Oscar Peterson's career as a jazz pianist was always a bit tricky. Unlike a Bill Evans or Herbie Hancock or Victor Feldman, who could control a set through steady use of block chords and minimal melodic adornment, Peterson was all about flourishes. His style was such that the left hand was of only nominal use while the right hand created intricate melodic magic. Which is all to say, Peterson worked best as a front man, not an accompanist. And when accompanying him, best to keep it simple. Too much counter melody, too intricate a bass line and the whole thing could quickly become an incoherent mess. Perhaps that's why Peterson's foray into orchestral jazz turned out so well.In 1969, Peterson recorded Motions and Emotions, an orchestral jazz album, sometimes derisively referred to as Muzak Jazz due to the lush strings and sonorous piano lines. Certainly those strings, beautifully arranged by Claus Ogerman, sound reminiscent of the type of music those over forty might recall hearing in department stores and elevators in their youth (hence the term, "elevator music"). But just because the unimaginative covers of popular hits for the Muzak corporation used lush strings doesn't mean they're a bad thing, just that they can be used well or poorly. On Motions and Emotions, Peterson and Ogerman use them perfectly.
Motions and Emotions, with its beautifully swirling wave cover, was a clear attempt by Peterson to put out music more tuned in to the new standards, if not more tuned in to the new sound. Peterson was no fool and wasn't about to start playing rock/jazz fusion just because most standard jazz was suddenly passé (to the incredibly short-sighted, that is). No, while other performers in jazz did just that, most notably Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, Peterson stuck to his strength and made nods only to song choice, not style. And those choices serve his style well, until the last cut on the album collapses under the weight of a musical genre gap that simply cannot be overcome.
The album kicks off, wisely, with a Henry Mancini tune, Sally's Tomato, from Breakfast at Tiffany's. If you're going to kick off an orchestral jazz album with any composer, there's probably not another one out there more suited to the task than Mancini. It also gives Peterson and Ogerman the chance to throw in a soft samba undertone, a foreshadowing of not only the album's grandest moment but one which may stand as one of Peterson's finest achievements. More on that in a moment.
After that we get into the more poppy of the new standards Peterson is covering, beginning with Sunny, that old pop hit warhorse covered more times than most other songs ever written combined. It may not be the gold standard of modern music but, by God, Peterson and Ogerman make it work beautifully with Ogerman giving the orchestra a dramatic punch that the original version, and every other pop cover of it, could only hope to replicate. Ironically, when the album collapses later, it will be with source songs infinitely better than Sunny. Go figure.
From here, Peterson breezes through Jimmy Webb's By the Time I Get to Phoenix, Gayle Caldwell's Wandering and Burt Bacharach's This Guy's in Love with You in a way that makes them all of a piece, kind of a trilogy stuck in the middle of the album. The tempos and rhythms of each move perfectly in and out of each other and signals in imagination not just in arrangements but of song order as well.
And then we get Wave. One of my favorite jazz composers, Antonio Carlos Jobim, penned Wave in 1967 and it became an immediate standard among jazz musicians. I have the original version by Jobim as well as four other versions. They are all splendid. Peterson's is majestic! It is not only the high point of the album but one of the high points of Oscar Peterson's recording career. Taking Jobim's original three minute samba song and extending it out to six minutes gives Peterson and Ogerman the time to transform it into an epic piece of modern music, slowly bringing in the low strings, then strumming guitar and horns before Peterson adds a few simple melodic lines, then trades off each verse with the orchestra until the final two minutes when both orchestra and piano build towards a crescendo that never arrives but fades away as Peterson and Ogerman see how many contrasting notes can be played without falling into the realm of cacophony. It is, quite simply, marvelous, and worth the whole damn album on its own.
After that, Mancini's Dreamsville is the perfect song to take the album out, gently serenading us into a hypnotic state of orchestral jazz bliss. And that's where it could have ended. However, there are three more songs and the first two are strong if redundant and the last is a serious misfire threatening to bring the whole enterprise down. Of course, it doesn't because no one song could bring down the greatness that precedes it but still, it's regrettable to say the least.
Two of the final songs are Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby by Paul McCartney and released, of course, by The Beatles (with the usual contractual "Lennon/McCartney" songwriting credit regardless of whether both had a hand in any given song or not). Those may be songs of superb craftsmanship but they don't work as well for jazz. The clash between the opening jazz tempo arranged by Ogerman for the orchestra and the suddenly altered tempo once Peterson starts playing the Yesterday melody is noticeable but Peterson still manages to make the song work splendidly. The two separate sections, the one playing the familiar melody and the one where Peterson riffs, are both well done, and the only real problem the songs suffers is that the melody is simply too familiar. One wishes Peterson had chosen a less iconic song.
Eleanor Rigby's baroque melody clashes with the feel of piano jazz in such as way that Peterson has to reinvent the melody halfway through and does so very well. Ogerman and Peterson do the best job they can and Peterson's flourishes pull out the melody in ways Lennon and McCartney (and producer George Martin) only hinted at. The only regrettable aspect of this is that putting two Beatles' songs back to back suddenly make the album seem like a Beatles tribute. One would have been fine.
Finally, the album reaches its final song with Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe and shifts abruptly, and I mean abruptly(!), into honky tonk! While Peterson and Ogerman's take on the song isn't half-bad really, it has the unfortunate effect of sounding as if it arrived from another album entirely, or maybe another planet. Imagine watching The Godfather for two and a half hours only to have the final reel replaced with the one from Brian De Palma's Scarface. They're both about gangsters, both star Al Pacino, but they really don't work together and take you in very different directions. This song's arrangement and inclusion on the album is a true head scratcher.
The fact that they weren't comfortable releasing an album with just nine songs is unfortunate because I can tell you that if this album ended after Eleanor Rigby, it would be damn near perfect. As it is, it is a work of orchestral jazz that has some of Oscar Peterson's finest work but crashes and burns within feet of reaching the finish line. Even with the crash and burn of Ode to Billy Joe, it's a masterpiece of piano and strings that can't be recommended highly enough.
12 comments:
Good piece -- I never heard this album. Peterson was perhaps the best "technician" of the great jazz pianists. He was polished beyond the avant-garde stylings of Monk, lacked the intellectual leanings of Bill Evans, and was far more aggressive than Red Garland. Nor did he pursue composing like Horace Silver or Bobby Timmons (whose "Moanin'" with Art Blakey still gets heavy rotation on my sound system).
Peterson's playing was generally perfect (Very Tall was a great album), but I can imagine the flaws of Dreamsville you mention, as he was apt to tackle compositions and arrangements beyond his scope, i.e. his album of West Side Story. Your comments about the two Beatles tracks, for example, sum up the worst of Peterson during those too-frequent times when he reached beyond his capabilities.
Nonetheless, you've inspired me to check out Dreamsville.
I just checked and can't seem to find it on CD. Know anyone who sells it or who can burn me a copy?
Ray, it's Motions and Emotions, not Dreamsville. Dreamsville is a song on it but Motions and Emotions is the name of the album, which may be why you had trouble locating it. You can find it for sale here.
Peterson was the first jazz pianist I ever knew. I bought Tracks on cassette some time in the seventies and loved it, even though it's not really very representative of Peterson's style. Later I joined a jazz music club that sold lp's (and later, cd's) of stuff hard or impossible to find in record stores and started loading up.
The thing with Peterson is that he went all over the place with his stylings. Unlike a Miles Davis or John Coltrane who had distinct periods of music, Peterson just kind of played this way, then that way, then this way again and so on and so forth. Except for the signature swirling melodic lines he never really planted himself firmly into one tradition. And because of that, he has a lot of misfires walking side by side with the successes.
Someone like Bill Evans has a style that lends itself to a higher status of jazz music, in which everyone agrees the music is superb, they just don't return to it time and again. I have several Bill Evans albums, including, of course, the great Undercurrent (which I got through that jazz club) but frankly, I return to the chaos of Oscar Peterson's repertoire with much more regularity. Hell, just since writing this review I've probably listened to Sunny a good ten times. It has overly dramatic punch of horns and strings that could easily send it to the realms of kitsch (and somewhere that the elitist jazz crowd would sneer down upon) but, fuck it, I love it.
I may have to tackle Theolonious Monk for a later review as he is one of my great failures as a jazz afficionado: A pioneer whose music leaves me cold. But you know what? I abandoned him so long ago that listening to him again now may well yield extraordinary results. We'll see.
My bad: thanks for clearing me up. I read your piece too early this morning; Motions and Emotions is now in the shopping cart.
I agree with you on Bill Evans: other than the Quintessence album, there's little of his I go back to, despite his excellence. If I remember correctly, Miles liked playing with Evans because other pianists "played too many notes," whereas Evans kept things simple.
Monk is an acquired taste, one that I've had and haven't had for a long time. There are individual tracks that still hold me ("Well, You Needn't" off Monk's Music in particular), but listening to too much Monk is akin to watching twelve hours of Godard. You either got it or you don't, and I don't.
I believe it's "The Man I Love" off of Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants that has the Monk solo where he doesn't play! His ego clashed with Miles's, and something of a temper tantrum ensued. A great album, nonetheless.
I wouldn't call myself a pianist, but I do play, and Peterson blew me away when I first discovered him when I was in my twenties. His technical proficiency seemed superior to anyone else I'd heard.
That's why he's got to be the front man! It's that virtuosity that attracts most people to Peterson. Davis was right, Evans is perfect for accompaniment, the master of restrained block chords. Peterson's all about "let me show you how many notes I can hit in five seconds without my fingers falling off." His coda for Wave on the album is just extraordinary.
Now I definitely want to listen to some Monk again and see how it takes. Problem is, I'll have to buy his music again. 90 percent of my music was on cassette (I was big into tape to tape dubbing and, in the early eighties, Sony Walkmans) and it's all been tossed out now without necessarily being replaced. Slowly, I'm rebuilding it, but it takes some time.
So you're not only writing about music, but you're writing about jazz. What in God's name could I possibly have to add to this discussion???
Um... I dunno. Kind of nice outside today. Um... anyway. So yeah, cool.
I'll avoid the temptation of recommending any Monk -- better to leave the listener to their own devices rather than risk some hellish wrath later on.
Outside of Monk, some jazz albums you're probably familiar with but will plug here anyway are Cannonball Adderly's Plus and Something Else; Coltrane's Blue Train and Duke Ellington & John Coltrane; nearly anything by Miles up to fusion -- I like Bitches Brew and Big Fun, but some of the rest leaves me cold; Miles Smiles has some amazing Tony Williams stuff on it; Red Garland's All Mornin' Long is the best album for a New Years Day hangover; Stan Meets Chet, Getz and Baker; Grant Green's Street of Dreams; Duke Jordan's Flight to Jordan, if just to hear the man Miles called "the worst piano player in jazz"; Michel Legrand's After the Rain; Eastern Sounds by Yusef Lateef; and Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil. There's also the vocalist Arthur Prysock, whose song "I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone" makes up for the mediocrity of the rest of his career.
Then there's the strange series of recordings credited to Donald Byrd that are heavily influenced by Fonce and Larry Mizell: Street Lady, Stepping Into Tomorrow, Black Bird and Places and Spaces. Byrd's earlier work was quite good, if low key -- his trumpet on Coltrane's "Lush Life" off the Lush Life album is sublime. However, the 1970s work with the Mizells is a trasure-trove of quasi-urban-funk, severely overproduced, right down to the Theremins and siren scat. I love those albums but can easily see how hokey they are. Yet little else sums up East Coast 70s for me quite like Black Bird and Stepping Into Tomorrow.
Memo to Bill: for an entertaining read, check out Miles's autobiography. And try to keep count of how many times he uses the word "motherfucker."
Coltrane and Davis are two it's really hard to go wrong with in the fifties and early sixties. Coltrane lost me with the later sixties stuff (though I still bought it and, for a time, pretended to like it) and Bitches Brew I kind of, sort of like but not enough to ever replace the lp on cd, although I still have the lp at my parents house and it is an awesome sight.
One of my favorite Davis' is Seven Steps to Heaven which gets lost in the fray often enough. Kind of Blue is, of course, both great and greatly enjoyable and also the subject of one of the most frustrating lines in the entirety of the Penguin Guide to Jazz: "KIND OF BLUE is one of the two or three most important albums in jazz history."
But they don't list the other two! Ever! Aaaarrrgghh!!! What are they?!
The rest of my comment disappeared. I also wrote, if memory recalls, that I am fairly unfamiliar with Grant Green and Duke Jordan but must listen to Jordan soon if only to test the veracity of Miles' pronouncement.
This has always been one of my favourite albums, if not my actual favourite. At sixteen I heard about Oscar Peterson, buying an album back then in Bournemouth wasn't as easy as it is today and I cycled 100 miles to Dobell's record shop in London and bought a second-hand copy of 'Motions and Emotions' for a pound. When I got back in the early hours of the morning I was exhausted but I still remember whacking it onto the record player before I collapsed. It wasn't actually what I expected but I liked it enough, and over the years have grew to love it.
I don't think of it as a 'with strings' album particularly. Most of the textures are wind, mainly alto flutes and horns, and some wonderful tone colours that I've always assumed to be flugel horns and trombones in bucket mutes. Strings there certainly are, but more typically scored for a film than a jazz album with very high passages offset by wind in the alto area and very little at all in the normal soprano range. I was intrigued to read that the piano was actually overdubbed - it's superbly done, but perhaps that explains why there's very little interaction between the rhythm section and the piano.
The rhythm section is extremely underplayed, often one hears little more than an unvarying shaker, the kit is very mixed down (although there are some very cinematic cymbal effects, where a large bell cymbal is struck almost like a typani.) and a lot of the bass is a very economic single note to a bar.
I agree about the last track, which sounds completely out of keeping. The instrumentation is quite different, more a conventional big band. I have no problem with the track as such (though not a style I care for) except it sounds as if it's from another album altogether.
The two McCartney tracks - I'm not sure I agree. Yesterday isn't exceptional, Eleanor Rigby I rather like - provided of course you don't have a concept of the original. The idea of 'all the lonely people' swung to a fast beat that is approaching a quickstep is decidedly odd, but I suspect neither Peterson nor Ogermann were familar with the original, perhaps merely given a song sheet. It has a few precedents - 'Miss Otis Regrets' originally recorded by as an up-tempo jive and 'Mac the Knife' a popular tune about a serial killer.
Mike, believe it or not, I don't agree with myself anymore. I've probably listened to this album a good hundred times or so since writing this and I still think, as you do, that "Ode to Billy Joe" just doesn't work. But, I've totally come around on "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby." The funny thing is, just last week I said to myself, "I've got to go back and revise that review before it gets too many more reads." Ha, too late. But I am going to revise it because, honestly, sometimes an album requires dozens and dozens of listenings to really get the true soul of it.
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