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Saturday Singalong: It's Flyte Tyme

Today, I'm all about Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis:

The SOS Band, Borrowed Love. Arguably, The SOS Band was the purest vehicle for the "Flyte Tyme" sound developed by Jam and Lewis, not even so much a "sound" as a whole set of atmospherics, layered synths on top of driving, percolating beats. SOS Band had already enjoyed success with Take Your Time (Do It Right), but the three albums concocted with Jam and Lewis set a new standard, especially on the expansive side ones of each one, the first which featured Just The Way You Like It, and the second, Sands of Time, which featured Borrowed Love. Borrowed Love percolates sharply, whie reveling in the jazzy, slightly mournful lyric sung by Mary Davis, one of the great, undersung lead singers in modern R&B. This song, and much of the Flyte Tyme collaborations came to define "Quiet Storm" radio in the mid to late eighties, a late night jam of torchy ballads, smooth jazz, and acts like SOS Band and Loos Ends who kind of defied easy descriptions. Also, Borrowed Love shows the Flyte Tyme magic with a particular sub genre of Other Woman songs, the Love on the Side story.

Janet Jackson, Love Will Never Do Without You. Jackson's whole rebirth as an eighties pop icon is all about Jam and Lewis, who produced the 4 pivotal albums that define the backbone of her hits (Design of a Decade wraps the story up in a bow). Jackson, of course, ebenfitted mightily from their carefully controlled approach to sound production, and they make some of the best use of what might otherwise be dismissed as a thin, breathy approach to singing, making her into a latter day Diana Ross. The kitchen sink, extended length (in the album version) opus of Love Will Never Do is a big case in point: layered synths, layered vocals, and a propulsive rhythm track tend to mask the almost childlike vocals from Janet, giving the song an almost unearned maturity and depth. But it really, really works.

Herb Alpert, Keep Your Eye On Me. Jam and Lewis were so succesful at turning Jackson into a star for A&M records that it really did seem natural that the label's founder, Alpert (the "A" in A&M), would collaborate with them on a career reviving album. Alpert's role as a sixties star trumpeter who captured pop success was ancient history, but the jazzy revisionist approach to his classic sound was beyond refreshing; it was audacious and daring. Who knew he had it in him? And who, at that point, knew Jam and Lewis were that capable of an artistic leap?

Human League, Human. Turning the top English synth act of the eighties into the next SOS Band may seem easy and derivative, but the collaboration did work wonders for both sides: The League never had quite such an accessible hit, and the track is simply, sheerly gorgeous. The cascading synths of the open, the plaintive lyric (yet another "sorry for my love on the side" message), are indeed a compelling mix of man and machine. Just because it looks easy, doesn't make it so.

Cherrelle, Affair. Cherrelle's career was also built on Jam and Lewis and their effective presentation of Cherrelle as a lusty woman willing to cheat ("Saturday Love", "Everything I MIss At Home", "You Look Good To Me", just for starters). Affair's forthright lyrics - "I don't need commitment, I don't need a man to tell me how to feel" - spoke to a frankness in the sexuality of independent urban women that was impossible to deny.

Johnny Gill, Rub You The Right Way. I was reminded of the primacy of Jam and Lewis and their work when this track showed up on my Sirius XM "Nineties on Nine" station ("Eighties on Eight" is also pretty awesome). Gill never was the biggest R&B star, but this track is a showstopper, from its explosive opening (a shouted "Pump Up the Bass!" followed by a signature Jam/Lewis zig zag of synths) to its sexy close ("your every wish is my command"). Your average song about a sexy massage would seem pretty silly. Not this one. 

Boyz II Men, 4 Seasons of Loneliness. Any of a number of their ballads would make the point, but I like the old fashioned, even gimmicky appraoch to a "4 seasons" song, subverted by BIIM's jazzy inventiveness in layered harmonies, and the Flyte Tyme magic in a sound curtain. The instrumentation is barely noticeable; it's the singing that really does the work, but even that is treated as a multilayered instrument in the Jam/Lewis mix, which gently softens what could be an overwrought lyric - "This loneliness has crushed my heart" - into a gentle, plaintive testament to love and loss.

Friday Favorites: Quiz Show

When I started writing about some of my favorite older films, I said I had a hard time thinking of these favorites, and that, plus a general slowdown in writing (oh... who notices?), left me grasping for topics.

But a few things came to mind over time, including Quiz Show, the film I think probably best shows Robert Redford's evolution as a director of quality projects, which are especially clever at illustrating the dominance and decline ofmainline WASP culture in America.

Redford's first effort was the difficult, somewhat depressing Ordinary People, a story of the aftermath of suicide that marked Mary Tyler Moore's drastic departure from her role as America's midern sweetheart via her television show. The film speaks tense volumes in its silences, the uncomfortable distance between couples and between parents and their kids. 

Quiz Show was Redford's 4th venture, 14 years after Ordinary People, but much of hwat he excavated in Ordinary People continued to resonate. Ostensibly, though, Quiz Show is - on the surface - much more glitzy and light, exploring the period of early TV history when the networks were dominated by game shows, mostly "quiz" programs where contestants demonstrated fantastic levels of knowledge on the most esoteric topics. 

In particular, Quiz Show focuses on the collapse of Twenty One, and its biggest success, the Columbia professor Charles Van Doren, who had a spectacular run on the show. Van Doren replaced Herb Stempel, and he was selected in part for his looks and personality, a kind of WASP ideal projected over much of the fifties (Mad Men, especially in Season One, makes a lot of this similar point).

In the film, Van Doren, played by Ralph Fiennes, is pursued by Richard Goodwin, an investigator for a congressional committee looking into quiz show fixing. Good win is eventually able to confirm that producers of Twenty One were feeding answers to contestants, picking winners and sidelining contestants to keep ratings high. Van Doren repeatedly protests his innocence to Goodwin, even as he grows disillusioned with his role, and tries to pull himself off of the show, only to have NBC move him into a guest role on the Today show.

Redford is, admittedly, playing a bit fast and loose with the facts - the quiz show scandal was driven primarily by the discovery of a "briefing book" of answers found on the set of the show Dotto, and similar fixing was discovered on The $64,000 Challenge; and Van Doren's personal history was simplified as well. But the key moment of the film - where Van Doren makes an oblique, vague "confession" of his guilt to the congressional committee did actually occur, as did the moment when one of the Congressmen on the panel chastised him for not deserving to be rewarded for simply telling the truth - especially the truth of a massive lie.

The insight Redford brings to the material is to climb under and around the great lies of the fifties, about the worship of the WASP ideal, and the marginalizing of other ethnics (especially Jews, as exemplified by Stempel). Redford presents Goodwin as being seduced, initially, by the comfort and ease of Van Doren's preppy, upscale family, a world away form his own experience, even with his Harvard degree. 

Fiennes is a  big part of why the film works, providng both the surface glamour of Van Doren's easy charm and good looks, but also reflecting his growing unease with the deceptions and the highly public nature of his exposure. At the same time, he offers Goodwin a heartfelt, if troubled defense of his actions - "what would you do if someone offered you all this money?" His fall from grace, and that of his parents, is vividly displayed in that Congressional confrontation, and in the subsequent response of the press, and Redford makes the point, quietly but effectively, that only a group as unassailable as white upper missle class protestants could suffer such a fall at that time, when a fraud is revealed.

Even the score serves to underline the distacne between the glitzy illusions of the fifties as seen in pop culture and the grimmer realities. The film opens to the snazzy swing of Bobby Darin's "mack the Knife" itself derived from "Moritat", a selection from Brecht's Threepenny Opera, then enjoying a revival on Broadway (starring Brecht's wife Lotte Lenye, who gets a shout out in Darin's version). Redford closes the film with Sting's reading of the actual Moritat, which is when you realize that Brecht's actual lyric is far darker, and far less charming than Darin's slick ode to a sexy gangster. So is the film, as it peels away the layers of lies in America's pop culture. And that may be Redford's truly finest achievement.

 

Saturday Singalong: Hep Cats And Gossip Girls

...and I was accused today of being too attached to old, classic looking clothes, too:

Ella Fitzgerald - Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone. This is a fairly rare track, compiled as part of a collection for my coffee house job, and one of my favorites, because it's such a great opener - for an album, a concert, or a mix tape. I particularly like when usual ballads from the "singer/songwriter" era are given spiky, peppy arrangements. I had a friend who pointed out that Ella had a tendency to "sleepwalk" through drowsy arrangements; this one has none of that, giving a real sharpness to her attack. By the end, you will do exactly as she asks.

Lena Horne - Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me. Horne's career was all about a series of reinventions, including her late life transformation into the great jazz interpreter she was always meant to be. This is from one of her last albums, inspired in part by her friend Billy Strayhorn, who helped shape her singing. The remarkable thing isn't just that she's in amazing voice, it's the incredibly light, playful, downright sexy way she plays with the lyric. She weaves the spell so seamlessly that you can almost miss the "...and you never will" she appends to the title lyric. She's that convincing.

Nat King Cole - I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter. One of my favorite, and wisest, album purchases is this collection of Cole's work with Billy May, one of the greatest arrangers of all time. May was instrumental in creating the fifties-era jazz style of slamming, chatty horn arrangements, which require some similarly strong singing. The apex of this may well be May's work with Sinatra, but Cole's arguably the better singer. The way he crashes into the final "make believe it came, make believe it came... frooom yoooou" is amazing. 

Sammy Davis, Jr. - That Old Black Magic. I tend to think that time has not been kind enough to Sammy Davis, practically the Michael Jackson of his era, a star from the time he was small, and one of the most natural performers and entertainers ever. Something about "Candyman" and "Mr. Bojangles" and his later apearancs in the seventies overwhelms the crucial role he played defining the sound of sixties jazz-pop and set the standard in most ways for a Vegas performer. This track is but one easy example, pure performance magic with some of the most amazing singing attached. And his final "under that old black magic called love" and the way he jumps high-to-low and back again on "called" is indeed magical.

Frank Sinatra - Luck Be A Lady. The remarkable thing about Sinatra, or one of many, is the span of his career. Just when you think his voice is finally giving out, he pulled yet another amazing trick: think "New York New York" in 1977 or even "Teach Me Tonight" in 1982. Luck Be A Lady was an amazing track when it premiered in Guys and Dolls, and when it entered the American songbook. But Sinatra recorded it fairly late in his career, at the height of his powers as a Vegas headliner, and his version drips with the late sixties, early seventies rhythm track of High Vegas. But it's his vocal attack that's just breathtaking; he's aging, there's definitely smoke in his chords, it's almost flat in spots, but how he soars on the peaks! Stick with me baby... I'm the fella you came in with. You can just see the chorus girls with the feathers all around him.

Frank and/or Sammy and/or Lena - The Lady Is A Tramp. This is less about the singer, and more about the song - "She gets too hungry to wait for dinner at eight" is about the best opening ever, a clear definition of a person and a lifestyle choice in a sentence. Frank's version is classic, Sammy's is all sass and the tightrope between black and white in the era of integration ("she likes the free fresh... wind in her wig."), Lena's is all about reclaiming your power and finding yourself - "That's why this here lady - is a tramp." Indeed.