Artist.......: Joe Jackson & The Bigger Band
Album........: Live α l'Olympia Bruno Coquatrix
Label........: n/a
Genre........: Alt. Rock
Catnr........: n/a
Source.......: DVBS
Rip.date.....: 2016-04-23
Str.date.....: 2012-11-12
Quality......: 201kbps/48.0kHz/Joint Stereo
Url..........: http://joejackson.com/
track title time
1. Live α l'Olympia Bruno Coquatrix 59:56
* Different For Girls
* I'm Beginning To See Light
Take The A Train
Cotton Tail
* Invisible Man
* Be My Number Two
* Home Town
* The Mooche
Black And Tan Fantasy
* Another World
* Target
* Steppin' Out
* It Don't Mean A Thing (If Ain't Got That Swing)
* A Slow Song
Runtime 59:56
Size 86.31
Release Notes:
SUPPORT LATEST LAME !!
In his 1999 memoir, A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage, Joe Jackson writes
approvingly of George Gershwin as a musician who kept one foot in the popular
and one in the classical realms of music. Like Gershwin, Jackson possesses a
restless musical imagination that has found him straddling musical genres
unapologetically, disinclined to pick one style and stick to it. The word
"chameleon" often crops up in descriptions of him, but Jackson prefers to be
thought of as "eclectic." Is he the Joe Jackson he appeared to be upon his
popular emergence in 1979, a new wave singer/songwriter with a belligerent
attitude derisively asking, "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" The
reggae-influenced Joe Jackson of 1980's Beat Crazy? The jump blues revivalist of
1981's Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive? The New York salsa-styled singer of 1982's
"Steppin' Out"? The R&B/jazz-inflected Jackson of 1984's Body & Soul? Or is he
David Ian Jackson, L.R.A.M. (Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music), who
composes and conducts instrumental albums of contemporary classical music such
as 1987's Will Power and 1999's Grammy-winning Symphony No. 1? He is all of
these, Jackson himself no doubt would reply, and a few others besides.
The roots of that eclecticism lie in the conflicts of his youth. He was born
David Ian Jackson on August 11, 1954 (not 1955, as some references mistakenly
state) in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, England. His parents had met when
his father was in the Navy and his mother was working in her family's pub in
Portsmouth on the south coast of England. They initially settled in his father's
hometown, Swadlincote, on the border of Staffordshire and Derbyshire, but when
Jackson was a year old, they moved back to his mother's hometown, and he was
raised in Portsmouth and nearby Gosport. His father, Ronald Jackson, became a
plasterer.
Growing up in working-class poverty, Jackson was a sickly child, afflicted with
asthma, first diagnosed when he was three and producing attacks that lasted into
his twenties. Prevented from playing sports, he turned to books and eventually
music. At 11, he began taking violin lessons, later studying timpani and oboe at
school. His parents got him a secondhand piano when he was in his early teens,
and he began taking lessons, soon deciding that he wanted to be a composer when
he grew up. He played percussion in a citywide student orchestra. But his social
milieu was more accepting of different forms of popular music than it was of the
classics, and he developed a taste for that, too. Becoming interested in jazz,
he formed a trio and, at the age of 16, began playing piano in a pub, his first
professional gig.
By the early '70s, Jackson, who had paid little attention to rock before, became
a fan of progressive rock, notably such British groups as Soft Machine.
Meanwhile, in 1972, he passed an advanced "S" level exam in music that entitled
him to a grant to study music, and he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Music
in London. Rather than moving to the city, he spent his grant money on equipment
and commuted several days a week to attend classes while continuing to live at
home and play pop music locally. He switched from writing classical compositions
to pop songs. Invited to join an established band called the Misty Set, he sang
his first lead vocal on-stage. He moved to another established band called
Edward Bear (the name taken from a character in Winnie the Pooh, not to be
confused with the Canadian band of the same name that recorded for Capitol
Records in the early '70s). Deciding that he resembled the title character on a
television puppet show called Joe 90, his bandmates began calling him "Joe," and
it stuck. After six months, the two principals in Edward Bear decided to retire
from music, and with their permission he took over the name and the group's
bookings and brought in a couple of his friends, lead singer/guitarist Mark
Andrews (later of Mark Andrews & the Gents) and bassist Graham Maby.
Jackson continued to attend the Royal Academy, where he studied composition,
orchestration, and piano while majoring in percussion. He also occasionally
played piano in the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. He graduated from the academy
after three years in 1975. By then, Edward Bear (forced to change its name to
Edwin Bear because of the more successful Canadian band, and then to Arms &
Legs) were attracting more attention and acquired management, which in turn
signed the band to MAM Records. In April 1976, MAM released the first Arms &
Legs single, with Andrews' "Janie" on the A-side and Jackson's "She'll Surprise
You" on the B-side. Second and third singles followed in August and February
1977, but the records did not sell. Meanwhile, in October 1976, Jackson quit the
band to become pianist and musical director at the Playboy Club in Portsmouth.
He was determined to save enough money to record his own album and release it
himself. In August 1977, he played his first gigs as the leader of the Joe
Jackson Band, singing and playing keyboards, backed by Andrews (sitting in
temporarily and soon replaced by Gary Sanford), Maby, and drummer Dave Houghton.
At the same time, he quit the Playboy Club job to become pianist/musical
director for a cabaret act, Koffee 'n' Kream, that was beginning a national tour
in the wake of their triumph on the TV amateur show Opportunity Knocks.
Jackson toured with Koffee 'n' Kream from the fall of 1977 to the spring of
1978, and the money he made enabled him to move to London in January 1978 and
continue recording his album in a Portsmouth studio. He began shopping demo
tapes to record labels in London without success until he was heard by American
producer David Kershenbaum. Kershenbaum was scouting for talent on behalf of A&M
Records, and he arranged for Jackson to be signed to A&M on August 9, 1978,
after which they immediately re-recorded Jackson's album. They completed it
quickly, and at the end of the month the Joe Jackson Band embarked on an
extensive national tour.
Despite his classical education and background playing many types of pop music
in pubs and clubs, Jackson had become genuinely enamored of the punk/new wave
movement of the late '70s in England, especially attracted by the energy and
simplicity of the music and the angry, aggressive tone of the lyrics. He had no
trouble incorporating these elements into his own music, and if he was, to an
extent, using the new wave label as a flag of convenience, the style
nevertheless was a valid vehicle of expression for him. Of course, first
impressions can be lasting, and to many people he would, ever after, be an angry
new wave singer/songwriter, no matter what else he did.
In October 1978, A&M released the first Joe Jackson single, "Is She Really Going
Out with Him?," a rhythmic ballad in which the singer ponders why "pretty women"
are attracted to "gorillas" and worries about his own inadequacy. The record
failed to chart, but Jackson and his band continued to tour around the U.K. and
began to attract press attention. Look Sharp!, his debut album, followed in
January 1979, again, to no significant sales at first. The LP contained more
songs in the vein of "Is She Really Going Out with Him?," many of them uptempo
rockers with strong melodies and lyrics full of romantic disappointment and
social criticism, bitterly expressed and with more than a touch of
self-deprecation. (One, "Got the Time," was sufficiently raucous to be covered
by heavy metal band Anthrax in essentially the same arrangement on their
Persistence of Time album in 1990.) A&M released "Sunday Papers," an attack on
the salaciousness of tabloid newspapers, as a single in February, again without
reaction. But in March, Look Sharp! finally broke into the charts, eventually
peaking at the bottom of the Top 40. The same month, A&M released the album in
the U.S., and it quickly charted, reaching the Top 20 after "Is She Really Going
Out with Him?" was released as a single in May (while Jackson toured North
America) and became a Top 40 hit; in September, the LP was certified gold in the
U.S. In the U.K., "Is She Really Going Out with Him?" was re-released in July
and charted in August, making the Top 20. Jackson was nominated for a 1979
Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Male, for the single.
Meanwhile, Jackson toured more or less continually, playing dates in Continental
Europe in June and then back in the U.K. through August before returning to
North America. But he had found the time and inspiration to craft a quick
follow-up to Look Sharp!, and his second LP, I'm the Man, was released on
October 5. That was a little too soon for the U.S. market, where Look Sharp! had
not yet exhausted its run, and while the album made the Top 40, it was a
relative sales disappointment, with the single "It's Different for Girls"
failing to enter the Hot 100. The story was different in the U.K., however,
where I'm the Man made the Top 20 and "It's Different for Girls" reached the Top
Five. Critically, the album was considered a continuation of Look Sharp!, an
opinion shared by Jackson himself. The first blush of his emergence fading,
Jackson was beginning to be viewed by critics as the third in a line of angry
British singer/songwriters starting with Graham Parker and continuing with Elvis
Costello, and his commercial success created resentment, especially because he
was not as forthcoming with the media as the garrulous Costello.
The U.S. tour ran into November, followed by more shows in the U.K. in November
and December. Jackson went back on the road in February 1980 with a few U.S.
dates, followed by some U.K. shows and a European tour that ran from March to
May. Like other punk/new wave acts, he had used reggae rhythms on occasion,
notably on "Fools in Love" on Look Sharp! and "Geraldine and John" on I'm the
Man. In May, he released an EP in the U.K. including a cover of Jimmy Cliff's
"The Harder They Come." In acknowledgment of his group's importance to his
sound, the disc was billed to the Joe Jackson Band. After dates in the U.K. in
May and June, the Joe Jackson Band returned to North America for a tour that
lasted into August; they finally took a break after a few more shows at the end
of the month.
Beat Crazy, released in October, also was billed to the Joe Jackson Band. The
album featured less of the frantic punk sound of its predecessors, instead
absorbing the dub-reggae and ska influences that were topping the British charts
just then in the music of bands like the Specials and the English Beat. But it
was a relative disappointment commercially, peaking in the 40s in both the U.S.
and U.K., with its singles failing to chart. One reason for the reduced sales in
America may have been that the group did not tour to support it there. The Joe
Jackson Band played a monthlong tour from October to November in the U.K.,
followed by a month in Europe from November to December, after which it split
up, according to Jackson because Houghton no longer wanted to tour. Sanford
became a session musician, while Maby stuck with Jackson.
Jackson, in ill health following more than two years of continual touring,
retreated to his family home, where he became increasingly immersed in the jump
blues of 1940s star Louis Jordan. He organized a new band in the style of
Jordan's Tympany 5 featuring three horn players (Pete Thomas on alto saxophone,
Raul Oliveria on trumpet, and David Bitelli on tenor saxophone and clarinet)
along with pianist Nick Weldon and drummer Larry Tolfree, plus Maby and Jackson
himself, who played vibes and sang. The group, dubbed Joe Jackson's Jumpin'
Jive, played a collection of swing and jump blues standards such as "Jumpin'
with Symphony Sid," "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby," and "Tuxedo Junction."
The resulting Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive LP, released in June 1981, was a hit in
Britain, where it reached the Top 20. In the U.S., the album was not so much 35
years behind the times as 15 years ahead of them; had it appeared in the
mid-'90s, it would have fit right in with releases by the Brian Setzer Orchestra
and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy as part of the neo-swing movement. As it was, America
circa 1981 was baffled, but Jackson's core audience was sufficiently curious to
push the album into the Top 50 while he toured the country with the band in July
in between British dates in June and from August to September.
Jackson went through more personal changes over the next year. He and his wife
divorced, and he moved to New York City, where, true to form, he began to
immerse himself in new musical genres, particularly attracted to salsa and the
classic songwriting styles of Gershwin and Cole Porter. The result was Night and
Day, released in June 1982, Jackson's first album to put his keyboard playing at
the center of his music, with percussionist Sue Hadjopoulas also given
prominence. Jackson seemed to have abandoned new wave rock for a catchy
pop-jazz-salsa-dance hybrid, and he backed the release with a yearlong world
tour as A&M put considerable promotional muscle behind the LP. "Steppin' Out"
became a multi-format hit, earning airplay on album-oriented rock (AOR) radio
before spreading to the pop and adult contemporary charts, placing in the Top
Ten all around and eventually earning Grammy nominations for Record of the Year
and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male. With that stimulus, the album reached the
Top Ten and went gold, spawning a second Top 20 single in "Breaking Us in Two."
Jackson finished the Night and Day tour in May 1983. He had been asked to
contribute a song to Mike's Murder, a film written and directed by James Bridges
(The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy) and starring Debra Winger (Urban Cowboy, An
Officer and a Gentleman). He ended up writing both a handful of songs and a few
instrumental pieces that were released on a soundtrack album in September.
Unfortunately, the film itself was not ready for release then, since it was the
subject of a dispute between Bridges and the movie studio that had financed it,
the result being reshooting and re-editing, such that the film did not open
until March 1984, by which time it had a score by John Barry and only a little
of Jackson's music remaining, and then it earned only one million dollars during
a few weeks of theatrical showings, making it a disastrous flop. The orphaned
soundtrack album, however, managed to get into the Top 100 and even spawned a
chart single in the Jackson composition "Memphis," while "Breakdown" earned a
Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.
Jackson returned to the studio and emerged in March 1984 with Body & Soul, an
album with a cover photograph showing him clutching a saxophone in the style of
the 1950s LP covers of Blue Note Records. The disc inside was a follow-up to
Night and Day in style, however, with a bit more of an R&B tilt, and it was
another commercial success, if a more modest one, reaching the Top 20 and
spawning a Top 20 single in "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You
Want)." After the four-month Body & Soul world tour concluded in July 1984,
Jackson retreated. The tour had been, he later wrote, "the hardest I ever did;
it came too soon after the last one, and by the end of it I was so burned out I
swore I'd never tour again." He re-emerged after 18 months in January 1986 for a
series of live recording sessions at the Roundabout Theatre in New York
conducted for his next album. Audiences were invited to attend, but instructed
to hold their applause as the performances were cut direct to a two-track tape
recorder. The resulting album, Big World, released in March, had a one-hour
running time, making it an ideal length for the new CD format, though it had to
be pressed on two LPs with the second side of the second LP left blank. Press
reaction to these two aspects of the album tended to overshadow consideration of
the material, which ranged from politically charged rockers like "Right or
Wrong," a direct challenge to the Reagan administration, to heartfelt ballads
like "Home Town," a reflection on memory and loss. Jackson undertook another
extensive tour lasting from May to December (one he reported enjoying much more
than the last one), and the album spent six months in the charts, but only
peaked in the Top 40.
In the winter of 1985, Jackson had been commissioned to write a 20-minute score
for a Japanese film, Shijin No Ie (House of the Poet), and the orchestral piece
was recorded with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. He adapted it into "Symphony in
One Movement" and added a few other instrumental pieces to create his next
album, Will Power, his first disc to reflect his classical background. A&M gave
the LP a surprising promotional push that included releasing the title track as
a single, and Jackson fans were sufficiently intrigued to push the album into
the lower reaches of the pop chart upon its release in April 1987. But his
increasing desire to include classical elements in his popular work and to issue
outright "serious" compositions tended to put him in a no man's land where
reviewers were concerned, since rock critics were for the most part incapable of
judging such works and preferred that he stick to rock-based music, while
classical critics simply ignored him. Had they been paying attention, however,
they might not have approved of what they heard, anyway. An unrepentant
Beethoven fan, Jackson had disliked his exposure to serial music and other
contemporary trends in classical music when he encountered them in college; his
serious compositions tended to reflect his taste for conventional concert music
of the romantic and classical periods.
While staying off the road, Jackson had two albums in release in 1988. In May,
he issued the double-disc set Live 1980/86, chronicling his tours over the
years. It reached the Top 100. In August came his swing-styled soundtrack to the
Francis Ford Coppola film Tucker: The Man and His Dream, an effort that probably
would have attracted more attention if the film had been more successful (it
grossed less than $20 million). Nevertheless, the album earned a Grammy
nomination for Best Album of Original Instrumental Background Score Written for
a Motion Picture or TV. His next LP, released in April 1989, was Blaze of Glory,
another modest seller with a peak only in the Top 100 despite radio play for the
single "Nineteen Forever." Jackson, who felt the album was one of his best
efforts and toured to support it with an 11-piece band in the U.S. and Europe
from June to November, was disappointed with both the commercial reaction and
his record company's lack of support. He parted ways with A&M, which promptly
released the 1990 compilation Steppin' Out: The Very Best of Joe Jackson, a Top
Ten hit in the U.K.
Jackson wrote his third movie score for 1991's Queens Logic; no soundtrack album
was issued. Signing to Virgin Records, he released his next album, Laughter &
Lust, in April 1991. Here, he expressed some of his frustration with the record
business in the appropriately catchy, '60s-styled "Hit Single," while the
socially conscious "Obvious Song" and a percussion-filled cover of Fleetwood
Mac's "Oh Well" attracted radio attention. But the album continued his gradual
sales decline, failing to reach the Top 100 in the U.S. Another world tour
stretched from May to September, after which Jackson was not heard from on
record for three years. In the interim, he wrote music for two movies, the
interactive film I'm Your Man (1992) and the feature Three of Hearts (1993),
neither of which produced soundtrack albums featuring his music. He reappeared
in record stores in October 1994 with Night Music, a low-key album that
attempted to fuse his pop and classical styles, including instrumentals and
guest vocals by Mßire Brennan of Clannad. The album, which did not chart, was
supported with a world tour that ran from November to May 1995. After it,
Jackson left Virgin and signed to Sony Classical, a label more accepting of his
musical ambitions. In September 1997, it released Heaven & Hell, a song cycle
depicting the seven deadly sins, billed to Joe Jackson & Friends; the friends
included such guest vocalists as folk-pop singers Jane Siberry and Suzanne Vega
and opera singer Dawn Upshaw. The album reached number three in Billboard's
Classical Crossover chart. A tour ran from November to April 1998.
Jackson worked on two projects in the late '90s, both of which appeared in
October 1999. Sony Classical issued his Symphony No. 1, which was played not by
an orchestra, but by a band of jazz and rock musicians including guitarist Steve
Vai and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, and it won the 2000 Grammy Award for Best
Pop Instrumental Album. And publishers Public Affairs came out with Jackson's
book, A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage, in which he wrote about his love
of all kinds of music and recounted his life from his birth up to the point of
his emergence as a public figure in the late '70s. Bringing his story up to
date, he wrote, "So I'm still making music, no longer a pop star -- if I ever
really was -- but just a composer, which is what I wanted to be in the first
place."
Having released only semi-classical works on his last three recordings, Jackson
was thought to have abandoned pop/rock music completely, but that proved not to
be true. The early years of the 21st century found him in a flurry of activity,
much of it returning him to the pop music realm. In June 2000, Sony Classical,
through Jackson's imprint, Manticore, issued Summer in the City: Live in New
York, an album drawn from an August 1999 concert that featured him playing piano
and singing, backed only by Maby and drummer Gary Burke, performing some of his
old songs along with covers of tunes by the Lovin' Spoonful, Duke Ellington, and
the Beatles, among others. Four months later came Night and Day II, a new set of
songs in the spirit of his most popular recording. Touring to promote the album
in Europe and North America from November to April 2001, Jackson recorded the
concert CD Two Rainy Nights: Live in the Northwest (The Official Bootleg),
released in January 2002 on his own Great Big Island label through his website,
www.joejackson.com. (The album was reissued to retail by Koch in 2004.)
Later in 2002, Jackson surprised longtime fans by reuniting with the original
members of the Joe Jackson Band, Graham Maby, Gary Sanford, and Dave Houghton,
to record a new studio album, Volume 4 (the first three volumes having been Look
Sharp!, I'm the Man, and Beat Crazy), released by Restless/Rykodisc in March
2003, and to embark on a world tour running through September 2003 that resulted
in the live album Afterlife, issued in March 2004. As he made television
appearances to promote the latter, he insisted that the reunion had been a
one-time thing. Meanwhile, his recording of "Steppin' Out" was being used in a
television commercial for Lincoln Mercury automobiles, and he was preparing to
score his next film, The Greatest Game Ever Played, for a 2005 release. Jackson
released a new studio album, Rain, in 2008, followed by 2011's Live Music:
Europe 2010, which was recorded live in Europe during his 2010 Joe Jackson Trio
tour with Dave Houghton and Graham Maby.
In 2012, Jackson released the Duke Ellington tribute album The Duke. Though a
long-avowed fan of the legendary jazz pianist and bandleader, Jackson didn't
want his tribute to follow the standard reverent approach, and instead he
filtered these timeless compositions through various unexpected rhythms,
arrangements, and musical pairings, including a duet with punk icon Iggy Pop on
"It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)." The year 2015 brought
another ambitious project from Jackson; the album Fast Forward found him
recording in four cities with four different sets of musicians, with each
capturing a different aspect of the songwriter's musical personality.
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