The great broadcaster made only a few vinyl recordings, but they are all fabulous. I have featured one of his spoken word records previously: Talk About America.
This LP, however, features him at the piano, whistling, singing and telling stories. I realise that to the youngsters of today, that sounds almost insane. They let him do this? Why didn’t someone sedate him, send him to a nursing home or put him on a stairlift?
There is even a wonderful moment where he demonstrates, with impish glee, the results of an experiment in multi-tracking his own voice.
The album tells a coherent narrative, so is perhaps best listened right through, but once you’ve done that you’ll keep coming back to many of these tracks for more.
Cooke, always a great storyteller, himself became the subject of a rather ghoulish story posthumously. He was one of the victims of a body-snatching gang that hacked up corpses of the recently deceased, replacing the harvested bones with PVC pipes, gloves and aprons before returning the bodies to families. Then – having forged donor consent forms to cover their tracks – they sold the stolen bones on for transplant tissue.
This LP, however, features him at the piano, whistling, singing and telling stories. I realise that to the youngsters of today, that sounds almost insane. They let him do this? Why didn’t someone sedate him, send him to a nursing home or put him on a stairlift?
There is even a wonderful moment where he demonstrates, with impish glee, the results of an experiment in multi-tracking his own voice.
The album tells a coherent narrative, so is perhaps best listened right through, but once you’ve done that you’ll keep coming back to many of these tracks for more.
| Drink to Me | This prelude to the album is a prime example of the almost vaudevillian versatility of Cooke as a pianist. |
| Spring Song | “I was taken on a picnic to see a tree. And I was very overcome. And I wrote a song.” |
| Blue Skies | Cooke explains the emotional resonance he found in Berlin’s massive hit song, before playing it with a light, yet chiming intensity. |
| She’s Funny That Way | Knowing that no one quite sings this song as Gene Austin does, Cooke whistles his way through it. |
| The Man I Love | Here’s a really good anecdote about the origins of this Gershwin song. I’ve never heard it elsewhere – I’m hanging on to it for future use. |
| Cupid, Ease A Lovesick Maid | This is a reflection on Cambridge University life: composing music for an 18th century song with no extant score. It shows a wonderful grasp of the songwriting of the era and the ‘sweet discords’ possible by the cadence sidestepping briefly into another key. |
| Have You Forgotten God? | I really like this. Cooke, composing again, sets the words of a hymn to a descending blues tune. Apart from a romantic middle eight, it completely works: you notice how close the Wesleyan preacher is to the fingerpicking blues singer. There’s even a bit of scatting in the coda. |
| Perpetual Motion | Talking of hymns, did Poulenc get the melodic material for his Perpetual Motion from a Welsh hymn? |
| Madrigal from The Mikado | Cooke whistles and hums almost simultaneously. Once you’ve heard it, you’ll want to try it yourself. |
| Mamie’s Blues | Cooke describes a chance meeting with Jelly Roll Morton. (“A gangling, wide-mouthed, flat-faced man with big wrists and diamonds in his teeth.”) The line Morton feeds Cooke is word-for-word the same as the introduction to his 1939 recording: “This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life.” (You can hear Morton talking bitches here.) |
| Basin Street Blues | A reflection on Englishness (“The English have to go after things that are out of reach.”) takes us to Basin Street and “Mr. Teagarden’s immortal invitation to the land of dreams”. |
Cooke, always a great storyteller, himself became the subject of a rather ghoulish story posthumously. He was one of the victims of a body-snatching gang that hacked up corpses of the recently deceased, replacing the harvested bones with PVC pipes, gloves and aprons before returning the bodies to families. Then – having forged donor consent forms to cover their tracks – they sold the stolen bones on for transplant tissue.
No comments:
Post a Comment