The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
composer Hoagy Carmichael proclaimed Nat’s version of Stardust the finest he’d ever heard – but also his bestselling LP, sitting at the peak of the US album charts for eight consecutive weeks. Among those who sat up and took notice was Capitol label-mate Frank Sinatra. He would turn to Jenkins to recreate the same mood on Where Are You and No One Cares, releases that followed in the path of Love Is The Thing but deliberately failed to offer the feeling of hope inherent in the Cole recording. An enormously influential record, it nevertheless fails to gain a mention in Cole biographies.
Mose Allison
Back Country Suite
Debut album from a pianist/trumpeter/vocalist who would influence not only jazzmen but also The Who.
Record label: Atlantic
Produced: Rudy Van Gelder
Recorded: Hackensack, New Jersey; March 1957
Released: 1957
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Mose Allison (p, t, v); Taylor LaFargue (b); Frank Isola (d); Rudy Van Gelder (e)
Track listing: New Ground; Train; Warm Night; Blues (Young Man); Saturday; Scamper; January; Promised Land; Spring Song; Highway 49; Blueberry Hill; You Won’t Let Me Go; I Thought About You; One Room Country Shack; In Salah
Running time: 36.00
Current CD: Not currently available
Further listening: Local Color (1958), a follow-up release that’s virtually Back Country Suite part 2, and includes his highly personalised version of Parchman Farm
Further reading: One Man’s Blues (Patti Jones, 1998); www.moseallison.com
Download: www.emusic.com
Mississippi born, Mose Allison grew up in the bebop age and assimilated influences that ranged from blues and gospel through to the cool cabaret sounds of the Nat Cole Trio. A white boy raised in a largely black neighbourhood, he claims he absorbed a lot of blues from local jukeboxes. He played trumpet at high school, was a pianist in the army and later attended Louisiana State University. The last stint was to later cause him some embarrassment when a black magazine rang for an interview and asked if he was the first black student to graduate from LSU: ‘I think there’s something you should know,’ began Mose.
He only needed one strike to make his mark and did so with Back Country Suite, an album that immediately established Mose as a musician who could be both down-home and city-hip. The main thrust of the album is a series of vignettes, mainly instrumental, that depict his southern-roots upbringing. Somehow Mose’s amalgam of influences came together to produce a record that was totally original, and that would influence white blues practitioners throughout the ’60s, The Who later pouncing on Mose’s Young Man Blues and turning it into one of the highspots of Live At Leeds.
Though he’s never made a poor record in his life, Back Country Suite remains Allison’s most potent work, a record that provided the blueprint for what would become an extensive catalogue. ‘I regard a record as an expensive calling card. You have to have one in order to work,’ Mose once observed. Back Country Suite proved the ideal calling card and he’s always found work easy to come by.
Nina Simone
Jazz As Played In An Exclusive Side Street Club
Neither, says the lady, jazz, nor her debut. Either way, it heralded a singular talent.
Record label: Bethlehem
Producer: Unknown
Recorded: New York City; 1957
Released: 1958
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Nina Simone (v, p); Jimmy Bond (b); Albert Heath (d)
Track listing: Mood Indigo; Don’t Smoke In Bed; He Needs Me; Little Girl Blue; Love Me Or Leave Me; My Baby Just Cares For Me; Good Bait; Plain Gold Ring; You’ll Never Walk Alone; I Loves You Porgy (S); Central Park Blues
Running time: 45.73
Current CD: Charly CPCD8240-2 reissued as Lady Blue; adds concert album
Further listening: Anthology: The Colpix Years (1996), a double-CD that features late ’50s and ’60s tracks taken from the diva’s nine albums for the Colpix label
Further reading: I Put A Spell On You (Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary, 1991), an autobiography that, naturally enough, provides the Simone point of view; www.boscarol.com/nina/
Download: iTunes
According to Nina, this was her second album. ‘The first album I ever made was a pirate that I never got paid for and knew nothing about.’ But Jazz As Played In An Exclusive Side Street Club – or Little Girl Blue as it is also known – which turned up in countless guises (and continues to do so) is the release that immediately established her as a unique performer, one who refused to be categorised – though record companies have repeatedly attempted to place Nina in ‘file under’ situations according to whichever trend is under scrutiny at the time.
Signed to Bethlehem, a jazz label, the singer-pianist born Eunice Waymon found that her debut was initially sidelined into jazz racks. But a hit single, culled from the album I Loves You Porgy, timed to coincide with the release of the film musical Porgy And Bess, did provide her with a wider audience. Doubtless, those encountering the album for the first time experienced confusion. Certainly jazz pervaded several tracks, but Nina’s instrumental version of Dizzy Gillespie’s Good Bait proved as much Bach as bebop, while Duke Ellington might have faced difficulty recognising the intro to his Mood Indigo.
‘I came to despise popular songs and I never played them for my own amusement,’ Nina claimed at the time. ‘Why should I when I could be playing Bach, Czerny or Liszt?’ So things were hardly what they seemed on the track listing; even Little Girl Blue somehow mutated into Good King Wenceslas! But her late-night loner ballads – Don’t Smoke In Bed and He Needs Me – are always moving, and Central Park Blues proves that she could provide a straightforward, heads-down, swinging instrumental if it took her fancy. In all probability, her now famous version of My Baby Just Cares For Me, with its rum-ti-tum rhythm and final lick nicked from Eddie Heywood’s Begin The Beguine, was just Nina being perverse: ‘It was the last song we did and I spent the next three days playing Beethoven to get the recording session out of my system.’ Whatever she thought about it, it’s an album that still reveals hidden facets.
The Crickets
The ‘Chirping’ Crickets
First album by one of the giants of modern popular music.
Record label: Coral
Produced: Norman Petty
Recorded: Norman Petty Studios, Clovis, New Mexico; February–March and May–July, 1957; Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; September 27–28, 1957
Released: March 1958
Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)
Personnel: Buddy Holly (g, v); Niki Sullivan (g, b, v); Joe Mauldin (b); Jerry Allison (d); Larry Welborn (b); June Clark (bv); Gary and Ramona Tollett (bv);