The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
ever done; because I had time to work on the arrangements – a week!’ excelled himself with the beautiful intros alone. The Chopin-esque piano of the title track, the whispering dissonances in the violins on It’s A Lonesome Old Town, the descending oboe line of Goodbye; Riddle attributed the tone of his work to the recent death of his daughter and imminent death of his mother – ‘if one can attach events like that to music, perhaps Only The Lonely was the result.’ Interestingly, though an astonishing arranger, Riddle was known as a vague conductor and Frank apparently contrived to have regular Sinatra concertmaster Felix Slatkin conduct the tricky, tempoless numbers while Riddle was out of town.
The album featured two of Sinatra’s favourite boozy loser pieces, Angel Eyes and One For My Baby, one of which he would always perform in concert as the saloon song segment with just Bill Miller on piano accompaniment. He recorded Baby like that (available on The Capitol Years 4-CD set) but returned the following day to cut it again with Riddle’s discreet strings and Gus Bivona’s delicious alto obligato to create a masterpiece, the pinnacle – along with I’ve Got You Under My Skin from Songs For Swingin’ Lovers – of the Sinatra/Riddle partnership.
Sinatra recalled the session: ‘Word had somehow got around, there were 60 or 70 people there, Capitol employees and their friends, people off the street, anyone. We had kept this song to the last track of the session. Dave Cavanaugh knew how I sang it in the clubs and he switched out all the lights bar the spot on me. The atmosphere in that studio was exactly like a club. Dave said “Roll ’em”, there was one take and that was that. The only time I’ve known it happen like that.’
Marty Robbins
Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs
The first successful C&W concept album.
Record label: Columbia
Produced: Don Law
Recorded: Bradley Film and Recording, Nashville; April 7, 1959
Released: June 1959
Chart peaks: 20 (UK) 6 (US)
Personnel: Marty Robbins (v, g); Thomas Grady Martin (g); Jack H Pruett (g); Bob L Moore (b); Louis Dunn (d); The Glaser Brothers (bv)
Track listing: Big Iron (S); A Hundred And Sixty Acres; They’re Hanging Me Tonight; Cool Water; Billy The Kid; Utah Carol; The Strawberry Roan; The Master’s Call; Running Gun; El Paso (S); In The Valley; The Little Green Valley
Running time: 44.42
Current CD: Sony 4952472 adds: The Hanging Tree (S); Saddle Tramp; El Paso (S)
Further listening: Marty’s Greatest Hits (1958), his first hits collection, released before Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs and containing all the early smashes
Further reading: The Encyclopedia Of Country Music (OUP, 1998); www.martyrobbins.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Glendale, Arizona’s Marty Robbins was already successful with smash hits such as Singing The Blues (1956) and A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation) a year later, though nothing could have prepared him for the reaction an album full of Zane Gray/Louis L’Amour-like gunslinger tales would bring him. Marty’s grandfather was ‘Texas Bob’ Heckle, a one-time Texas ranger who told his grandson spellbinding tales of the Old West. Robbins grew up a Gene Autry fan, seldom if ever missing a movie by The Singing Cowboy, and had bit parts in two Hollywood horse operas.
When his theme from a Gary Cooper western, The Hanging Tree, climbed the charts in early 1959, it put Robbins in a position where he could lobby his label for an entire album of cowboy ditties. They agreed and Robbins compiled a list of his favourite Old West songs including the Sons Of The Pioneers’ Cool Water, his friends the Glasers’ Running Gun, three traditional cowboy ballads and four of his own songs. And what songs they were; Big Iron, which became a hit C&W single; The Master’s Call, an almost Biblical tale of a cowpoke’s redemption; In The Valley; and El Paso, the Number 1 pop hit which earned the first Grammy ever awarded to a country song and fast became Robbins’ signature tune. A tale of a foolish young cowboy’s love for a forbidden maiden, El Paso remains one of the greatest C&W songs, and has been covered by everyone from Johnny Cash to The Grateful Dead. Produced with a cinematic viewpoint by Englishman Don Law (who had recorded blues legend Robert Johnson a quarter of a century earlier) and propelled by Grady Martin’s bittersweet Mexican guitar flourishes, it was the album’s centrepiece, becoming one of the most played songs on country radio and propelling the album to platinum sales.
Robbins would have many more country – and crossover – hits in his career, and he would win a second Grammy a decade later, but nothing could eclipse the bright burning lights of this album just as nothing could stop that foolish cowboy from returning to his love at Rosa’s Cantina in El Paso.
Ornette Coleman
The Shape Of Jazz To Come
The influence of chaos …
Record label: Atlantic
Produced: Nesuhi Ertegun
Recorded: Radio Recorders, Hollywood; May 22, 1959
Released: October 1959
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Ornette Coleman (as); Don Cherry (p); Charlie Haden (b); Billy Higgins (d)
Track listing: Lonely Woman; Eventually; Peace; Focus On Sanity; Congeniality; Chronology
Running time: 37.56
Current CD: Warner Jazz 8122731332
Further listening: Free Jazz (1961); At the Golden Circle, Stockholm, Vols 1/2 (1965)
Further reading: Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (John Litweiler, 1992); Ornette Coleman (Peter Niklas Wilson, 1999); www.ornettecoleman.com
Download: Not currently legally available
Ornette Coleman was arguably the last musician to introduce a truly seismic shift in jazz styles. He ushered in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, a tag borrowed from one his albums (although he said it was a record company invention and claimed to dislike it). He grew up with the Texas tradition of tough, blues-rooted saxophonists, but from his earliest experiments evolved a singular and idiosyncratic approach to jazz and was regularly shunned from bandstands in his native state and later in California, where he finally made contact with musicians capable of empathy with his radical ideas. They included the members of what became his seminal quartet featured on this disc. They burst upon the New York jazz scene in 1959 as a fully fledged phenomenon. Their residence at The Five Spot was the talk of the town for months, their radically new sound polarising critics, musicians and jazz audiences alike, continuing to do so even now.
Bass player Charlie Haden remembered hearing Ornette for the first time: ‘This guy came up on stage and asked the musicians if he could play, and started to sit in. He played three or four phrases, I couldn’t believe it – I had never heard any sound like that before.’
Atlantic Records had made its name as a rhythm and blues label, but was building up an impressive jazz roster, with Ray Charles and John Coltrane among its stars. The Ertegun brothers seized the opportunity to pick up on this new and controversial sensation, and launched with the defiantly titled The Shape Of Jazz To Come.
It followed his debut for the California-based Contemporary label, Something Else!!!, and laid down a marker