![]() His legacy inspired a generation of younger experimentalists including John Cage – and, later, Frank Zappa. Working in New York in the 1920s, the French-born composer Edgard Varèse pioneered electronic and percussion music. Most of his later releases tweaked the riff without ever quite achieving the impact of ‘Dust My Broom’ and this, James’ first single, remains his best.Ĭomplete Works Of Edgard Varèse, Volume 1 James’ heavily amplified, intense interpretation gave the song a refit for the new, urban, electric-blues age emerging in Chicago among players such as Muddy Waters. James and Johnson both lived in Mississippi in the late 1930s and it is possible that James was taught the song by Johnson himself. Electric slide-guitarist Elmore James’ ‘Dust My Broom,’ though credited to James, was a remake of Robert Johnson’s ‘I Believe I’m Gonna Dust My Broom’ from 1937. The riff that launched a thousand blues-rock bands in the 1960s. In 1957, Esoteric rereleased the tracks along with others recorded at a second Harlem club, Monroe’s, on a 12” album, After Hours, which is also worth seeking out. The LP consists of two, hard-driving, nine-minute workouts. The album catches Christian away from the highly-structured surroundings of his rent-paying gigs, the Benny Goodman sextet and orchestra, jamming with fellow revolutionaries Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. Christian pioneered both the frontline role of the electric guitar – on which he played his solos single-note style, like a saxophone or trumpet – and the more complex harmonies which defined the style. Recorded live at Harlem afterhours club Minton’s in 1941, but not released until 1951, nine years after guitarist Charlie Christian’s passing, Jazz Immortal is a bop urtext. Hopefully, you will find a few surprises along the way. Some of the discs are by artists widely-celebrated today, although where possible an effort has been made to avoid the most obvious choice of releases, others are by musicians who were little known at the time, and remain so today. Looked at chronologically, as in this list of the some of the most enduring and collectable releases of the decade, the 1950s were soundtracked by a giddying, multi-coloured galaxy of music. By the end of the decade, recordings of African, Indian, Latin American and South Asian musics, sometimes mediated by jazz and exotica, sometimes presented in their authentic states, were commonplace. In the 1950s, too, increasing numbers of record buyers in the US and Europe were listening to music from distant cultures, a process encouraged by recovery from post-World War II economic austerity, affordable international air travel (for the middle classes anyway) and the increasing prevalence of LPs. Teenagers were invented, and so were free jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. ![]() Innovation and experiment were to the fore in pop, jazz, R&B, electronic, conservatoire and even, though it sounds counterintuitive, in traditional folk music. The recorded music of the 1950s, however, reveals a different picture. ![]() The 1950s are generally perceived as a monochrome and conservative decade, in contrast to the technicolour and revolutionary 1960s. We begin with the 1950s when the LP was in its infancy and the modern world as we know it was starting to take shape. Unlike traditional “collectables” lists defined by monetary value, these are records picked for their importance as artefacts, whether rare, revolutionary or representative of a moment in time. A decade at a time, writer and music historian Chris May will be working with the VF editorial team to uncover what we’re calling the “most collectable” records of each era. Over the next few months we’re going to be looking at the last sixty years of recorded music from a slightly different perspective.
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