I used to work for HMV in downtown Toronto. It was the best store to buy music in the early nineties because our giant repository was steps away from Sam The Record Man and A&A’s, two long-time Canadian record stores I first patronized as a teenager.
In 1991 I started in the “store-within-a-store” Jazz department on the third floor of the building, located at 333 Yonge St. home of Le Coq D’Or. Paul Alofs, then president of HMV Canada, considering it a boutique. Across the hall the Classical section had more square footage, box sets galore, but we were the hip place for music lovers not only of Jazz but Blues, Cajun and Zydeco. The hours were long, the pay was lousy, but my ear-training in music was priceless. We had our own sound system playing the latest releases on CD, the premiere format of choice in those days.
From a business perspective I learned the importance of the back catalogue. New CDs were usually racked up front at a sale price, say $9.99. The back catalogue was at full price, that is, a suggested retail price much higher than a sale price. Those CDs were usually between $19.99 and $29.99, depending on their source. CDs from the United States, Japan, and Europe were known as “imports,” so with the exchange rate on the Canadian dollar, HMV priced them accordingly and they never went “on sale.” As my manager at the time, Howard Cramer, with some twenty years experience in record retail once told me, “sale priced items bring people into the store. We charge a minimum of 12% above cost (wholesale price) to cover our expenses. Back catalogue items make our profit.”
Dipping into my own back catalogue collection, I recently played a Carla Bley album simply called, Sextet. It was released in 1987 on vinyl and CD at the same time. You have to remember that vinyl was still the principle format for customers. But CDs were making a huge splash on the market. HMV was the first store to commit its stock to CDs exclusively. We also had cassettes, believe it or not, but we carried no vinyl. I felt that going all-CD was a bit of a mistake for the store, so I pushed for our department to carry some vinyl releases as to not squeeze-out a portion of our customers, many of whom would visit Sam’s or A&A for their Lps.
I was wrong. The few albums that I ordered, mostly ECM back catalogue, never sold and consequently we couldn’t return them to the distributor. Record companies were all in for CDs in the early nineties putting out some highly compressed, poor sounding, unmastered recordings from the fifties to the eighties. I can remember customers coming in all set to replace their vinyl for CDs. I told them not to pay twice for one album. Buy new, but don’t replace your existing vinyl collection with CDs. I’m not certain how many people heeded my advice. I still retain my vinyl:
Sextet (WATT/17) eventually joined my collection when I was able to buy, at cost, any vinyl the store couldn’t sell. In a low-paying job, it was a decent perk, I must say, so I added six albums by Carla Bley to my collection. I’ve had the albums over thirty years and they’re in mint condition.
Bley composed and arranged the music. It’s played by six musicians on six tracks, three per side. The band features Bley, organ, Hiram Bullock, guitar, Larry Willis, piano, Steve Swallow, electric bass, Victor Lewis, drums, and Don Alias, percussion. The record is one of the most intimate albums in the Bley canon. The music isn’t overly sophisticated; it’s harmonically engaging. Bullock is the star of the set; his sound and phrasing reveals the pulse of the album. His sound is clean, loud and earthy. He shapes his solos like a Frank Zappa, sculpting the air. He also plays bass on “Brooklyn Bridge” which opens side two.
The outstanding track is “Lawns”, a slow, quiet, bluesy song that conjures up images of summer heat, green lawns in an Americana frame. It’s a beautiful composition, perfect for dinner jazz programming. Kurt Elling set the melody to poetry a few years ago on his album, The Questions (Okeh), released on CD and vinyl in 2018. It’s gorgeous, but a better version can be heard on SuperBlue released in 2021. The groove is way better and so is the accompaniment. It features Charlie Hunter, Corey Fonville and DJ Harrison who lay down the time and feel that raises “Endless Lawns” to new emotional heights.
Elling takes Judith Minty’s poem, “Sailing By Stars” and unites the work with Bley’s instrumental. It works perfectly to my ears. His ability to phrase the poem with the music is extraordinary. The words aren’t made to fit, they were written by a poet in isolation, yet Elling merges Minty’s words with the music as if they were meant for each other. Remarkable.
Day Is Done (Nonesuch, 2005)
After I left HMV in October, 1996, I had a headful of music running through my brain. One of the most profound memories I had was discovering Brad Mehldau. At the time, he was playing with Joshua Redman and I had the chance to hear his young band in concert at the Premiere Dance Theatre in Toronto. Some promoter, in their wisdom, booked Redman’s quartet for a week at the venue.
Smart choice.
Mehldau played piano, Christian McBride played bass, and Brian Blade sat behind the drum kit. It was a sparkling show full of great technical and emotional achievement. I’ve been following all four musicians ever since. Now some thirty years later, Mehldau is the musician of currency, a virtuoso for a generation of piano players since 2000.
In 2005, Mehldau took two days in March to record Day Is Done, his third album on the Nonesuch label. It was the first record by his trio to feature Jeff Ballard on drums, who recently joined the band. Larry Grenadier plays bass.
The record is a triumph of virtuosity. All three musicians are playing at their unstoppable best; a power trio at the top of their game. Listening to the album again, part of my back catalogue on CD, I was struck by the energy of the band and its relentless musicality, if there is such a thing. Track after track I felt energized as each player poured themselves into the music. Even in the ballads, including “Alfie” and “Day Is Done”, I got the sense that this band fully intended to take the music to the edge without fear of falling.
This is particularly true on “She’s Leaving Home”, by Lennon and McCartney. The 3-4 groove is irresistible. I never want it to end.
In 2005 a typical CD could hold up to 80 minutes of music. This record runs just under 70 in total. Too much perhaps? Not for these ears.
Siren (Atco/Island, 1975)
I pulled Roxy Music’s fifth studio record off the shelf after hearing the classic single, “Love Is The Drug” played during the closing credits of an episode of Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+).
It took me back to the mid-seventies when I first heard the band on commercial radio in Toronto. The track still stands out as a tribute to American funk from a British band whose claim to fame was the use of scantily clad women on its album covers. Siren features model/actress Jerry Hall crawling along some rocks by the ocean. It’s a provocative look, seductive and sexy, much like most of the content on the record.
The single launches side one with an opening sound effect of a someone, presumably Bryan Ferry, getting in his sports car and heading into the city for some “action”. But the song, like the whole album, is a hook-filled trip into the night club scene. It’s not about a lifestyle per se, but the pursuit of one and what the protagonist, Ferry, discovers about relationships. “Love Is The Drug” sets up the course of events for Ferry’s night on the town. By the end of the album, his relationships are so intense, Ferry concedes his fate, “Both ends burning until the end.” In fact, he struggled to finish the lyrics while the band was completing the record, but it still fits the theme of the record in my view.
Nevertheless, Siren still holds up for its production values, for which Chris Thomas gets full marks. This was Thomas’s second album with Roxy. Stranded released in 1973 was his first experience working with the band. Vocals were recorded after the band tracks, typical of Thomas’s work at the time. Consequently, he knew intuitively how to make the band sound good on a record, especially an established act like Roxy Music. Siren is a hard-edged album that ebbs and flows between songs and instrumentals and it still kicks today: a far cry from their dream-pop sound on Avalon in 1982. That was pretty hard to take for us die-hard, art-rock fans. (I saw the band at Massey Hall in 1979.) I’ll reach for Siren or For Your Pleasure or Country Life more often than Avalon . By ‘82, Ferry was fashioning the tale of King Arthur into song having left the nightclubbing scene in the rearview mirror of his sports car.
The jazz section at HMV at 333 Yonge was a huge part of my education in the music - spent a lot of time in that part of the store - a lot of CDs in my collection were bought there and where I probably bought my copy of Mehldau's 'Day is Done.' I miss the days of making the circuit of Sam's, HMV and Tower a couple of blocks south on Yonge and building my jazz collection.
Thanks for sharing those insider memories. HMV's jazz section was a totally cool place to frequent. Sams had a good section too and so, for that matter, did A&A. But HMV was where I earned my jazz degree, if you will. Re: Mehldau...I saw him in that same era at the Top o' the Senator as the "backing" pianist in Christopher Hollyday's band. The friends I was with were raving - almost drooling - over Mehldau and thought it was a bit dodgy for Hollyday to describe Brad as one of the musicians "playing behind me". They could tell he was a generational talent - which he certainly was!