Daily Listen by Brian Brock

This is what I like to call early 90’s jazz.  At that time the current of jazz’s irrelevance to mainstream culture seems to have intersected with its acceptance of outside playing into inside circles, in a way which enabled all sorts of freaky normal stuff to happen.  Bill Frisell makes an appearance here, which is fitting because early 90’s jazz is the thing he did best - it’s too bad he stopped doing it in the late 90’s.

Before my thumb began complaining, I tried to play the clarinet for a while, and I frequently wondered why there are so few clarinetists in modern jazz.  I refused to believe that it was for sonic reasons, but continued to encounter that idea until I lost interest in the question.  Don Byron explains it well somewhere in this Fresh Air broadcast.  Basically, the saxophone, for example, uses the same fingering to play the same notes in different registers, so that Coltrane and his followers could play rapid scales in any octave more easily than clarinetists.  Byron and his ilk have to use a different set of fingers to play a high A, a low A, and whatever other A’s they can conceive of.  It’s like changing the tuning on a guitar - it’s not theoretically harder to play in nonstandard tunings (although one chord or melody may be harder, another will be easier), but it’s much harder to switch between two contrasting systems than to stay in one.

Amazingly consistent production from track to track on this album.  Reggie Lucas found a sound he liked, and that’s not easy.  “Everybody”, the one track produced by Mark Kamins sounds drastically different.  It being the track which earned her a record deal, the difference is particularly striking.  The record label must have felt they dodged a bullet when she came back with songs like “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction”.

In this day, it seems pop albums specifically pursue sonic diversity.  It’s common to see five or six featured artists on a hip-hop album, or even on a pop album, to the extent there’s a difference any more.  At least two or three producers have generally worked on a given collection, often on each song so that you might have twelve different spoons in the sonic pot.  Mixing is always handled by yet more people.

I’ve always loved the guitar playing on this music, beyond the obviously awesome bass and drums.  I see Lucas is credited as guitarist as well as producer.  I will have to look further into his work.

Madonna’s ascent and the men she was involved with on the way up makes an interesting history.  Look at this picture. She completely owns the situation - she may as well be standing in front of the picture.

Look at the lucky kid who just won a meet-Madonna contest.  But in fact, it’s John Benitez, aka “Jellybean”, who mixed and co-produced her breakthrough album, and not-so-incidentally was her boyfriend.

I hope she at least sends him a Christmas card every year.