Jeff McCord on the month’s new releases
Various
hommage à Nesuhi
Rhino Handmade
In 1955 Nesuhi Ertegun joined his brother, Ahmet, and producer Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records to form one of the greatest triumvirates the music business has ever seen. Ahmet and Wexler were already known for their R&B successes; Nesuhi was brought on to give jazz a real foothold at the label. HOMMAGE A NESUHI (Rhino Handmade), a sprawling five-CD set, celebrates the one-of-a-kind roster that Nesuhi oversaw: talents like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and of course, Fort Worth’s Ornette Coleman, whose thrilling Atlantic recordings are legendary (though, sadly, criminally underrepresented here). Other Texans dot the landscape as well: saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman, clarinetist and composer Jimmy Giuffre (curiously featured only as a sideman), screaming saxophonist King Curtis, and boisterous Mingus tenor Booker Ervin. Famed producer Joel Dorn, who pestered Nesuhi for a job and eventually took over his duties, lovingly helped assemble this set before passing away last year (his mentor died in 1989). Dorn’s personality-filled liner notes are a major highlight, and despite some puzzling omissions, the music is stunning (Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Coleman’s “Ramblin’,” Ray Charles’s “Drown in My Own Tears”). Nesuhi had a gift for speaking the artists’ language. They clearly responded in kind.
Roy Orbison
The Soul of Rock and Roll
Monument/Orbison/Legacy
The Soul of Rock and Roll (Monument/Orbison/Legacy) marks the first comprehensive collection of Roy Orbison’s career, and hearing the Vernon native’s work in sequence over four CDs is eye-opening. His operatic High Plains voice shines through the early bare-bones, amphetamine-paced sessions with Norman Petty and Sam Phillips. Yet moving from these to his Monument Records years (1959–1964) is akin to watching your black and white TV morph into a sixty-inch plasma right before you. There’s “Running Scared,” “In Dreams,” “Crying,” “Blue Bayou” (this was a B-side?); no one made records like this or has since. That such wide-screen works were live-in-the-studio creations makes them even more astounding. Personal tragedy derailed Orbison’s career for much of the seventies (his first wife died in a motorcycle crash, and he lost two of his three sons in a house fire), but he had an unprecedented comeback in the eighties with the Traveling Wilburys and superstar producers T Bone Burnett, Don Was, and Jeff Lynne. It’s mostly all here (regrettably, there’s only one Wilburys track), including twelve unreleased demos and live recordings, among them a fiery “Tutti Frutti” and a version of “It’s Over” that was made in 1988, just days before a heart attack ended the life of this Texas great.
Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis
Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis
Photograph by Todd V. Wolfson
Austin’s favorite musical couple have separate careers: He’s just released The New World, and after recording Translated From Love, in 2007, she’s now taking a hiatus to focus on their four children. Yet they join forces every year to play a series of holiday shows in cities across the state. They kick off this year in Austin, on December 11.
Is it challenging for songwriters like yourselves to sink your teeth into such well-traveled material?
KW: It isn’t stuff that’s real fresh, that people haven’t heard a hundred times going to the grocery store, so it’s challenging to find interesting material. But I love singing in that style. We don’t really get to do that a whole lot.
BR: Especially not in country music. It’s a fine line, right? The songs are traditional, and it’s wonderful to hear them every year, but you can easily become sick of them.
Did you both grow up around a lot of holiday music?
BR: Yep, I heard all those songs on the radio.
KW: My mother would do a lot of singing in that style, so I have a fondness for that stuff. There’s such a nostalgic feeling to those songs. It just feels good to hear ’em and sing ’em. (Read the full interview.)
