two live concerts, which will strike you as very E.L.P.ish. The lyrics are mostly in Italian and those words that are sung in English get muddled by the heavy accent. Beyond that, you'd swear this was one of those upper-middle-class British bands that waver from moment to moment between brilliance and banality. The banality's maddening, but there are some truly fine moments on this record, too, especially the guitar solos, which are dazzling. Odds are that P.F.M. will soon be raking in the lire.

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Maybe it's a faulty memory; more likely our tastes have changed over the years, but, Christ, it's a bummer to have some of one's fondest recollections smashed to smithereens. Columbia has just put out a trio of LPs reproducing some of the immortal W. C. Fields's radio shows, but--Godfrey Daniel Mother of Pearl--they're not such a much. One, the Lux Radio Theater's presentation of the old theatrical warhorse Poppy, is a semidisaster. Maudlin, simple-minded and turgid, it affords Fields little opportunity for the ripostes and nuggety non sequiturs that made him famous. The two others are pickups of The Chase and Sanborn Hour--some of them pitting Fields against his nemesis Charlie McCarthy, with Edgar Bergen and Don Ameche as referees. (Ameche has to be the only man with a smile permanently imprinted in his voice.) Fields also does a couple of routines as Larson E. Whipsnade ("That's Larson E. Whipsnade"), a bumbler of epic proportions. There are laughs--it was impossible for Fields to open his mouth without striking your funny bone, however lightly--but they're far too infrequent. Collector's items, maybe; classic routines, no way.

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Four years ago, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles metamorphosed into Labelle, a high-gloss, high-powered trio, and thereby saved themselves forever from the fate of eternally playing rock-'n'-roll revivals. The old everything--sound, look, material--has been replaced by space-age soul music that can make the scalp tingle and lift you right out of the chair. With this latest album, Nightbirds (Epic), and a move to a new label, Labelle has also acquired a new producer, Allen Toussaint, who proves to be an ideal match, providing the ladies with maneuvering room for their voices and a couple of dandy songs, especially All Girl Band, with the hideously appropriate line, "It's just an all-girl band/Dealing with the facts, and the pain." The album also demonstrates that group member Nona Hendryx has become a fine songwriter who is, to a great extent, shaping the direction of Labelle. With the title song and Space Children, she emphasizes the group's basic quality--warmth surrounded by steel knife edges. Let's hope this one does it for Labelle & Co. They're ready.

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If you don't believe that Thad Jones and Mel Lewis have the big-band business locked up, dig Pot-pourri (Philadelphia International) and we'll accept your apology. Half of the compositions and all of the arrangements except for Ambiance (charted by Jerry Dodgion) are by the awesomely talented co-leader-horn man Jones, and the band is loaded for bear--it can play lush, funky, deliver complex orchestrations with crisp precision and has gifted soloists sitting in almost every chair. And, wonder of wonders, even Buddy Lucas' harmonica seems exactly right in the middle of all those big, bad sounds--For the Love of Money and Living for the City demonstrate that admirably.

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Miles Davis' musical personality grows more elusive by the year; on Get Up with it (Columbia), there are moments when he seems to disappear entirely. The famous laconic trumpet style is stripped to the bone, and even on his new instrument, the electric organ, Miles demonstrates his belief in the axiom that less is more. The music--a varied and often intense mixed bag of space funk, calypso and even a straight blues, complete with raunchy harmonica--at times confirms this impression, and the band, augmented by spot performances from John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Dave Liebman and some exciting African and Indian percussion, is a powerful unit in its own right. Yet Miles is in total command: His presence is diffused throughout, much in the same way that Duke Ellington, to whom this double LP is dedicated, controlled his band with a brief phrase on the piano or a wave of the hand. This is apparent on the mournful He Loved Him Madly, a stately tribute that evokes the Duke's elegance through musical understatement and almost elegiac use of silent intervals. Miles himself doesn't come in until halfway through the sidelong tune, and then only with a few well-chosen, echoing phrases that speak, as they say, volumes.

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On the subject of speaking volumes, geniuses are generally difficult to approach for interviews, and Davis is no exception--even though he was the subject of the very first "Playboy Interview" in September 1962. But Jimmy Saunders, a writer/musician who first met Miles back in 1964, thought he had a pretty good chance of getting him to talk when the Davis group recently played a concert at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. So when the godfather of jazz rock arrived, in mxi-length fur coat and three-piece satin suit, Saunders accosted him and asked for a short interview. Miles agreed and right after the concert, they got to talking about colleagues in the jazz field, white folks vs. black folks and religion:

[Q] Saunders: How do you get up for this kind of thing--for gigs, interviews, and so on?

[A] Davis: I don't make interviews.

[Q] Saunders: Well, the gigs, then.

[A] Davis: Black folks.

[Q] Saunders: That's what gets you up?

[A] Davis: Drummers. My musicians. What they might play, and what they might play after that (laughs).

[Q] Saunders: Well, you've always surrounded yourself with great musicians, like 'Trane.

[A] Davis: When I first went into the studio with Coltrane, they asked me, "What are you doing with a sad-ass saxophone player like him?" So I said, "Just shut up and get behind the controls--before we leave (laughs)." When I first got Sonny Rollins, they said the same thing. Fuck them folks. They don't know shit. You know them blankets they used to put in front of the drums in recording studios? I made them take that shit from in front of Art Blakey's drums, man. They don't use that shit no more. Drums are supposed to be heard--everywhere!

[Q] Saunders: Speaking of drums, what do you think of the music Billy Cobham is playing now?

[A] Davis: Aw, man, I don't want to get into talking about other people's music and shit. That's what them goddamn critics do.

[Q] Saunders: He and McLaughlin were both with you--

[A] Davis: Well, John played different when he was with me.

[Q] Saunders: He seemed to lay back more.

[A] Davis: Naw, naw. He didn't lay back with me. See, you can't lay back when you play, because you don't help the rhythm section. You got to keep goosing them. I don't worry about playing the trumpet, man, because I know how to play the trumpet. But a horn ain't shit without the rhythm section.

[Q] Saunders: Having to lead such gifted musicians must put you through a lot of changes. Like Herbie Hancock--

[A] Davis: Herbie wanted to quit, man.

[Q] Saunders: Why?

[A] Davis: Because once in Chicago he said, "Miles, sometimes I feel like it just ain't nothing to play." And I said, "Then just don't play nothing." He's a great musician, man, and he knows what's happening. But you can't be a nice guy. He's a nice guy. But me, I ain't nice. I don't care if you don't like me--as long as you can play.

[Q] Saunders: What about Wayne Shorter?

[A] Davis: He fell in love, man. He started playing pretty, syrupy music. Ain't no fire there no more.

[Q] Saunders: Weather Report doesn't move you, then?

[A] Davis: Foggy. It's foggy.

[Q] Saunders: The things that Weather Report has done are more structured than what you're doing now. Your band is a really free, extended-improvisation group.

[A] Davis: But there's control. We might write a melody around the drums. We might write a melody around one chord. Whatever we do, it's controlled.

[Q] Saunders: But you're constantly creating--

[A] Davis: That's the name of the game. I'm 48, but so what? Am I supposed to stop growing? If I live to be 70 years old--

[Q] Saunders: You still going to be playing?

[A] Davis: I don't know. We might get up there and just hold hands. We have rehearsals like a five-hour rehearsal of nonreaction.... Like, if I say, "Ba-bop-ba-ba-ba," you don't say, "Bop." You don't do that. You don't say nothing.

[Q] Saunders: You wrote on Joe Zawinul's first solo album that he was extending thoughts you'd both had for years--

[A] Davis: Listen. Zawinul is like Sly and Mingus. They write things and they fall in love with them. You know what I mean? I don't write things for myself. I write for my band. When you write things for yourself, your ego takes over. I ain't never going to ever damn-fool myself into believing that everything, or any one piece I write, is that good--and I ain't going to let my musicians tell me that shit, either. I don't have no yes men around me.

[Q] Saunders: Do you ever read reviews of your music or concerts?

[A] Davis: Never.

[Q] Saunders: Why?

[A] Davis: Because white folks can't review black music. I don't review their music. Could I review Fiddler on the Roof? Or would I?

[Q] Saunders: I'd like to go back to your comments about Shorter. Do you really think the fire has gone out of his playing?

[A] Davis: You can't come, then fight or play. You can't do it. I don't. When I get ready to come, I come (laughs). But I do not come and play.

[Q] Saunders: Explain that in layman's terms.

[A] Davis: Ask Muhammad Ali. If he comes, he can't fight two minutes. Shit, he couldn't even whup me.

[Q] Saunders: Would you fight Muhammad Ali, under those conditions, to prove your point?

[A] Davis: You goddamn right I'd fight him. But he's got to promise to fuck first. If he ain't going to fuck, I ain't going to fight (laughs). You give up all your energy when you come. I mean, you give up all of it. So if you're going to fuck before a gig, how are you going to give something when it's time to hit?

[Q] Saunders: This might be somewhat farfetched, but are you a religious cat, Miles? Are you into God and Jesus?

[A] Davis: Ain't no fucking Jesus, man. Get out of here. Shit. Do you believe in God and Jesus? I believe in myself. I believe every man is Jesus and God. If there was a Jesus, and he came down here, he'd get put in jail--drinking wine, beer, smoking shit. White folks fill you up with all that shit about Jesus, and then you get out there believing that holding hands we shall overcome. If there was a God, he would be in the cancer wards, in the hospitals--or over in Korea and Vietnam.

[Q] Saunders: One more question. You've got a concert tomorrow night in Boston; are you going to make it?

[A] Davis: Man, shit. I'll be up all night thinking about what we did tonight and trying to think of something else for the band to do.