{"id":7560,"date":"2015-04-03T05:30:36","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T09:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=7560"},"modified":"2015-04-03T05:30:36","modified_gmt":"2015-04-03T09:30:36","slug":"rick-wakeman-cannonball-adderley-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2015\/04\/03\/rick-wakeman-cannonball-adderley-and-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Rick Wakeman, Cannonball Adderley, and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I&#8217;m going to indulge in a brief change of pace. I&#8217;d like to tell you about a pair of reissues with which I am involved. I won&#8217;t be reviewing either title \u2013 what would be the point? \u2013 but suffice to say that if I didn&#8217;t think they are superb albums, I wouldn&#8217;t have written the liner notes.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/wakeman_rhapsodies2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"280\" height=\"280\" hspace=\"20' vspace=\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The first, reissued earlier this week, is <strong>Rick Wakeman<\/strong>&#8216;s final album for A&amp;M Records, <em>Rhapsodies<\/em>. This 2LP set capped his association with <strong>Herb Alpert<\/strong>&#8216;s label; the <strong>Yes<\/strong> keyboard player&#8217;s first album \u2013 <em>The Six Wives of King Henry VIII<\/em> \u2013 remains his best-selling (and arguably best) album, but <em>Rhapsodies<\/em> is a successfully varied lot as well. <iframe style=\"float: left; padding: 10px; width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ss&#038;ref=ss_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=musoscribe-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=B00T9QDX6O&#038;asins=B00T9QDX6O&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true&#038;linkId=NEGSMZDZQNLOP65Z\"><\/iframe> Though he had employed vocalists on some of his earlier A&amp;M albums (even <em>Rick Wakeman&#8217;s Criminal Record<\/em>, another album reissued with liner notes by yours truly), for <em>Rhapsodies<\/em>, Wakeman stuck to his strengths: piano, organ and synthesizer. A crack band is on hand, and as often as not they play in what might be termed a disco fashion, but the results are not nearly as gruesome as that description might suggest. Flashes of humor are shot through the album, and save for an interesting misstep (a bizarre reading of <strong>Gershwin<\/strong>&#8216;s \u201cRhapsody in Blue\u201d), <em>Rhapsodies<\/em> is a highly recommended album. My liner notes contextualize the album and even sort of review the tracks therein.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/adderley_bigman.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"280\" height=\"280\" hspace=\"20' vspace=\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Out next week is an album that&#8217;s near and dear to my heart. I&#8217;ve written often about how the music of <strong>Julian \u201cCannonball\u201d Adderley<\/strong> changed my life, serving as my adult gateway into jazz. (Audrey and I even had \u201cMercy Mercy Mercy\u201d played at our wedding last year.) Adderley&#8217;s final project was also his most ambitious: a sprawling double LP that combined Broadway, blues, folk tale, avant\/free jazz, funk and more. <em>Big Man: The Legend of John Henry<\/em> was met with mixed reviews upon its release shortly after Adderley\u2019s untimely death. <iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"float: left; padding: 10px; width: 120px; height: 240px;\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;OneJS=1&amp;Operation=GetAdHtml&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;source=ss&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;ad_type=product_link&amp;tracking_id=musoscribe-20&amp;marketplace=amazon&amp;region=US&amp;placement=B00TPVW2K6&amp;asins=B00TPVW2K6&amp;show_border=true&amp;link_opens_in_new_window=true&amp;linkId=VMOOISL3JO4ESKUW\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\"><\/iframe> But it&#8217;s a fascinating album, with a modern-day allegory that (to my mind, anyway) spoke to the Black Power concerns of the early 1970s through the retelling of a Reconstruction-era folk tale about the \u201csteel drivin&#8217; man.\u201d  Famed actor <strong>Robert Guillaume<\/strong> (known to a generation as Benson, a core character on <em>Soap<\/em> and later a self-titled sitcom) got one of his first big gigs providing vocals for this album. And Mr. Guillaume consented to an interview with me, which formed the basis of my extensive liner notes. I also did the package design for the reissue (which includes the entire work\u2019s libretto) and got my first (co-) producer&#8217;s credit on an album.<\/p>\n<p>At present I&#8217;m writing liner notes for another upcoming reissue, <strong>Iron Butterfly<\/strong>&#8216;s classic <em>Ball<\/em> LP, which will be out later in 2015. With luck, there will be other projects to tell you about in future days.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/the_musoscribe\">Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on <\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/the_musoscribe\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/icon_twitter_small.jpg\" alt=\"\" name=\"graphics3\" width=\"18\" height=\"18\" align=\"BOTTOM\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"1\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/the_musoscribe\"> Twitter<\/a> and get notified<br \/>\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I&#8217;m going to indulge in a brief change of pace. I&#8217;d like to tell you about a pair of reissues with which I am involved. I won&#8217;t be reviewing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,30,31,32,40,42,56,64],"tags":[460,1796,1843],"class_list":["post-7560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-avant-garde","category-folk","category-funk","category-fusion","category-instrumental","category-jazz","category-prog","category-reissue","tag-cannonball-adderley","tag-real-gone-music","tag-rick-wakeman","cat-7-id","cat-30-id","cat-31-id","cat-32-id","cat-40-id","cat-42-id","cat-56-id","cat-64-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}