Shelly Manne / Jack Marshall - Sounds! (Capitol)

Stereo.

Enough has already been written in the last decade about the hi-fi culture of prosperous mid-century America to make this a rather short entry, but it is worth remarking that the duet setting is a rather intimate one on which to base a "sound spectacular". For that is what you get with this LP, the sound of two highly professional musicians enjoying each other's backstage conversation. The recording itself -- by Hugh Davies -- is both up-close and spacious: a classic example of the kind of analog sound that audiophiles still pine after.

Jack Marshall plays guitar "Classical Gas"-style throughout; fun enough. But it is Shelly Manne, one of the most unfailingly musical drummers in the jazz idiom -- cf. his Impulse! 2, 3, 4, recorded about the same time as this session -- who raises this LP to the level of the extraordinary. Manne seems to have lugged every exotic percussion instrument in his private collection into the studio with him, and he uses each maraca, steel drum, wood block, Philippino loo-jon, tambourine, boo-bam, suitcase and piece of discarded cardboard to restore some color to faded popular fare such as the theme from Lawrence Of Arabia, "Am I Blue?" and "Yesterdays". Outsider euphony by the likes of Orientalists Harry Partch, John Cage and Colin McPhee, as well as neo-Viking Moondog, plays in the background of many of these pieces, though the arrangements on Sounds! circumnavigate the Southern hemisphere. There is also the sense that Manne's work here anticipates that of Roscoe Mitchell's groups in that leader's fascination with "little instruments". Or at least anticipates it as much as Capitol was trying to cash in on the phenomenal success of Enoch Light's Persuasive Percussion recordings. Yet, if we have learned nothing in the post-hip-hop age, it is that you take your avant-garde wherever you can get it. Traditions are just waiting to happen.

Not bad for a record by a couple of "squares" (as seen from this end of the telescope), jacketed in a fairly tame -- I won't go so far as to say "classy" -- cheesecake cover, no doubt sold simply as accessory to a bachelor pad evening of grilled steaks, dry martinis, "low-tar" cigarettes, and necking with the secretary on the bearskin rug.

~ Joe Milazzo