Terry Durham - Crystal Telephone (1969)

Final edit: solved the mystery of this disappearing post.  Blogger pulled it as they wanted to check the YouTube link for viruses or something, and have now okayed it.  So here's the original back!

 

Sole solo album release (he also formed part of a folk band, Storyteller, in the early 70s) by abstract/figurative artist and poet Terry Durham (1936-2013).  This record was originally released on the Deram label, with by music by composer/arranger John Coleman.  Very much a product of its era, Crystal Telephone has become something of a cult item in recent years, positing Durham as "Yorkshire's answer to Serge Gainsbourg".  Have a listen to the clip from BBC Radio 6 Music in the YouTube insert below for a very funny broadcast of one of the album's tracks - for anyone confused about the announcer's references to "tabs", in this context it's a Northern English colloquialism for cigarettes.

With a crack team of British session musicians and jazz artists behind him, the album features Durham reciting his poetry (and occasionally singing) over a backing that's sometimes groovy and bluesy, sometimes sweetly orchestrated, on one occasion furious free jazz (check out the end of Branwell's Corner!), and always listenable and enjoyable.  Some tracks are amusing in a kind of cod-beat poetry way, others have aged better and are more affecting - Fryston Main is a poignant look at the decline of the British mining industry over a brass band playing Abide With Me, which works incredibly well.  One of these sweet little obscurities that's well worth discovering.

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pw: sgtg

Robert Ashley - Private Parts (The Record) (1978)

If Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was an experiment in barely comprehensible, involuntary speech coming out of nowhere, its predecessor was a deliberate, clearly (if laidback, almost narcotically) enunciated spoken word opus on thoughts coming out of nowhere.  The two distinct narratives of Private Parts would end up bookending Ashley's landmark 'opera for television' Perfect Lives, but these original versions, on 'The Record', are the perfect way to listen to them, in what may well be his masterpiece.

Accompanied by Robert Sheff, aka "Blue" Gene Tyrrany on keyboards, and Krishna Bhatt on beautifully melodic tabla, Ashley narrates two stories that focus on the mental ruminations of two different people.  In the first one, a man on a business trip distracts himself from the loneliness of his motel room by imagining two men sitting on a nearby park bench.  In the second, a woman stands on a porch at twilight pondering her surroundings, the comforts of mindful breathing and a highly personalised numerology, and the cosmological heretic Giordano Bruno.

The music is supremely relaxing, with just a slight uncanny edge to it.  What makes The Backyard the superior of the two for me, at least musically, are Bhatt's brisker rhythm and Tyrrany's gradual introduction and swelling expansion at key points.  Ashley pours forth line after line, each potentially loaded with meaning or insignificance, depending on what mood each line catches you in and the level of attention you want to bring to each listen.

This has the great effect that no two listening experiences of the album are ever the same.  Even after spending several years with it, one particular line can just jump out at you in a way it hasn't before: in this instance, whilst having to divide my attention between listening to The Backyard whilst writing, I just caught "Behind her the great northern constellation rises in the majesty of its architecture."  But then, Ashley's very next line is the fourth-wall-leaning "Well, maybe that’s a little too much", and directs the character back into some more abstract thoughts of Bruno's martyrdom and the nature of twilight.  Prepare for many, many such bizarre moments of sudden clarity with Private Parts.

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pw: sgtg

Original LP cover

Freddie Hubbard / İlhan Mimaroǧlu - Sing Me A Song Of Songmy (1971)

A unique and still powerful collision between jazz, recited poetry/other spoken word and the electronic/composed avant-garde, this album is very much a product of its time, but continues to resonate.  Credited first to the legendary trumpeter Freddie Hubbard (and solely to him on the spine of the CD I have here), Sing Me A Song Of Songmy was however foremost a project by Turkish-born composer İlhan Mimaroǧlu (1926-2012).  As a producer at Atlantic, Mimaroǧlu had top-notch facilities at his disposal to indulge in an album this bizarre and still get a major label release out of it, and Hubbard's quintet were game to provide an underlying backbone of post-bop accessibility.

Before even hearing the record, listeners of the time would've been aware that there were weighty themes within - 'Songmy' was an anglicization of Sơn Mỹ, the Vietnamese village in which the 1968 My Lai massacre took place; the cover painting was Picasso's Massacre In Korea, and the gatefold a collage of contemporary anti-war content.  Alongside Mimaroǧlu's "Fantasy For Electromagnetic Tape", with occasional quotes of older classical music, and Hubbard's quintet, were readings of poems by Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca and Nha-Khe, and texts by Kierkegaard and Che Guevara.

The album opens with another then-contemporary recitation, of Susan Atkins' testimony at the Manson Family trials, accompanied by a nightmarish sound collage giving way to a string orchestra overture and more electronics.  If this is a bit too much of a chucking in at the deep end, a few minutes of Hubbard and band follow with minimum disturbance, before the electronic processing gradually leads to the first piece of war poetry.  The album continues in collage mode, jumping from jazz to processed noise to orchestrated passages to recitation and sometimes piling on all at once, clearly intended to be unsettling, provocative and thought-provoking.  A must-listen, even today.


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Iancu Dumitrescu / Ana-Maria Avram / George Astalos - Musique de Paroles (1993)

Mark your SGTG bingo cards, folks - we're following up Iannis with Iancu & Ana-Maria.  Took me ages to track this one down, and it was worth it.  Astree Lontaine is first up, a fine orchestral Dumitrescu work that stands up with the best of his large-scale works of the 80s and early 90s, e.g. Grande Ourse - the ominous droning and screeching suggesting a haunted orchestra pit.  Later on, there's a solo work apiece from the two composers - Avram's Archae for voice, and Dumitrescu's Holzwege for viola.

In between is the album's centrepiece Symetries, a half-hour long suite of five pieces based on writings by George Astalos (1933-2014), a Romanian poet and playwright who settled in Paris (I'm guessing that's why all the words are in French).  Dumitrescu and Avram take turns at filling out the sonic backdrop, as French literary-spoken word performer Pierre Lamy intones the texts on a ghostly bed of reverb and other effects.  Haunting stuff and very effective, even if you're not fluent in French - I'm certainly too rusty to get much out of Astalos' texts, but I still enjoyed these settings a lot.  The one that's stuck with me most is Magma, with Avram's bubbling and sputtering electronics.

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John Cage / David Tudor - Indeterminacy (1959)

John Milton Cage Jr, 1912-1992 - composer, music theorist, Zen Buddhist, all of these and more; here he is captured on tape in the late 50s holding forth on every facet of his life and interests.  Encouraged by long-time collaborator David Tudor to start delivering some lectures that were simply storytelling, Cage started compiling minute-long anecdotes on cue cards, and eventually decided to record some of them.

Even if this double-album of 90 stories was just purely a spoken-word recording, I'd still love it - Cage holding forth on everything from music to philosophy to charming autobiographical snapshots is a joy to experience on repeat listens.  The icing on the cake, however, is that Tudor accompanied him in the studio (well, in separate studios where they couldn't hear each other) playing and cutting in elements of Cage's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Fontana Mix.  Voice and musical/noise backing collide against each other, sometimes abraisively, sometimes dovetailing brilliantly in moments of wonderful serendipity.

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BBC Schools Radio Series Drama Workshop - The Seasons (1969)

This bizarre slice of British educational history came to my attention when it was reissued by Trunk Records, who have a firm niche established in reissuing great little oddball records that would otherwise be lost to history.  I found this CD in my local HMV's classical/specialist section, plonked in the 'spoken word and poetry' rack, and snapped it up in one of those 'okay I'm buying this right now' moments about five seconds after I'd read the description on the back.

They really, really don't make 'em like this any more - correct me if you know any different, but the British Broadcasting Corporation of 2016 sadly no longer appear to commission any music for children to improvise interpretive dance to, let alone base it around creepy, primitive Radiophonic Workshop electronics and equally disturbing declaimed poetry like they did on this 1969 production.  Fun for any neofolk afficionados picking up this album: read the poems in the booklet, and imagine each one being performed by Current 93.  Hilarity will ensue, along the lines of one of those Buzzfeed quizzes like 'Who said it - Morrissey or Alan Partridge?'.

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