My Best Tunes

A toilet on the A26 is a funny place to flush out the future of British pop, but for now, the Forum – a converted convenience in Royal Tunbridge Wells – is about the right level for Ellie Goulding.

A toilet on the A26 is a funny place to flush out the future of British pop, but for now, the Forum – a converted convenience in Royal Tunbridge Wells – is about the right level for Ellie Goulding.

Hitmaker Pete Waterman will be behind the UK entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it was announced today.

Hitmaker Pete Waterman will be behind the UK entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it was announced today.

The literary legend, who died this week, inspired the modern idea of the rock’n'roll rebel with his character Holden Caulfield, the outsider antihero from The Catcher in the Rye

The death of JD Salinger has naturally got everyone reminiscing about his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, one of those rare books that virtually everyone read when they were a teenager. Its distinctive mood – that mix of sarcasm, pathos and pained nostalgia for lost youth – never quite leaves you (it also has the dubious distinction of being the only book Ricky Gervais has ever read).

It’s ironic that a book which pre-dated rock’n'roll has gone on to influence generations of rock lyricists, but then The Catcher in the Rye has an uncanny knack of staying forever young, speaking to successive waves of teenagers. In recent years, it’s variously been a hipster bible and a sort of emo set text. To own a copy when you’re young is to signal that you’re something of an unquiet soul – an underachiever but brainy with it, a misfit but not a nerd.

It’s often said that the character of Holden Caulfield invented the teenager. I’d argue that, in some sense, Caulfield also set the mould for our modern notion of the rock star – damaged, hyper-sensitive, infinitely cool, creative, hungry for sensation, an authentic voice in a world of phonies. Kurt Cobain, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, Richey Manic, Gerard Way are all Holden Caulfields in their own way. Even Thom Yorke, with his “lost child” shtick, on songs such as Street Spirit (Fade Out) – the thin-skinned loner wandering the streets at night, adrift in a sea of heartless modernity.

The power of The Catcher in the Rye is its ability to make the reader feel Holden Caulfield is speaking exclusively to them. This, of course, has its downsides, as it’s sometimes used as lazy lyrical shorthand for outsider status by the kind of American pop-punks who, you suspect, haven’t really read many other books. To be “like Holden Caulfield” is in fact a cliche of that genre, invoked to lend literary weight to what would otherwise be mere navel-gazing angst (see The Offspring’s Get It Right). Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, in the song Who Wrote Holden Caulfield, seems to misread the protagonist as a kind of pot-smoking 1990s slacker (”There’s a boy who fogs his world and now he’s getting lazy/There’s no motivation and frustration makes him crazy”); Caulfield, a restless and fretful street-walker, has many problems, but laziness is not one of them.

The most wrong-headed “tribute” of all, however, must be Guns N’ Roses’ The Catcher in the Rye, from their long-delayed comeback album Chinese Democracy. Axl Rose clearly fancies himself as something of a Salinger-style recluse, maintaining a dignified silence down the years – rather forgetting that dignified recluses tend not to become embroiled in childish feuds with Dr Pepper, or announce lucrative world tours.

Still, you can see why Salinger’s approach to creativity – one unrepeatable work of brilliance, followed by decades of crabby silence – might appeal to past-it rock stars. Salinger published his last work in 1965. You wonder if just occasionally the Rolling Stones, the Cure’s Robert Smith, Lou Reed, or any other artist doomed to churn out albums of diminishing quality long after the creative fires have sputtered out, wish they’d made a similar decision, and quit while they were ahead.

The charismatic prince of cool jazz developed an elegant and intertwining sound after being forced to perform without a piano

When Bruce Weber released Let’s Get Lost in 1988, his documentary on the trumpeter Chet Baker, it joined the likes of Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight and Clint Eastwood’s Bird in a group of late-1980s films that showed prominent jazz artists on the skids.

A huge improvement from the years in which jazz movies were considered a joke, these documentaries also indicated how deeply attached writers and film-makers of a certain generation were to the tempting symmetry of saxophones, syringes, and stumbling idols kept upright only by music and devoted admirers.

Chet Baker was a “doomed youth” who might have been made for Hollywood’s idea of jazz. He perfectly suited the white, postwar myth of the gifted, self-destructive and marginalised artist. Looking like James Dean was the worst thing that ever happened to the trumpeter/singer.

A charismatic and talented prince of cool jazz, Baker represented a seductive form of passive rebellion. If he was the romantic ballad-singer who was irresistible to women, and the trumpet lyricist who played by ear, then he was also the shambolic, alienated junkie, who would eventually be found dead on an Amsterdam street, at the age of 58.

Back in the early 1950s, however, Baker was a rising star who had been recruited by Charlie Parker to inherit the mantle previously worn by Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Parker once described Baker as the boy from California who would “eat him up”.

He then went on to join baritone saxophonist and composer Gerry Mulligan, a key contributor to Davis’s groundbreaking Birth of the Cool album. Mulligan played the cumbersome baritone sax as if it were a tenor, or even an alto, preserving its gruff and rugged sound, but giving it a melodic agility that resembled the fluency of Lester Young. But he was also a composer and arranger of harmonic sophistication and theme-weaving contrapuntal skill, who could write illuminatingly for big bands (he was a staff arranger for Stan Kenton) and make small bands sound bigger than they were.

Mulligan played The Haig, on Wiltshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, in 1952. The young Chet Baker began sitting in. Because the vibraphonist Red Norvo, a mainstay at the club, took a keyboard-player’s role, the establishment had disposed of its piano. So Mulligan and Baker began thinking of how to work without one. An elegant, intertwining, low-key and ambiguously chord-free jazz evolved, and with it an increasingly enthusiastic audience.

The heyday of this quartet (Mulligan and Baker, plus bass and drums) was in 1952-53, after which Mulligan was sent to prison on narcotics charges, and Baker became a solo star. But at that time, the “pianoless quartet” became one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz; the quintessence of the cool style and a model for innumerable ensembles to this day. Here’s one of their all-time classics, Mulligan’s composition Walking Shoes.

To paraphrase Nina Simone: “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new Music Weekly … and I’m feeling good.” Yes, this is our first podcast of 2010, picking up after we ended last year with a look at the noughties, a showcase of live sessions and a fond farewell to presenter Paul MacInnes.

This week, your new host Alexis Petridis will be guiding Rosie Swash and Miranda Sawyer around the latest Massive Attack album, Heligoland. And we hear from 3D about his favourite collaborations and the possibility of band counselling.

There’s also new music from Yacht, Gorillaz, and Marina and the Diamonds in Singles Club, plus our new feature, Your Label’s Showing, in which we hear all about wonderful compilation specialists, Soul Jazz Records.

We’re pleased to be back and hope you enjoy the new show. Please let us know what you think of Massive Attack’s Heligoland, Soul Jazz Records and Singles Club. If the fancy takes you, we can even be friends on Facebook. Enjoy!

There’s been an incident. Thanks to the internet, I’ve heard all about it before we even meet. Shortly before she sets out from her rented flat in Islington to the private members’ club in central London where we are destined to share afternoon tea, Paloma Faith broadcasts the breaking news on Twitter: “ho hum! i didnt get nominated for a brit award but nor did amy [Winehouse] on her first album so i will try not to get upset”. But she is upset, and by the time she arrives at our chosen destination, she is very upset indeed.

There’s been an incident. Thanks to the internet, I’ve heard all about it before we even meet. Shortly before she sets out from her rented flat in Islington to the private members’ club in central London where we are destined to share afternoon tea, Paloma Faith broadcasts the breaking news on Twitter: “ho hum! i didnt get nominated for a brit award but nor did amy [Winehouse] on her first album so i will try not to get upset”. But she is upset, and by the time she arrives at our chosen destination, she is very upset indeed.

Your chance to download a free track from the band’s new album, Odd Blood

We’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t start frothing at the mouth when talk turns to the new Yeasayer album, Odd Blood. That’s probably because it’s really rather good. Visit their website now to download a free slice of psychedelic eighties disco.