Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

A hot week. ?Sweaty and cranky? is never a good combination for listening to CDs followed by writing a review of the music; regardless, I ventured toward the stack of CDs on my shelf to pick one that might fool me into believing the current temperature had been lowered a few dozen degrees. Forget global warming. This was global baking.

I checked the titles or artists on the jewel box spines: ?On The Beach? by Neil Young, ?Birth Of The Cool? by Miles Davis, ?Pet Sounds? by the Beach Boys, ?It Serves You Right To Suffer? by John Lee Hooker, ?Modern Cool? by Patricia Barber, ?Wind On The Water? by Crosby and Nash, ?Help!? by the Beatles, and then I saw the cover of ?Like Swimming? by Morphine, with the bubbles in blue water and a pair of submerged arms and hands at the bottom…ahhhhhhhhhh…this was more like it. I picked up the CD and put it to my ear, like a shell found on a shore, hoping to hear Mark Sandman singing the title track?s chorus, ?Do you feel/like swimming?? over and over. No such luck. I had to settle for using my CD player to hear his voice, which was tragically silenced when he died on stage in Palestrina, Italy during a Morphine concert on July 3, 1999.

[tag]Morphine[/tag] was formed by Sandman and sax player Dana Colley in 1989. The band was primarily a trio led by Sandman, who sang and played a self-devised two-string slide bass (!), giving the band a murky, eerie foundation. Colley played mostly baritone sax and occasionally bass sax, adding to the murkiness of the music?s lower-register sound, although a number of songs would feature him playing two altos at once. Billy Conway played drums and percussion instruments. On recordings, the band was dreamlike and mesmerizing; live, they absolutely smoked. Morphine was critically acclaimed, provided the music for the film ?Spanking The Monkey? and an episode of HBO?s ?The Sopranos,? and continues to be internationally admired by fans of rock, jazz, and spoken word.

?[tag]Like Swimming[/tag]? was released in 1997. The music was both an extension of the sound they had created for their ?Cure For Pain? release four years earlier and the beginning of their expansion of sonic colors, which was fully developed in the band?s final recording ?The Night.? At the center of their sound, as always, was their self-proclaimed ?low rock? combination of bass, baritone sax, drums, and Sandman?s baritone vocals. And Sandman?s songs. Each one conjured up images of smoky rooms, Beat poets reading with bongo-and-sax accompaniment, and always the night. The song titles for ?Like Swimming? are like a list of little-known movies from a film noir festival: ?Murder For The Money,? ?Empty Box,? ?Eleven O?Clock,? ?Hanging On A Curtain,? and ?Wishing Well,? just to name a few.

Lyrically, Sandman?s strengths were imagery, brevity, and humor. ?Empty Box,? for example, begins with the singer tearing open a package that turns out to be an empty box without meaning to him. The sender, the singer continues, ?was a woman/she said she?s sending me everything I never gave her before/she said: fill it up and send it back,? which results in him returning the empty box to her, entering a dark valley, finding himself by the sea at sunrise, swimming as far as he could go until too tired to continue, seeing an empty box float past him, and climbing into the box. And if that one requires too much thinking, consider the complete set of lyrics for ?Eleven O?Clock?: ?Every night about eleven o?clock/I go out.?

Colley?s sax playing is dual in nature. His ensemble parts, particularly on baritone sax, were designed to replace the moments during a song where one would expect to hear a guitar, with lots of fuzz and sustain. His soloing is powerful in a post-Coltrane way, sometimes screaming, sometimes understated, and very effective in the way it is utilized apart from the ensemble sound.

Do you feel like swimming yet?

For ordering and additional information, visit the best website on this [tag]great band[/tag], [tag]The Other Side[/tag], at www.lukin.com/tos.

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