Tag: 1990s

Nelson Rangell | Map of the Stars

“Flute Talk Magazine states ‘Nelson Rangell creates the impression that anything is possible when he improvises,'” (AllAboutJazz). “Such praise is a confirmation of what contemporary jazz fans have known since the Denver-based saxophonist emerged in the late 80s: that Rangell is one of the most exciting and diverse performers in the genre, equally adept at soprano, alto, and tenor saxophone, as well as being a genuine virtuoso on flute and piccolo.

… Rangell first played flute at the age of 15. Within months he was studying both classical and jazz music at The Interlochen Arts Academy … (then) the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.” After college, he worked in New York City with artists including Hiram Bullock, Jorge Dalto, Eric Gale, Richard Tee, Jaco Pastorius, David Sanborn, and Michael Brecker. “He also found occasional employment with the legendary Gil Evans Monday Night Orchestra and worked on many commercial jingle recording sessions.” Rangell has gone on to release 15 albums. While apparently no fan of smooth jazz, Stewart Mason of Tivo calls Rangell “a gifted soloist capable of twisting away from simple, melodic lines without losing the cozy accessibility that’s the calling card of this style of jazz.”

“Map of the Stars” (1992) gives Rangell a chance to showcase the piccolo at its most fluid and agile. The charming opening melody, in F major, shifts to a second section in F minor (0:48), back to major at 1:04, then minor again at 1:20, this time announced by a playful trill. By the time the groove-driven chorus arrives (1:44), we’ve slipped back into F major. At 2:13, the next verse begins with a guitar solo as the pattern continues — until 4:04, where a masterful extended solo by Rangell finishes out the tune.

for Marje

Tony Bennett | Steppin’ Out With My Baby

20-time Grammy winner Tony Bennett passed away last week at the age of 96. With his release of Love For Sale in 2021, a collaboration with Lady Gaga, he broke the Guinness World Record for oldest person to release an album of new material.

His 1993 album Steppin’ Out, a tribute to Fred Astaire, won the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Performance. “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” is the lead track, and the music video featured here was aired on MTV.

After a long, winding intro that quotes “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” among other tunes, we ultimately land in D minor for the start of the song. It modulates subtly to D major for the 8 bar “B” section at 1:00, then returns to D minor at 1:12. The tune continues alternating between these two keys throughout, and also briefly detours to C major for 8 bars at 1:40.

Fee Waybill | Tall, Dark and Harmless

“Wild, wacky, weird and wonderful are just a few words that would appropriately fit but still fall short of fully describing the unclassifiable theatrical rock enigma and fabulous freak show known as The Tubes,” (ChicagoConcertReviews.com). “The San Francisco-based band started in the 1970s by turning underground upside down with cult favorites ‘Don’t Touch Me There’ and ‘White Punks On Dope,’ accompanied by technologically-advanced productions, outrageous characters, over the top costumes and comedy that all seemed to jump straight out of a scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show crossed with a Saturday Night Live sketch.”

After many years with the band, Waybill decided to go solo. “It was the good, bad and the ugly of David Foster. He was a brilliant producer and a brilliant arranger, but he wanted to make hits. When we did the first album with him, he put me together with [Toto’s] Steve Lukather and we all wrote ‘Talk To Ya Later,’ which was a big hit. Then we wrote ‘She’s a Beauty’ on the second album and that was an even bigger hit. He wanted big hits on the radio and that’s what the record company wanted, but it kind of flew in the face of a band that had been together 15 years and he’s telling us, ‘no, I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to do a whole side of just hits with Lukather and Fee.’ The band couldn’t handle it and I understand it.”

Waybill released several solo albums, including 1996’s Don’t Be Scared of These Hands. “Tall Dark and Harmless” features all of the harmonic complexity and layered textures of later Tubes material. The uptempo rocker features a buzzing, ascending chromatic guitar line on the chorus — as complex as the repeated one-note title line is simple. Overall, the architecture of the tune is ever-changing: after an intro in E major, 0:17 features multiple two-chord pairs (suggesting several keys, none of which is E major). At 0:49, a pre-chorus leads back into the static E major of the chorus.

A Tribe Called Quest | Check the Rhime

“If A Tribe Called Quest had stopped with their first album, People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm, they’d still be regarded as a seminal hip hop act (BBC) … The laid back style of Q-Tip and Phife Dawg over the jazz sampleology of Ali Shaheed Muhammad, along with the daisy age raps of De La Soul, almost single-handedly defined the alternative rap scene … So when they followed it up with as close to a perfect album, The Low End Theory (1991), their place in history was assured.

Low End… pushed the jazz connection even further with a sparse but not quite minimal selection of grooves built around some exquisitely chosen upright bass samples, and in the case of ‘Verses From The Abstract’ actually utilising the real-time skills of legend Ron Carter … Like its predecessor, it combined humour with insight to show the world that ‘rap’ needn’t be equated with the worst aspects of the American dream. Q-Tip and Phife’s posse flows were, by this point, honed to perfection, with most tracks seeing them bounce off each other like some funked-up game of table tennis … this is another feel-good mix of smart grooves and the wittiest rhymes this side of Noel Coward. Acclaimed as one of the best 100 albums of all time by Rolling Stone, The Low End Theory remains one of hip hop’s defining moments and deserves to be in everyone’s record collection. Probably now more than ever…”

The track opens with an angular, heavily processed sax line that outlines C major and Bb major chords and doesn’t settle easily into any key, but shifts into a much clearer E minor as the first verse starts at 0:28. The two-chord vamp (A/B -> E) that underlies most of the tune is more complex than you might expect: the B bass note hits on beat one, but the A chord is delayed until the “and” of beat 2 and bleeds into the E bass note on beat 1 of the next measure. From 1:49 – 2:08 and again for the outro at 3:28, the C major intro riff returns.

Many thanks to Mark B. for this submission!

k.d. lang | Miss Chatelaine

“lang was an androgyne from rural Canada who considered herself to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, convinced she was born to be a country star,” (Pitchfork). “Even in outlaw terms, she was a long shot in conservative Nashville, a city nonetheless seduced by her punky verve and saucy rambunctiousness, a hay-bale alternative to the genre’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. She was accepted, to a degree—her vegetarianism and PETA allegiance notwithstanding—but lang knew that acceptance was creative death. By the early ’90s, she felt that she had exploited country’s full creative potential. Now was time to develop her own romantic language.” Her 1992 release, Ingénue, was the embodiment of that effort.

“Miss Chatelaine” was the album’s second single (after the #38 US/#8 Canadian hit “Constant Craving,” for which lang is generally best known). The track “earned its high camp credentials even before lang accompanied it with a video where she wore the high-bouffanted, ballgown-clad drag of femininity, the lesbian Liberace … ‘Miss Chatelaine’ is a towering millefeuille of accordion, frisky percussion and strings, a succession of audible exclamation points—a song with so many ornate moving parts that it’s easier to imagine its blueprint as a cuckoo clock than a black and white musical staff.”

“Miss Chatelaine” is built in E major overall, its relatively languid harmonic rhythm taking a back seat to the rangy melody, lang’s crystalline vocal, and her distinctive phrasing. A new dance partner, an instrumental bridge which jumps up a minor third to G major, cordially cuts in between 1:59 and 2:20, but then the tune reverts to its original key.

Van Morrison | You Don’t Know Me

*This is the second installment of a weeklong series featuring covers of the 1956 song “You Don’t Know Me”*

Van Morrison’s cover of “You Don’t Know Me” was featured on his twenty-third studio album, Days Like This, released in 1995. His daughter, Shana Morrison, joins as a guest artist on the track.

There is a modulation from Eb up to E at 3:48.

Teenage Fanclub | I Don’t Want Control of You

“Initially lauded for the sonically dense, guitar-driven anthems that heralded them as unexpected stars of the alternative rock era, the perception of Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub transformed over time, eventually earning the group a reputation as pop craftsmen famous for a distinctive brand of classicist ’60s- and ’70s-style power pop and folk-rock,” (Qobuz). “Originally centered on the talents of three singer/songwriters — Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley — Teenage Fanclub emerged in the late ’80s mixing sludgy guitar riffs and memorably hooky choruses that drew inspiration from iconic guitar rock bands like Big Star, Badfinger, and the Byrds.

… The band broke through with its 1991 Geffen major-label debut, Bandwagonesque, which hit #1 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, and spawned three Top 20 modern rock hits … They eschewed larger pop culture trends like grunge and Brit-pop in favor of further honing their sparkling, guitar-based sound, a choice that only worked to endear them to their loyal cult fan base.” The Glasgow-based band has pursued a “continued dedication to writing heartfelt songs imbued with timeless lyricism, nuanced maturity, and warm vocal harmonies.” In 1991, “they joined Nirvana on tour, after which Kurt Cobain was famously quoted as saying they were the ‘best band in the world.’ By year’s end, Bandwagonesque had landed at the top of Spin Magazine’s Best-Of list, surpassing Nirvana’s Nevermind … and R.E.M.’s Out of Time.” The band has continued to release albums into the 2020s.

Released on the 1997 album Songs From Northern Britain, “I Don’t Want Control of You” features a dense guitar-centric arrangement, a broad harmonic vocabulary, and tight vocal harmonies. The single reached only #43 in the UK, the only place where it hit the charts. An economical guitar solo (1:48 -2:06) doesn’t hit many notes — just the right ones. Some 6/4 measures are mixed in with the otherwise standard-issue 4/4 meter rock feel, including right before the key change. Determining the power pop pedigree of mid-tempo tracks is an inexact science, but the dense tapestry of this track seems to qualify.

Michael W. Smith | Place In This World

American singer/songwriter and three-time Grammy winner Michael W. Smith wrote “Place In This World” with Wayne Kirkpatrick and Amy Grant for his sixth studio album, Go West Young Man, released in 1990. The track ended up being his biggest mainstream success, reaching the #6 spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

In an interview with Songfacts, Smith recalled hearing a story about how the song helped someone who was suffering. “Well, the one story I remember vividly, I could still go back to reading the letter, was some young girl, I think she was 18 or 19 years old, and had a horrific childhood in terms of abuse and that sort of thing. And she was suicidal. She gave me this whole story in a two page letter. She was driving down the freeway and listening to a pop radio station and heard ‘Place In This World’ and pulled over and began to weep. And had this encounter with God on the side of the interstate. And her life forever changed. And that’s the one that I’ll never forget. There’s been plenty of people talk about ‘A Place In This World’ but that’s the one letter that I’ll never forget.”

The track begins in B and modulates to C leading into the instrumental bridge at 2:15.

Counting Crows | Chelsea (live)

“Leave it to the Counting Crows to follow its first two studio albums with a double live release,” (MusicBox Online). “Many have questioned the need for Across a Wire (1998), but one listen to the music contained on this set reveals the ingenious creativity of this multi-faceted group. The recordings were taken from the band’s appearances on VH-1’s Storytellers and MTV’s Live at the 10 Spot. One of the Counting Crows’ goals of performing on Storytellers was to present reworked versions of its songs. Therefore, although several of the tunes are repeated between the two discs, they are given remarkably different treatments …

Throughout Across a Wire, Adam Duritz’s voice has never sounded better. He masterfully channels the deep-seated emotion behind his lyrics as the band bathes his vocals in both swirling angst and subtle nuance. There’s never a dull moment at a concert by Counting Crows, and this set certainly captures the group at its best.”

Originating in F major, “Chelsea” shifts to a chorus in the closely related key of Bb major (first heard between 1:00 – 1:24). The change is played up yet further by the contrast between the hypnotic I-IV repetition of the the verse and the broader harmonic vocabulary of the chorus.


for Kelli

Bush | The Chemicals Between Us

“English rock band Bush emerged during the grunge boom of the early ’90s, becoming the first British band post-Nirvana to hit it big in America. Following the release of their breakthrough debut, 1994’s Sixteen Stone, they carried that international, multi-platinum success to greater heights with their chart-topping follow-up, Razorblade Suitcase,” (AllMusic). “A hit on radio and MTV, the band — fronted by guitarist/vocalist Gavin Rossdale — rounded out their peak period of popularity with 1999’s experimental The Science of Things.” In 2001, the band broke up for a decade, returning in 2010 to renewed popularity.

Representative of the band’s edgy and lyrics-forward sound, “The Chemicals Between Us” is a track from The Science of Things, an album probably best known for its slow, hypnotic, modulation-free track “Letting the Cables Sleep.” Starting in a heavily de-tuned C minor shot through with E-naturals not only in the guitars but in the bass line as well, 0:54 brings a chorus built around Bb minor. At 1:14, C minor returns in advance of the next verse.