Shit Your Grandma Liked: The Reverend Dick Picks the Best Albums of the 1950s

I don't know which I like best:
cooking, cleaning, or intercourse.
Cooking, I guess.

I hate Canada Geese.  They're nasty, miserable, filthy, stupid, vicious fucking things and if it wasn't for the demented laws protecting them as some sort of Canadian national symbol, I'd set up a non-profit association whose sole purpose would be to wipe them off the face of the earth forever.

Every Fall they migrate south, but the other day while I was riding my bike along the Seawall here in Vancouver, I noticed they were back, lunging at children, hissing at tourists, and shitting all over the place like the nasty, miserable, filthy, stupid, vicious fucking things they are.  As I passed by a small flock of them and extended my leg so I could give one or two of them a kick in the ass as I zipped by, it occurred to me that their return, though unfortunate, is not without it's upside:

It also means Spring is on its way at last.

Johnny Gill: Yo Bobby,
what you get Whitney
for Valentine's Day?
Bobby Brown: A coffin.
Ralph Tresvant: That's cold, bro.
Bobby: That's my prerogative.

I should have sensed it.  The return of the geese to their nesting grounds on the Seawall coincided almost exactly with the death of Whitney Houston, an event which also had a bit of a Springtimey vibe about it - kind of like when Dorothy's house landed on the witch in the Wizard of Oz and all the Munchkins started to sing and dance around.  For those of you with delicate sensibilities and terrible taste, I apologize, but I really can't get all that weepy about the death of a crackhead millionairess whose music makes my rectums recoil.

Quite frankly, she was dead to me already.

Anyways, with these seasonal themes of growth and change in mind, I've decided to spruce up the look of the Gospel a little bit.  Look closely and you'll note that I've switched the previous black background for a oh-so-slightly different black background.

Chuh-chuh-chuh-changes!

I've also added a new feature called "Dick's Picks," which you can find by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.  Each week, I'll administer a two LP-length dose of the good stuff I keep behind the counter: a recently released album that I think is worth checking out, as well as a forgotten or under-appreciated classic from the past.

I know four inches doesn't sound
like much, but it's thick.

Starting this week with the 1950s, I'm also going to take you bitches on a magic carpet ride through the history of the Long-Player Album.  Though there's obviously a shitload of recorded music prior to the invention of the LP in 1948, when your talking about albums, as I will be, the 1950s are pretty much where it starts.

Though rock acts really didn't start putting out great albums until the mid 1960s, almost immediately, the LP became pretty much the standard format for jazz.  Frank Sinatra also embraced the LP by the midway point in the decade, after Elvis and other rock 'n' roll acts began to eclipse him on the pop singles charts.  The result was a handful of albums that were among pop music's first masterpieces in the format.

Truman: Psst. Hey Joe.  Now that we've carved
the world up between us here, what say
we ditch fatso and go get us some bitches?

Anyways, here goes: the top 10 albums of the 1950s.
















10.  Ravi Shakar: "Three Ragas, 1956"

Song selected: "Raga Jog"

Though unfortunate associations with acid-headed hippies emerge almost as soon as you start listening to Indian classical music, there's actually a good reason why people started going all gaga for raga gurus like Ravi Shankar in the 1960s: he's a full-on shitkicking motherfucker of a sitar player.  No one ever has, is, or likely ever will be any better than him.  I mean, fuck, There are more ideas in what's called the alap or opening, free improvisation section of "Raga Jog" than Jimmy Page or Pete Townsend came up with in their entire lives.  This album probably would have ranked higher, but I had to knock Ravi down a couple of spots for fathering Norah Jones.


9.  Sun Ra & His Arkestra: "Sound Of Joy, 1956"

Song selected: "Ankh"

Sun Ra is one of jazz's great weirdos.  Sometime in the 1950s, he became convinced that he was an extra-terrestrial from Saturn, changed his name to Sun Ra, and developed a world view and personal philosophy that combined Egyptian mythology with some totally crazy-ass space alien shit.  Seriously.  Later on, his music would occasionally sound like it was made by someone suffering from mental health issues, but this earlier effort is just a top-notch, modern, big band swing album, one of the best ever, in fact.  Exquisitely arranged, beautifully performed, richly textured: a great example of swinging, space-ace, bachelor pad music.


8.  Ray Charles: "Ray Charles, 1957"

Song selected: "Sinner's Prayer"

No one sings gospel songs about fucking quite like Ray Charles, and his 1957 debut is one of the best examples of smutty soul I can think of.  It's hard to understand just how subversive a song like "I Got A Woman" or "Hallelujah, I Love Her So" were back in 1957 when they came out: nowadays, it'd be kind of like jacking off in public to a picture of the Virgin Mary.  This album also laid down the blueprint for much of the soul music of the 1960s: groove-oriented, gospel-inflected blues songs about - what else?  Love and sex.  Which for Ray Charles, seem to be pretty much the same thing.


7.  Thelonius Monk: "The Genius of Modern Music, Volume 1, 1952"

Song Selected: "Ruby, My Dear"

It's hard to underestimate the greatness and importance of this album.  For one, this 1952 release by Thelonious Monk is the first masterpiece of the LP format.  It also documents one of the architects of bebop's first recording sessions as a leader.  Not to mention that the album contains the Monk compostions "Off Minor," "Ruby, My Dear," "Well, You Needn't," "Epistrophy," and "'Round About Midnight,"all of which would become standards and among the most recognized tunes in the jazz catalog.  Must-have music for any jazz collection.


6.  Ornette Coleman "The Shape Of Jazz To Come, 1959"

Song selected: "Congeniality"

The release of Ornette Coleman's 1959 Atlantic debut is a watershed moment in the history of jazz.  It is the birth of Free Jazz, a subgenre of hard bop that basically dispenses with the harmonic underpinnings of the music altogether, emphasizing instead the relationship between the melodic lines.  On his previous two releases, the largely ignored "Something Else!" and "Tomorrow Is The Question," Coleman was not entirely successful in realizing his new and altogether game-changing conception.  Both records still retain lingering traces of many of the harmonic and structural elements that Coleman would abandon completely on "The Shape of Jazz To Come."  Coleman's choice of sidemen have a lot to do with both his past failures and newfound success.  He stopped using a pianist after the first album, and in Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden, he finally finds a rhythm section that was open-minded and sensitive enough to follow him and Don Cherry outside the box, without losing touch with reality altogether.  Not all jazz to come would be shaped as Coleman suggests here, but like it or not, the music would never be the same again.


5.  Elvis Presley: "Elvis Presley, 1956"

Song Selected: "Blue Moon"


There's probably no album more historically important in the history of pop music than this one.  Elvis Presley's self-titled debut kicks off the rock 'n' roll era, and does so with blue-suede boot to the ass.  People often accuse Elvis of racistly appropriating black culture in order to sell a watered-down version of it to middle America, but that's a bunch of bullshit. This is to confuse him with his pigmentally-challenged imitators and with the suits who got filthy stinking rich peddling his funky white ass to America.  Elvis didn't invent rock 'n' roll, he WAS rock 'n' roll - its living, breathing embodiment.  Equal parts Country, R&B, and Gospel, The King is the real fucking deal.  Long may he reign.

4.  Frank Sinatra: "Songs For Swingin' Lovers, 1956"

Song Selected: "I've Got You Under My Skin"

In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was the undisputed master of the album.  Between 1955 and 1959, he released 7 or 8 albums that are all fantastic, some dark and depressing: "Only The Lonely," "In The Wee Small Hours," "No One Cares," and "Where Are You?"; others upbeat and swinging: "Come Fly With Me," "Come Dance With Me", and "A Swingin' Affair" to name a few.  My favourite of them all, though is "Songs For Swingin' Lovers."  This is Old Blue Eyes at his rat-packy best: smooth, cool, loose as fuck, and yet in complete and total control.  Few, if any artists have mastered their medium the way Sinatra has the American Songbook.  The best crooner ever.


3.  Charles Mingus: "Mingus Ah Um, 1959"

Song Selected: "Better Git It In Your Soul"

With the possible exception of "The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady," "Mingus Ah Um" is the best, and certainly the most immediately appealing of Charles Mingus' large and excellent body of work.  The album is both musically forward looking and conscious of its history: nodding to past greats like Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton on "An Open Letter To Duke" and "Jelly Roll" while remaining very much a modern and progressive jazz album.  Not at all a bad place to start if you want to check out jazz in general or Mingus in particular and aren't into the skronky shit.


2.  Dave Brubeck Quartet: "Time Out, 1959"

Song Selected: "Take Five"

Largely because of its enormous popularity (Brubeck even graced the cover of Time magazine not long after its release) "Time Out" is often reviled as gimmicky, soulless, and almost self-consciously caucasian.  It's none of the above.  Among Brubeck's innovations here include the use of unusual time signatures like 5/4 and 7/8 as well as experimenting with contemporary avant garde compositional techniques like phasing and minimalism.  Although Miles Davis laid the foundation for the style on "The Birth Of The Cool," Brubeck's work, particularly on this album, along with that of Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan is what became known as West Coast Cool Jazz, a softer, less rhythmic, one might say, loungier version of jazz than the east coast Hard Bop of Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, or Charles Mingus.  This shit is too cool for school, Daddy-O.


1.  Miles Davis: "Kind Of Blue, 1959"

Song Selected: "So What?"

"Kind of Blue" is almost unequivocally cited by jazz-heads as the creme de la creme of the idiom and, quite frankly, I cannot help but concur.  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the album is that the music on it is completely improvised: the musicians (who included John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb) actually had nothing to work with prior to recording other than some rough sketches of modes that Miles had scribbled down on a napkin before the session.  In terms of what is attainable when a small group of inspired and highly gifted artists gather together to make something beautiful, it is an unparalleled masterpiece.  This is not just the best album of the 50s, or of all time, it is, quite possibly, the greatest music ever created by human beings.  If you don't like it, there's almost undoubtedly something seriously fucking wrong with you.


Make sure to check out the Gospel next week for the top 10 albums of the early sixties (1960-65)

*** DICK'S PICKS *** for the Week of February 19, 2012.

New Release:

John Talabot: "Fin"

Song Selected: "Oro y Sangre"

Imagine your at a club, all fucked up on E, shaking your shit and your glow stick like it ain't no thang, when suddenly the ceiling splits open above you, letting in the blinding brightness of a fierce, Ibiza-like sun.  Indeed, the sunstroke electronica that Spanish DJ, John Talabot creates here almost seems better suited to a day at the beach rather than a night at the club.  "Fin" has a bit of that drugged out, sunshine supermanish feel to it that many, including myself, have found so appealing in the work of artists like DeLorean and Caribou, both of whom are worth checking out if you haven't already.  It may require some chemical supplementation in order to appreciate fully, but "Fin" is still one of the best new releases so far this year.  Although the year is still very, very young.


Past Classic:

Various Artists: "The Indestructible Beat of Soweto"

Song Selected: "Ohude Manikiniki" by Umahlathini Nabo.

That music such as this, so brimming with life and joy, could come gurgling up out of the tyrannical oppression and abject squalor of the apartheid-ravaged townships of South Africa is a testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit as well as of the Mbaqanga beat of Soweto.  Here, hopefulness emerges from a hopeless situation through an authentic and heroic engagement with the things that matter most.  If listening to this compilation of gloriously soulful psalms about life, love, and the struggles that abound does not make you ashamed of our culture's snivelling predilection for bitching and moaning about shit that in the great scheme of things is almost laughably petty, it is only a matter of time before you discover the dark and horrible truth about yourself:

You are a cyborg.