EDUCATION | EXHIBITIONS: ONE LP@LOUD & CLEAR, EDINBURGH
Music on a Chink of Light:
Exhibition of One LP Portraits and Works from the Portfolio
Loud & Clear Hi-Fi, Commercial Quay, 94 Commercial St, Leith, Edinburgh EH6 6LX
Opening Friday 24 September
Around 40 framed pieces from the portfolio and a selection One LP Portaits will be on display at my first Edinburgh exhibition.
I'm delighted that the first showing of a collection of handmade silver gelatin prints will be in this perfect music lovers gallery set in a former bonded warehouse in the old port of Leith. Originally used to store whisky prior to being shipped around the world.
It's actually taking place the superb showroom and listening room of Scotland's leading Hi-fi dealer, sonic glory will be in attendance as well as artist's of many genres including Acker Bilk, Carol Kidd, Dizzy Gillespie, Graham Nash, Gregory Porter, Herbie Hancock, Jah 9, John Martyn, Johnny Marr, Sir John Tomlinson, Marcus Miller, Miles Davis, Peggy Seeger, Robert Glasper, Rick Wakeman, Tony Bennett and Tracy Chapman - photographed on her first U.K. tour.
The mages will be displayed throughout the showrooms and will be enhanced by carefully selected tracks played through some of the world’s finest hi-fi.
Visitors have the opportunity to nbe part of the One LP Project and commsission their own portrat and interview.
Places are limited to book contact Loud & Clear.
contact edinburgh@loud-clear.co.uk
About the photographs and preview the exhibition
Opening times:
Tuesdays and Wednesdays by prior arrangement
Thursdays and Fridays 11am – 7pm
Saturdays 9.30am – 5.30pm
For more information visit Loud & Clear Edinburgh
![{quote}It is so special because, as many people know, that Abbey Lincoln passed away earlier this year [August 2010] and I have always been really inspired by her. From a very early age, she was one of the – you know, after Ella Fitzgerald – she was the next person I really got into. So I am a massive fan of her and I’ve got all her albums. The reason I chose this is because I think this is one of the lesser-known ones but there’s beautiful tracks on here and the one that I really love is “Exactly Like You” because I listened to another version of this by Carmen McRae, which I love, and when I heard this version I loved this equally. You know, it’s the way her sentiment, the way she gets the lyrics across, are so different to a lot of other singers. She is very deep when she sings and you can really hear a lot of emotion. Not in the same way that you can with Billie Holiday but you know it’s coming from a real spiritual sort of place, when she plays and that’s why I love her.{quote}Anita Wardell: The Spa, Scarborough, 26th September 2010Abbey Lincoln: It's Magic - released 1958Anita Wardell](http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4c866b5ee9717/images/Anita_Wardelw__WEllis_thumb-1.jpg)
![{quote}Well, that record is the world-famous Kind of Blue album by Miles Davis, which was the most-sold jazz record in history. The reason it’s dear to my heart is because Miles Davis was staying at my parents’ house when he made that album. I was in high school and my stepfather was his doctor and I was playing trumpet and going to the conservatory and Miles gave my stepfather the test pressing – you know with no grooves on one side – and so I became enthralled with Miles Davis and then just the music on there is just so classic, you know, with Coltrane on it, you know, and Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb…Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans.Yeah, Bill Evans and Cannonball. It was just like the quintessential music of that era, almost of all time. I mean, it really changed the face of quote-unquote jazz music and really changed my life, because seeing him in person - and he took me to a gig when I was 17, 18 years. He stayed at the house. So that album and just that experience is dear to my heart, you know.WE: Beautiful. Beautiful. That is so special. Thank you.EH: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I could go on and on for hours.WE: I’ll bet. EH: But, you know, I think everybody... with that album and that music.WE: Your experience of Miles staying at your house is so unique.EH: Absolutely….and me playing the trumpet too. It made it ever so much more significant to me.WE: When you were very young at that time, did you talk to Miles about the trumpet, and did he talk to you?EH: Well, he wouldn’t just come by like a normal person and say this is this and this is that, it’s just by observation. In fact I may have played one of his records, you know, and he just smiled and said - 'you sound good but that’s me' [laughs] That was an eye-opener right there, you know.{quote}Eddie Henderson: Universal Rehearsal Studios, New York City, April 2013Miles Davis: Kind of Blue released 1959Eddie Henderson](http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4c866b5ee9717/images/EDDIE-HENDERSONwb_William-Ellis_thumb-1.jpg)
![Bob Koester talks about Hoodoo Man Blues, his life in music, the ins and outs of running the longest established independent American jazz and blues label.BK: That’s paradise. It’s freezing. We had a lot of snow a couple of days ago.WE: I was here actually. I got in on Sunday night from Los Angeles…BK: Oh I see. So you saw a little bit.WE: ..and it was chucking it down when I landed.BK: Maybe the last of the year [knocking sound]. That’s not wood though, that’s plastic, so that doesn’t count.WE: That’s wood.BK: Good to have a wood desk, that’s true.WE: I love all these as well. These are amazing. (rare 78s)BK: That’s a bunch of stuff we just bought. We keep them naked until a couple of regular customers see it so they know that there are new arrivals.WE: To check the condition.BK: Sure.WE: How long has this shop been here, Bob?BK: I’ve been here for 10 years. I was upstairs for 5 years. I was a block and a half away from 1962 and I have been in the business 61 years.WE: Wow. BK: I started in St Louis. Actually a little before I had a shop, I sold records out of my dormitory room at St Louis University for a year, mostly by mail. And then we opened a store, me and a friend. My friend collected Ellington and Billie Holliday and didn’t like any other jazz. He liked sweet bands so we only had to fight over two artists’ records.WE: Which jazz do you prefer, Bob?BK: Well, I like everything from early New Orleans jazz up through swing. Bebop I can understand now. The avant-garde, I record a lot of avant-garde on Delmark but it’s not my favourite music and I can’t say I understand it all but jazz changes over the years. As it goes from place to place it changes. Even in the traditional jazz era there was Chicago style, New Orleans style. Almost every major city had its own style of trad. I call it trad, I don’t like the word Dixieland. It’s basically…it’s seems vaguely racist somehow, I don’t know. Maybe a putdown, you know. But the south has done a better job of recovering from segregation than some major cities in the north so Dixie is not so bad maybe anymore. The record you have photographed – Hoodoo Man Blues by Junior Wells – was, well, I started recording blues back in St Louis in early ‘60s and we’re best known as a blues label. We have a little over 500 titles in our catalogue and a little less than half of them are blues – around 225 blues records. Bunch of trad. Bunch of modern. A few big band records. Quite a bit of avant-garde lately. The Hoodoo Man Blues was the first time a Chicago Blues Band went in the studio to make an LP, to not be confined to 2 minutes and 45 seconds or 3 minutes and 45 and I didn’t even realise that until about 20 years ago that we had a first, I have to say, Chicago working blues band because Muddy Waters did a few LPs with studio groups prior to that. There might have been some others that I can’t think of right now. It has been a major seller for Delmark. It won a Grammy as a classic blues record. Memphis Blues Organisation gave it an award. Quite a lot of good reviews. Sold…I don’t really know I think we’re approaching a third of a million, maybe half a million since 1965. That’s 40, almost 50 years. More than 50 years. Like the year before last, we sold 2000 LPs and 4000 CDs but that was a little more than usual. Usually, it’s 4 and a half, or 5 thousand but that year we did an expanded CD version of it, and raised the price a little bit. That’s about all I can say is that I can’t take much credit for how good it is because I just watched while Junior Wells produced it. It’s got Buddy Guy on it, by the way, who was Junior’s guitar player at the time although he had made records on his own. But that’s not unusual for sidemen in bands to have records on their own. And the story I sometime like to tell is Buddy didn’t wanted to ruin a little relationship he had with Leonard Chess at Chess Records so he said “maybe I should call Chess and see if it’s ok for him to be on the record”. Chess said [imitates voice] “OK. But he does his thing and you don’t use his motherfucking name” or maybe “the motherfucker better sing but don’t use his name”. So the first 7000 copies which covers the first 4 or 5 years, he is referred to… Well, there was a British chap working for me. A British guy, I should say, working for me. And I said, “what’s a good pseudonym for Buddy Guy?”. I thought I’d let him come up with a pseudonym and he said [British accent] “Well, a buddy is a friend and a guy is a chap so why don’t you call him Friendly Chap”, which we did. His name was Peter Brown. He later put out some reissued records in Englend, when he went back to England. Worked for me for a year or two, I think. Good man. Really good man. In fact, we had three Brits in a row, one of whom was somehow in the royalty. They had some deal over here where they didn’t have to pay income tax for a year and they took full advantage of that. Wait a minute, was there another one? Yes. Another guy. Man, I had a stroke 8 years ago and I fucked up my memory. He’s an active musician in New Orleans. Oh no, he’s from Sweden! But we’ve had several guys from other countries work here. So Junior was not as well-known then. He was known to blues collectors but in 1965 most of the interest in blues was in country blues. It started in New York where they didn’t have very many blues artists. They had Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. They had Lead Belly until he died. They had Reverend [Gary] Davis, who was a street-singing gospeller, and they had Champion Jack Dupree, a piano player, and that was about the whole blues scene they had there. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry dominated and most of the criticism and most of the writing about music did not pay much attention to blues. A few enlightened, mostly traditional jazz people, were into blues and people like Hugues Panassié were into blues in the late ‘30s and between Panassié and the British just about everybody I recorded, and anybody you can name, went to England. Chris Barber had a lot to do with that. He would take a blues artist and tour him in England for a month and several of the guys he pulled over there, piano players, Jack Dupree and Eddie Boyd and I can’t think who else right now but several of them moved to Europe. They couldn’t move to England because it’s very hard for musicians to move there from any other country but Chris deserves a lot of credit for that blues revival. He was bringing blues artists over, I think, just about as soon as he split from the guy whose band he was with. I forget the other guy’s name, but he was a member of the band and the whole band pulled away.Anyway, there was this relationship between traditional jazz bands and blues and it gradually built up. In the early ‘60s, there was a big rock thing here. I’m sorry, not rock, folk music and Peter Seeger had all kinds of groups, some of them pretty terrible. Groups of more than two people tended to be pretty showbizzy but that developed an interest in blues on the part of a lot of young Americans. They could go from Peter Seeger to Brownie McGhee to Big Bill Broonzy and once it got to Broonzy they were in the Chicago thing because he was the king of the Chicago blues back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Then pretty soon, it was like Muddy Waters. Well, Muddy would bring his band to gigs and well, we don’t want the band we want just Buddy and a harmonica player, you know, but they got the band and until Dylan used a blues band in one of his appearances at Newport and they put him down for that. It was a white blues band, the Paul Butterfield Band with Mike Bloomfield. They put him down for that. It’s sort of interesting when Muddy Waters first went to Europe the Europeans hadn’t quite got into the city blues bands to the extent that they did pretty quickly. But Muddy went to Europe and he played acoustic guitar. He didn’t like it but that’s what they wanted. Then the next year he went over and he had a nice acoustic guitar instead of borrowing one which he did the first time and they said “Where’s the band?”. They had changed that much in one year.WE: I guess it’s kind of the whole, like the Yardbirds, John Mayall, the British bands.BK: All that came out of…the Beatles started…Well, there’s a thing. Chris Barber in between sets would switch from trombone to bass. The drummer would switch to washboard and the guitar player, who had a major hit here and you know his name better than I do because I can’t recall it, would play guitar and they would do blues and call it skiffle. And as you probably already know, the Beatles began as a skiffle band, influenced by Chris Barber. Chris would do that between sets at gigs and concerts and then he would bring on the blues artists and then they would play with the blues artists. Chris had a hit over here and doesn’t play trombone on it, he plays bass. And I can’t exactly remember his name now. Very embarrassed, because he had a bigger hit.Bob Koester: Jazz Record Mart, Chicago, April 2014Junior Wells: Hoodoo Man Blues, released 1965Junior Wellls performs Hoodoo Man BluesBob Koester: Founder and record producer, DelmarkJazz Record Mart - the world's largest jazz and blues record store.](http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4c866b5ee9717/images/BOB-KOESTER1w_-William-Ellis_thumb-1.jpg)
![{quote}It’s the best playing of Duke Ellington I ever heard in my life. It’s really beautiful. You can hear him humming on “Sophisticated Lady” in the background and it’s heart wrenching - it’s so beautiful. On something like “I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” he starts off with some real slow playing of it in free time just by himself and then the band pulls it in after he plays the first verse and it feels like somebody’s just taking a romp through the park on a warm summer day. And then “Caravan”, which has that Latin beat to it, he just really grooves on it and leaves a couple of measures out and then comes back in. And those measures he leaves out are so important and so strong – he just did the right thing all the time – he was totally intuitive. He’s a real hero. You see, I don’t play that kind of music; I come from the slow blues of Jimmy Yancey . I accompanied Jimmy’s wife, Mama Yancey, after he died. I learned on the streets first and then I took a couple of degrees in music later. I love classical music but it kicks my ass in so badly when I try to play it so I memorise stuff. So I am more wired to play improvised music so this is the kind of stuff I play- but I don’t play like Monk but I just love what he plays. Most of the stuff I love is what I can’t do!{quote} [laughs].Erwin Helfer: Katerina's, Chicago, 14th May, 2013Thelonious Monk: Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington released 1955Erwin Helfer](http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4c866b5ee9717/images/ERWIN_HELFERwb__WELLIS_thumb-1.jpg)
![“I have done many live recordings but I have never done a live recording of my own as a band leader and this is on my label which is entitled Sound Reason and that emblem has a significance. As you can see, it’s kind of a play on words because when you look at it, it’s a sun in the background with gold bars in front of it, so - Sonny Fortune [laughs]- the boy ought to be ashamed of himself but I’m not! So, you know, it’s all my compositions and it’s with a band that I feel very, very good about. That was the reason why I recorded it. And it’s, like I said, my first live recording as a band leader.I tell you what - there’s a tune on there that I wrote for someone that I have the highest regard for, is Elvin Jones . There is a tune on there called “The Joneses” and the tune consists of…it’s dedicated - and there were some reviews and people thought that I was talking about the family of Joneses, Thad and Mel, but actually I’m talking about Elvin and his wife Keiko, and she was Japanese and so the composition consists of a Japanese acknowledgement as well as an Elvin Jones acknowledgement and I feel very good about that.Coltrane told me that if I ever got the opportunity to play with Elvin Jones to take it, so I was working with Elvin the night Coltrane died.So I’m kind of locked into where I’m at because of a whole history of events and I should add that my two favourite drummers - last year when the Four Generations of Miles got together I told Jimmy Cobb - I said you ask anybody that’s known me for years and they’ll tell you I tell them that I developed my rhythmical concept from Jimmy Cobb and Elvin Jones, those were the two guys that influenced me the most.So to be working with Jimmy Cobb now is a continuation of when I was working with Elvin Jones.”Sonny Fortune: Harlem, New York City, April, 2013Sonny Fortune](http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4c866b5ee9717/images/Sonny_FortuneWB__William_Ellis__thumb-1.jpg)
![WE We’re with Mr Vinny Fodera. We’re in Brooklyn, in the Apple.VF: The Big Apple.WE: The Big Apple. Thanks for that. And so Vinny, what have you chosen very kindly as your one LP? What are you going to share with us and why is it so special to you please?VF: I chose Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced [laughs] and I must say it was very difficult to choose only one. But the reason I chose it, although I was actually very profoundly enlightened some years earlier by The Beatles - I was a young tad of a lad - and they sort of opened my mind to music, I chose the Hendrix album because it’s actually more relevant to my professional life. When I first heard Jimi it blew my mind – as I’m sure it did many people – and listening to his playing and his technique made me very aware for the first time of the guitar itself, not only just the [inaudible] but the songs. I was fascinated at how he achieved the tones and sounds and effects that he did and which led me to investigate the guitar itself. I realise that in the hands of a master like him the guitar could be a very powerfully expressive tool. So in a very real way that led me…it actually began a love affair with guitars and basses and gear of all sorts which has culminated in my current career as a luthier so I really sort of owe it in some large measure to that early influence by him. So, thank you, Jimi! And it’s still a turn-on. I still listen to him and try to play and catch some of what he was doing. Endlessly fascinating. That’s it.Vinnie Fodera: In his workshop, Brooklyn, New York, May 2013The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Are You Experienced, 1967](http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4c866b5ee9717/images/VINNIE_FODERA__William_Ellis-FW_thumb-1.jpg)