On First Hearing

The times I've bought albums based on walking into a record store, hearing something playing and saying I want that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, as far as I can remember the finger of one finger. It was back in the days when the HMV store on Orchard Road was of a genuinely substantial size, had specialist rooms devoted to jazz and classical music and didn't carry a ship-load of DVDs. The album in question was Bill Frisell's The Sweetest Punch, his arrangement of the songs from Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's Painted From Memory, and the track playing was the title track, the opening sequence thereof. It was so funkily luscious I had to have it, and I just knew I was about to discover a whole new area of work to engage with.

I was put in mind of this earlier this evening when, getting back from work, I gave the CD a spin for the first time in a little while and fell in love with it all over again. In fact, this time the more so. Familiarity had not bred contempt. When I first heard I didn't know the original Elvis and Burt album, but now it's well-established as a sure-fire winner in the household as the missus also has a soft spot for it. A great set of torch songs, by the way, the languorous Bacharach magic mixed in with some Costellian acid. (I've read a few comments here and there complaining about the vocals which simply confirms my opinion that a lot of folk have no idea of what a voice is meant to do.) So now I hear the Frisell arrangements in the full light of the original - each set of versions of the songs illuminating the other actually. Tonight it was the harmonies that got to me - there's more room in the jazz arrangements to fill them out and they're just gorgeous. Curiously the tempi are generally a bit more rushed than on the original songs, but this works in terms of the verve it brings. The melodies could have been over-milked but the temptation is resisted and the resulting crispness feels just right, especially in Frisell's oddly slightly sharp world.

Buying The Sweetest Punch was the gateway to my acquisition of the master work, and the realisation in the most general terms that if it was from Elvis it was worth getting hold of, however unlikely the collaboration might appear. (Tickets for his forthcoming appearance are safely ensconced in my wallet as I right. Just please don't cancel.) And it also led me to the estimable oeuvre of Bill Frisell himself, though maybe that's going a little too far. I've only got two other albums, both great favourites, but his material is hard to come by here and I suppose I have that sense that I've not even done justice to what I've got so restless acquisition is not the way to go.

Funnily enough that came home to me just after we installed the new Bose system and I played Frisell's Music from the Films of Buster Keaton: Go West. Previously I'd thought of it as a thoroughly pleasant, rather spare suite but not too much more than that. And then I really listened. And now I'm wondering why I'm not listening right now, and there is no good answer to that. So I'm just off to put my head between two speakers.