Somethin' Else

Happy 50th birthday to one of my favorites, Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else, recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, N.J., on March 9, 1958. It's got a reputation for being the best Miles Davis album that isn't a Miles Davis album, but it's almost certainly Cannonball's finest hour as well. Art Blakey was known as a powerhouse drummer, but he takes it easy here, driving along playfully rather than calling too much attention to himself. A classic in every way.

Somethin' Else is really every bit as good as its cousin, Kind of Blue, which is routinely fetishized by by Rolling Stone and other publications that clumsily try to toss a few jazz records into their pop-dominated lists as they try to rewrite history over and over. (I guess it's their way of saying that their generation is one that likes to mix it up every once in awhile, which to me trivializes the entire idiom. But then, their lists trivialize everything, don't they?) Kind of Blue is a great album, but the argument these publications give for lionization -- "it used modal scales" -- seems awfully out of place compared to the rationales posed for including other pop records ("it was the beginning of new wave," "it was a forerunner of industrial music," "it was on drugs") on these lists. Why the sudden interest in harmonic theory, anyway, RS? And how come your four-star Shania Twain reviews don't refer to that kind of thing?