Bags & Trane (1978)

I think it's high-time for another guest weblog from that stalwart of natural shoulder style, 'Talk Ivy's Jimmy Frost Mellor, don't you? Well then, take it away, Jimmy...

Bags & Trane, Milt Jackson & John Coltrane, Atlantic 1368, released 1961 (recorded 1959), cover photo by Lee Friedlander

19 years after his conception in New York City and 17 years after his birth, I first encountered a new friend. One that I've had by my elbow for the last 35 years now. Some records are just records, but this one was an instant Mate.

It was 1978 and I was 13, kicking my heels a long way from home and keeping myself busy by giving myself an education sorting through two bookcases filled with old vinyl: my Uncle's record collection, the treasure trove that was to change my life in every respect.

I'd already fallen in love with Hard Bop drumming and images of American Ivy League clothes from those LP sleeves at least two-days ago at this point and was by now very happily hooked on both, creating a daily routine for myself of listening to as much as I could, reading all the sleeve notes and checking out all the visual clues I could get of the style of the genius musicians I'd suddenly stumbled across by accident. I still have my old notebook diaries of tracks, dates and an ever growing series of shopping lists.

I couldn't separate the music from the clothes and from the style of their presentation on those old LP sleeves back then. They were a total sensory experience combining skills from many disciplines all brought together to produce perfect artworks to me. The music, the clothes, the styling, the photography, the typography, the sleeve notes , the smell of the cardboard, the texture of the paper liner, the weight of the thick black vinyl inside.

I tried to talk to my Uncle about all this and he just nodded. "Gesamtkunstwerk", he replied. "Bless you", I said and fetched him a handkerchief...

I'm writing this with my late Uncle's copy of Bags and Trane (Atlantic, 1961) in front of me and it is still a perfect thing to me. A part of the soundtrack of my last 35 years and one of the milestones which marked the start of my real life, after my previous 13 years of moving slowly towards who I was meant to be.

So who was I meant to be? With this LP and others I could tell you about another time I felt I'd found a home at last. A stylish place with nice neighbours who you never minded if they made a noise because the noises they made were so good.

And there were also new clothes to go with it all too! Different clothes. Familiar/Unfamiliar items which captured my imagination just as much as the brilliance of the pairing of Bags and Trane themselves.

I've described what I was up to as me giving myself an education back then, so what did I learn?

1) I needed a haircut ASAP. Something cropped and serious, but a world away from anything 'Skinhead'. My floppy 'Huge Grant' (Did he even have hair like that back then?) style had to go.

2) There can be a hardness in softness/ Checking out the cover shot on the LP the shirt collars and jacket shoulder lines were soft, unstructured and relaxed. But from two of the most disciplined musicians I'd heard so far? Trane especially came across to me as really tough, or maybe that's just what I wanted to project on to him? I liked the idea of 'sloppy' clothes (By regimented English standards) and a razor sharp creative brain at work. I liked the contrast. Later I was to learn that that was actually a very commonplace combination, but what did I know at 13? Before I went to live with my Uncle I only knew City of London Accountants and those in the Legal trade who were all as uniformed as the little lead soldiers in my toy fort.

3) A shirt, a tie and a suit needn't be a shirt, a tie and a suit ! These Ivy League clothes can be wonderfully subversive. Not to most Americans, I agree - who consider them Conservative - but their Conservatism is nothing compared to that of the English... I just fell in love with the idea that a haircut, a shave, a suit, and a shirt and tie could be done on the sly so that it all looked straight from a distance but was really saying something else. That seemed to reflect a part of me that went very deep: to be myself and to get away with it!

And so I went shopping for my first Blue buttondown and slim Dark knitted tie...a story for another day!

- Jimmy Frost Mellor

Miles Davis (1956)

There is a GREAT sequence of color photos of Miles Davis available over at Corbis taken by photographer Marvin Koner. Koner most likely shot these in June 1956 at Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village, New York, NY.

Cafe Bohemia was located at 15 Barrow Street between West 4th and 7th Avenue South. The Barrow Street Ale house currently resides in the location. A very historic stretch of Manhattan - bohos Steve McQueen and Jason Robards reportedly rubbed shoulders with sundry beat poets at the nearby Louis Tavern. According to a June 13, 1956 article in The Village Voice, the genesis of the cafe as a jazz venue directly involved Charlie Parker. Parker was crashing at poet Ted Joan's apartment at 4 Barrow Street in 1955 and frequented the bar across the street (favoring Brandy Alexanders). The bar/cafe had been owned by lifelong Villager, Jimmy Garofolo, since 1949 who had tried to pay the bills by utilizing the space as everything from a restaurant to a burlesque house. After being thrown out for drinking without any way to pay his tab, Parker offered to play a gig at the Cafe Bohemia. Garofolo didn't know Bird from Adam, but took him up on his offer and advertised the gig which attracted A LOT of attention from the hipsters and jazz fans. Unfortunately, Parker died on March 12, 1955 before he could play the gig, but the interest stirred up by the booking encouraged Garofolo to take his chances with using the space as a jazz venue. Within the year, Charles Mingus had recorded a disc there for his own Debut Records as had Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for Blue Note Records. By 1956 it was one of the top jazz clubs in New York City.

Miles Davis has only recently signed to Columbia Records at the time of these photos and had yet to have his debut LP on that label released. In fact, he had just (on June 5) completed his second of three sessions at Columbia's famed 30th Street Studios which would yield 'Round About Midnight, the disc that the label would release on March 18, 1956. Davis was in his ascendancy. He had been clean for a number of years, made something of a "come-back" at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, and had been leading one of his first steady combos in quite a while. More to the point, he was leading a combo which later became known to the cognoscenti as "The First Quintet" featuring Davis, John Coltrane (tenor sax), Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Philly Joe Jones (drums). The group had debuted at the Club Las Vegas in Baltimore on September 27, 1955 and made their New York debut at Birdland in mid-October of the same year, during which time the Columbia Records deal was sealed. It was also during this period that the group recorded over 6-albums-worth of material for Prestige Records - the independent label Davis was leaving for major-status Columbia. Cafe Bohemia was something of a home base for the Quintet throughout 1956 as it played several extended engagements there throughout the year.

What photographer Koner (who seems to have only been freelancing for Columbia at the time) captured in the above photos - including the last one, which was cropped and used on the cover of Miles's Columbia debut - is a vibrant immediacy that is so often lost in archival black and white photos. Now, don't get me wrong - I LOVE black and white photography - as well as old photos in general, but seeing Miles and John Coltrane in glorious 1956 color just brings them to life as people, rather than historical characters. And of course any fully illustrated chance to catch a glance at Davis's sartorial stylings is ALWAYS welcome. Dig that rolled sack seersucker jacket and Madras plaid casual sport shirt. Well "casual" and "sport" in the 1956 sense of the words, at least. Ivy League indeed. It's also the details the suck me in: the red fluorescent stage light, the Cadillac-grill Shure microphone, the sunglasses Miles is wearing...

Here's a clip of what the Miles David Quintet sounded like "live" in Philadelphia a few months after the photos were taken (Bandstand USA radio broadcast from the Blue Note Club on December 8, 1956):