Duane Allman - AND band

I'm only a recent convert to the Allman Brothers Band, despite having had several of their albums for some time.

By that I mean, I have appreciated them like I appreciated a lot of music, and the sheer genius of Duane Allman is inescapable. But I have only just come to appreciate the full mastery of the band. At its peak, music rarely gets better.

To convert to Duane Allman, it's enough to listen to him on Boz Scaggs' 1969 Loan Me A Dime.  After that, a wealth of Allmans music awaits. Yet it's easy to overlook the achievements of the band under the shadow of Duane. It takes a close reading of a few tracks from their live At Fillmore East recordings (original album and subsequent releases from those concerts) to properly appreciate what they can do together that nobody else could.

When I first sought out Miles Davis, I stumbled across A Kind Of Blue; without knowing it, I'd come upon what is often acclaimed as one of the best jazz albums ever.

Duane, at the time of the Fillmore East recordings, said: "I've listened to that album [A Kind Of Blue] so many times that for the past couple of years, I haven't hardly listened to anything else."

Now I've been a harsh critic of Miles Davis for the instigation of jazz rock. However, the Allmans introduced the complexities of jazz-like improvisation and timing to rock music in a way that preserved the best of both worlds, rather than the worst. To begin to understand the intricacy of their jamming, it's enough to read appreciations of a couple of the Fillmore tracks: In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Whipping Post - preferably while listening to the music. Whereas I once thought the Allman Brothers were simply steeped in blues with the number of standards they covered, I now appreciate that they were capable of using practically any song as a starting point for their music: the song itself didn't matter (Mountain Jam derived from a song of Donovan's, of all people) - and indeed, Greg Allman's vocals, although very apt, were really only background to the music as a whole.

Two drummers, two lead guitarists, and it worked. As the other lead guitar, Dicky Betts was doomed to remain in Duane's shadow, but he is so good in his own right that people often mistake his parts for Duane's (seek out 'Duane Allman's best guitar lick ever' on YouTube - comments indicate that it was actually Dicky Betts'). The whole of the band, together, jamming, were simply better than the parts.

An essential part of my kids' musical education.

Jerry Wexler's influence on music

Reading the paper last night, I learnt of the death of Jerry Wexler a few days ago. Not too well-known outside music circles, his influence is still very widely felt, in particular as executive and producer at Atlantic Records. Coincidentally, at the time of reading, I was listening to an Atlantic album: the eponymous Bette Midler (a protege of Wexler's partner Ahmet Ertegün, whose passing I noted in December 2006).

Although Wexler wasn't a founder of Atlantic (he boarded in 1953, insisting on partnership), he had already made his mark in music by then. Inter alia, he was credited with the neologism "rhythm and blues" in 1949, when he renamed Billboard magazine's black music chart, formerly known as "race records".


Always keen on black music, he was instrumental in the careers of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin in particular, although not so keen on the whitey music of Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. He had, however, been keen to sign the little-known Elvis Presley, but lacked the $10,000 to clinch the deal.

It was Wexler who was represented in Ray, the biopic of Ray Charles, as the latter's record executive and producer.

He was also a keen proponent of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, white Alabama session musicians who he used to great effect for Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, amongst many others. He recorded many seminal works there, for example coming up with the rhythm track for Pickett's In The Midnight Hour, as well as producing Frankin's Respect, I Say A Little Prayer, and many others.

Atlantic also signed Boz Scaggs for one album in 1968; coupled with the Muscle Shoals team, this resulted in one of Duane Allman's greatest recordings, on Scaggs' Loan Me A Dime.

Wexler left Atlantic in 1975, which putatively signalled the end of his career peak. That period would see his involvement with Dire Straits, George Michael, and Bob Dylan's born-again album, Slow Train Coming. But his work over the three prior decades had already altered the course of popular music.


Further reading: overviews of Atlantic Records here and here.