Well, it’s Friday night again, so here’s my next musical thread ;): I’m listening to Hank Williams 40 Greatest Hits, and thought once more what a perfect and flawless compilation and document of country music it is. If someone asked me to help them start with country music, I’d guide them to this album first.
If they’d ask for the blues, I’d recommend Robert Johnson’s The Complete Recordings. I knew many covers (Stones, Clapton etc.) and some of the myth of Robert Johnson before, but when I finally got me this compilation shortly after first release in 1990, it was the first time that I heard the man himself, and I was baffled, just like I still am when I listen to it today. It too is a document of American musical history.
Can you come up with similar examples, maybe in the same genres or maybe others? It’s always hard to pinpoint such a personal category like I’m thinking of, but I’m going for stuff that perhaps would be preserved as pieces of cultural heritage by a museum or library.
(Typing the last paragraph, I thought about the fact that the Voyager’s golden records have Chuck Berry on it. So yeah, a definite Chuck Berry album would surely qualify. Send more Chuck Berry :-))
John Hartford’s 1971 album Aereo-Plain. What happens when you give hillbillies a LOT of marijuana to smoke. Their hair gets long and their string bands get really weird.
Sam Bush, famous fiddler/mandolinist and founder of the New Grass Revival, said that “Newgrass” music never would have happened without Hartford’s groundbreaking work.
I’ve got it for a long time (granted, the CD re-release, but with great features, including a facsimile of Harry Smith’s original annotations), so I’ve got that down :). Don’t know how I could forget about it when I wrote the OP :smack:.
The Birth of the Cool, with Miles Davis’s nine-piece band. Sessions recorded in 1949, not released until 1957 or so.
Miles left Julliard and started playing hot bebop in 1945 with maestros like Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and Bud Powell. By the late '40s he was hanging out with Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan and discussing a new kind of jazz, which would be less a “frantic” blowing session and allow more space for arrangers to add harmony, counterpoint, and color.
They put together a nine-man band, which was as small and musically mobile as they could get while keeping in all the timbres and sounds with which they wanted to work. Trumpet and alto saxophone at the top of the range; French horn and trombone for the middle; and baritone sax and tuba for the low range. Piano, bass, and drums in the rhythm section.
Every piece on the collection is a masterpiece of jazz composition and arrangement, albeit only 3 minutes long (to fit the existing recording medium). Listen to the opening of “Godchild,” with the theme stated by VERY agile tuba and bari, which then launch into a rising figure that adds 'bone and horn a third of the way through, and finishes off with the alto and trumpet brightening the mix.
The music had an enormous effect on what was to become known as the “cool jazz” movement, which burgeoned through the 1950s on the west coast, particularly in the Los Angeles area.
I’d love to have that, though I console myself with the Stax albums I got. And then I own the Atlantic R&B Box Set - Various Artists | Album | AllMusic Atlantic R’n’B box set, which I think is equally great in importance and scope. There must be some overlaps, as there were some distribution deals between the labels. The Atlantic compilation got some Otis Redding, for instance.
The Harry Smith stuff first came to mind. Love the Hank 40. Don’t forget James Brown’s Star Time, or Bob Dylan’s Biograph.
The Nuggets albums compiled by Patti Smith’s guitarist are held up as seminal to garage rock, punk, etc.
Various Motown, Stax, Sun, Hi Records (Al Green! Otis Clay!) compilations are worthy and essential. Some Best of Blue Note compilations are essential for Jazz heads.
Kind of Blue is my favorite American recording and one that endures at the top of list.
I found a great old school Rap compilation that had everything from Whodini, to Kool Moe Dee, to Baby Got Back, The Message, White Lines and Bust a Move. Very fun.
Sorry - cut off. Mosaic records puts out great compilations. I have a 3-cd set of boogie woogie piano that is so great and fun. It’s in my car CD player now.
A great tangential Nuggets collection is Love is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970, for those of us who love the Charlatans, the Airplane, the Dead, and all their druggy psychedelic ilk.
The Louis Armstrong Columbia box set Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1923-1934. Hot stuff! It’s not yo gramma’s “Hello, Dolly!” Satchmo.
Track 10 on Disc 1, Pete Johnson doing an instrumental called simply Boogie Woogie is everything I could ever hope to hear in a boogie piano player. Damn.
Well, some of you might know that I’m a big, big Dylan fan, so of course I got Biograph.
Yeah, Nuggets is great. I’ve got the extended 4-CD edition as mp3’s (well, I confess that I downloaded it in the Napster days when I still had not much qualms about acquiring music this way. But I promise that I’m done with those kind of downloads for a very long time). There’s much great stuff to discover on it.
Well, about ten years ago when I was still a regular reader of the German edition of “Rolling Stone”, they had a ten-CD compilation with Motown’s complete singles as a gift if you subscribed. Unfortunately, I missed it then.
Biograph is for Dylan pussies! You need all of The Bootleg Series, starting with Live at the Albert Hall 1966.
Somebody said the first CD…the acoustic set…was substandard, but they’re full of shit. And the second, electric disc, with The Band, is one of the great sets ever. “Play fuckin’ LOUD.”
