Wheat-dogg’s world
• • • • •

I have a former roommate to thank for introducing me to the late Maynard Ferguson’s unique combination of musicianship, showmanship and stewardship of new talent. This album was his first from Great Britain, where Ferguson had retreated when big band music fell out of favor in the US.

The six tracks showcase Ferguson’s broad musical tastes, as well as his high-register trumpet playing. Track 1 is an arrangement of Laura Nyro’s “Eli’s Comin’,” one of two “pop” covers on the disk. “Ballad to Max” mellows things out with a straight-ahead original jazz composition, on track 2.

Next comes one of Ferguson’s signature pieces, a vibrant, big band rendition of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.” Actor Richard Harris sang this expansive (read, long) love song with damnedly obscure lyrics in 1968. Despite his awful singing voice, it was a hit, both here and in Europe. Disco queen Donna Summer — who has a much better voice — had a hit with it a decade later.
The piece is musically complex — remarkable for a pop song — and as far as I’m concerned, works much better as an instrumental work than as a song. Webb’s lyrics were just too over the top for me then, as now. Here’s an excerpt:

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet, green icing flowing down,

Someone left the cake out in the rain,

I don’t think I can take it, cause it took so long to bake it,

Since I am just now beginning my analog-to-digital conversion project, I thought it would be cool to offer some commentary along the way. Here’s the first installment.

This Grammy-winning album was a landmark in the jazz and pop music worlds back in the 1960s. It launched the singing career of Astrud Gilberto, spawned a bossa nova craze in the USA, and bolstered the careers of sax player Stan Getz, Brazilian guitarist Jõao Gilberto and Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. The melodies on this disk should be familiar to any jazz fan, and probably most casual listeners of “cool jazz.”

I was seven when this disk was released, so of course I picked it up many years later. Taking Portuguese in college and rooming with a jazz trombonist had a lot to do with my decision to buy it. Besides, the tunes were just cool.

The backstory behind the album goes something like this. Charlie Byrd, who had visited Brazil and discovered this new musical genre created by Jobim, Jõao Gilberto and others, told Getz to visit Brazil and check out the bossa nova. In short order, Byrd and Getz cut a bossa nova album for Verve in 1962. A year later, Getz on tenor sax, composer Jobim on piano and Jõao Gilberto on guitar and vocals, recorded Getz/Gilberto. Jõao only spoke Portuguese, and the guys decided they had to have someone sing English versions of Jobim’s lyrics for the US market. So, as the story goes, Jõao persuaded his wife, Astrud, who knew English, to sing on a couple of tracks.

Textbooks rarely discuss the physics of the phonograph anymore, since the CD and other digital formats have largely replaced the older format. To make up for that loss, here’s a very brief explanation of how sound comes out of a vinyl plastic disk. The reader is invited to look elsewhere for additional details.

First, the basics. Sound is a vibration in a medium such as air. These vibrations can make objects, like your eardrum, vibrate in sympathy. Thomas Edison in 1878 perfected a machine that could take the vibrations from someone talking VERY LOUDLY into a horn-shaped receiver, translate them to a vibrating needle, and finally onto a wax or tinfoil covered cylinder. The wiggles of the needle imitated the vibrations of the air. Playback used the same equipment. The vibrating needle would excite the airhorn, and sound could be heard coming from the horn. The process — captured by the classic corporate logo of the RCA Victor company (right) — was entirely mechanical.

[You can recreate the process today with a sewing needle taped to a homemade paper cone. Choose an album that won’t break your heart if it gets scratched, place it on a turntable and start the platter going. Hold the wide end of the paper cone at one point and let the needle drag along the record. If you listen very carefully , you’ll be able to hear the tracks.]

Like most of my generation, I bought and listened to record albums. That is, until my apartment was burglarized in ‘85, and I lost my amp and turntable. For these past 22 years, I have been yearning for a replacement system, but raising kids on a teacher’s salary leaves little room for quality stereo component systems.

My wait is finally over, thanks to the serendipitous gift of a Technics linear tracking turntable from a fellow high school chess coach. The subject came up because in my classroom sidelight I have Isaac Hayes’ album, “Black Moses,” which a former teacher had left me. We got to talking about albums and turntables, and how we missed listening to our old music. Sure, some of the old stuff is now digital, but a lot of the vinyl I have will probably never end up on CD.

Anyway he had just decided to divest himself of his 10,000-album collection, and his turntables, by giving the albums to his university and the turntables to any takers. On the last day of the chess season, he brought me a dusty, but very functional Technics SL-BL3, a nice linear tracking model I probably could never have afforded 20 years ago.

I had to buy a $40 phono preamp from Circuit City, so I could run the phono’s audio into my computer’s sound card. I have started the painstaking, but fun, process of converting fom analog vinyl to digital CD and mp3.