Song Blog - Eli Moore

Here’s where I share the various musical and general life/art inspirations I’m having, and how they intersect with my own music-making. Expect unnecessary reviews of albums from 60 years ago, and notes on the musical minutiae that I enjoy.

Eli Reviews: TomCat – Tom Scott and the L.A. Express (1974)

Tom Scott is THE session musician. If you’ve heard saxophone in the 1970s, you’ve heard him. When he was only 20 years old, Quincy Jones was already talking about him, how he could ‘play any idiom’. He’s the Jazz Man on Carole King’s classic paean, and the horn section arranger on Steely Dan’s Aja, even the funny electronic sounding melody that turns out is a Lyricon on Billie Jean.

I was excited to see some of his records are on Spotify. Sometimes Spotify has gaps – also depending on country – and I’m sure at one point I couldn’t access one of his records with his own band The L.A. Express. This one has cool cover art that I also find funny because I’ve had a recent run of jazz fusion discoveries, all with humanoid animals on the cover, that have turned out to be AI created. Tom Scott was an early adopter of the electronic wind instrument, the afore-mentioned Lyricon, but is all real. Guy can play anything.

TomCat is a solid jazz funk fusion record. It goes around rock and bop and blues and shuffle elements and features great playing all-round – I like this keyboard player a lot, Larry Nash – but I can’t say I really loved it. Usually I’m out and about or at the gym when taking in my album listening and will be regularly checking my phone for track titles if I’m digging it. I didn’t do that until the ballad “Love Poem”, which features Scott as the entire horn and woodwind section. I also did go back and saved “Day Way” before it to my Transcription playlist for the really cool, angular language of the melody, but I think the more interesting stuff is in the latter half, with a rock-edge TV news intro sort of track, “Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America & All The Ships” that Robben Ford really tears up.

“Backfence Cattin’” is mostly a cool funk groove in 3/4 that then pulls some clever metric switches. “Mondo” is pretty heavy, and Scott switches back to the synthesizer-sounding Lyricon for a rip. The last tune, “Refried”, is probably my favorite, at least for the intro groove, which I’m sure must have been sampled many a time. It’s a mostly dark tune and full of all that 1970s recording grit and richness I love so much. Unfortunately this is the only 70s from him available on Spotify, but I’m definitely going to hear him pop up soon enough in my music listening explorations – the guy really was on everything.

1970s, 1974, funk, jazz, Larry Nash, Tom Scott

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Eli Reviews: First Cuckoo – Deodato (1975)

I haven’t been mentioning that I also love Deodato’s album covers. I didn’t even see the figure of the woman with baby carriage until blowing it up big here.

This one’s a real mix and not such a clear concept, also with a lot more cover songs than the two others I’ve listened to – four out of the seven tracks, in fact. I like this one more than Knights of Fantasy and less than Love Island, and it’s again testament of how much Deodato can do as a musician. Steve Gadd is the only other musician on the record I know and he of course lays down the faultless grooves throughout.

“Funk Yourself” is a fun enough funk bash, probably great to kick your time on the treadmill off with. For me though, nothing beats Herbie Hancock’s “Hang Up Your Hang Ups”. It’s the next gamble that really pays off though: Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”. Deodato’s band actually delivers a metrically better performance, not rushing that one bit of the riff…it’s got enough gnarl to it that it comes off really well when it might not have.

The next track is to be one of my all-time favorite Deodato tracks, I’m sure: “Crabwalk”. Arranging and conducting your own stuff becomes a really amazing credit when there’s such large instrumentation like this. What a great writer. Great composition. There’s a tolerable dub element with the delays on the trumpet lead, but the lush 70s orchestration style is the real star here.

“Adam’s Hotel” is a super fun tune that were it recorded a little different would fit in some scenes of Napoleon Dynamite. I don’t know if I’m trying too hard to self-promote here but it’s a vibe I was going for with my track (as EM/FM) “Into Atlantis”. What I really want to take from Deodato is his deft management of composition and arrangement. His tunes develop and lengthen without feeling either convoluted (like Bob James for me) or uninteresting (like the Jazz Crusaders for me).

The funky boogaloo version of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” isn’t bad but I don’t need to ever hear it again. This guy really likes doing covers. I love his version of “Speak Low” though – another jazz standard – and I about hiccuped reading in the credits that the lyricist for the tune was actually Ogden Nash, my favorite poet.

The album ends with a classical piece by Delius, the title track basically, but I don’t know what Deodato did to it as it’s un-jazzified. He would have been pushing even his luck trying to make Cuckoo into a funk.

1970s, 1975, Deodato, funk, jazz, Steve Gadd, synthesizers

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Eli Reviews: Lyle Mays – Lyle Mays (1986)

I had possibly a spiritual experience listening to this album in a pool one night, on my iPhone speaker. Surely an improper means to listen to art but that’s good the mix and music are that I could be as absorbed as I was.

This falls in with my 80s EM/FM-related obsession as my jazz background found it’s way more into Quixote than it did Ship Life, for some reason. The digital synth tones on this record marry so well with Mays’ piano language, and though I liked the intro track “Highland Aire”, it was “Teiko” that transported me. The reverbs used are so cosmic sounding, and with the unusual combination of world musics and sparkly synth and soprano sax, it reminded me of one bit from the anime Cowboy Bepop.

I was only vaguely aware of Pat Metheny for the longest time, playing a few of his tunes in college and making note to follow up on his discography some day. I only ended up doing that last year and became aware of Lyle Mays and his beautiful piano language. I’m overdue to do some transcribing of his playing. He’s basically the piano version of Pat Metheny as far as I can tell, fluent and virtuosic in jazz vocab but with a passion for this more folk mode of playing (I believe I’d heard Metheny use that word this way) by which I mean things like double plagal cadences and sus 2 chords, diatonic scale runs and more triadic thinking.

The use of such big reverbs is kind of an 80s thing but for jazz, I feel like this could have been contentious. Solo piano track “Mirror of the Heart” has so much reverb on it that it almost become a second instrument on the recording. It’s beautiful. “Northern Lights” is another one that took me to the stars, with it’s held synth string note and repeated soft plucky synth motif, acoustic piano and double bass dancing around the digital elements.

This galactic combination of jazz and synthesizer was something I was reaching for with my own track “Per Aspera Ad Astra”. I’m still in awe of how much texture, power and width synthesizers can give a composer who doesn’t have access to a traditional orchestra.

“Slink” has an immaculate and very modern piano solo and “Invocation” has some beautiful synth in it but “Ascent” and “Close to Home” arrest me a lot more. The latter is such a gorgeous end to the record and might become my first Lyle Mays transcription.

1980s, jazz, Lyle Mays, synthesizers

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Eli Reviews: Deltron 3030 – Deltron 3030 (2000)

Fans who have found me through my cruise ship career might be surprised to see me review hip hop/rap. It’s not a favorite genre of this demographic and not one I’ve probably ever covered in the piano lounge but I actually really love 90s hip hop. The samples chosen were largely from funk and jazz records from my favorite eras and the beats really grooved. I love the texture the samplers and drum machines imparted to the recordings and love the delivery of a lot of the rappers from this era, even though I’m not normally paying much attention to what they were saying.

I think because the medium requires so many more words than a sung song of the same length (words go by a lot faster in rap and have no limitation of marrying with a melody) there could be the potential to really say more than a song could, but I’ve not heard much rap live up to that. I’m satisfied when it’s just not about something ugly or inane and the beat smacks.

So I was super happy to stumble upon Deltron 3030, which is a concept album mostly depicting a sci-fi future scenario involving a mecha-soldier and his defection from an evil empire. I learned that from Wikipedia as I didn’t actually catch all that the first time around…But I was enjoying the miscellany of sci-fi references and the really awesome beats that Dan the Automator made for it – I’ve since followed him around Spotify and have admired all his production work so far.

“3030” is probably the best track, with this amazing orchestral sequence Dan the Automator sampled from William Sheller (I’ve yet to listen to this guy, a French composer and songwriter) bringing an epic breadth to the track. “Mastermind” has a crunchy beat to it and my favorite is probably “Virus” where Del the Funky Homosapien rhymes ‘virus’ with ‘papyrus’ and it’s great.

My wife was wondering if the album wasn’t just a hodge-podge of science fiction terms and I can’t say that it isn’t – I definitely drift off towards the latter half. But it’s really inspiring to me that these guys stuck it out with their concept, blending their cross-media loves into their music. I have in mind to continue my ‘Quixote’ concept/character with later EM/FM releases so it’s really nice to have guiding stars like this one.

2000, 2000s, dan the automator, hip hop, rap, review, sci fi

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Eli Reviews – Knights Of Fantasy – Deodato (1979)

Deodato does disco! I’m maybe four albums into his discography and I already know this one will be one of my least favorites. It doesn’t seem quite as inspired as a few of his others from this era but it still has plenty for the brain and the booty, with tight grooves and great synth-ing over jazz chord progressions. It just seems like an odd choice to me to go full disco towards the end of that craze, but some 80s sounds have entered here with what seem like synth drums and the very 80s hand claps.

There’s only five tracks on this one, but they’re almost all around seven minutes. It doesn’t really make any of the tunes more memorable and I found myself thinking as great as the players are (I don’t recognize any of the names on this one) between solos songs like the title track are almost muzak. There’s some really nice brass somewhere on the album, and the last track, “Lovely Lady”, sounds a lot like the Japanese jazz fusion I love from the same era.

Funnily the part I enjoy most is just an intro, and in fact the intro to the most questionable track: a disco version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring”. It’s reminiscent of the Star Wars disco medley, but then this one steps outside of any logic and goes into “Love Is Blue”. I won’t say it doesn’t work. Then it gest funky in a disco way before going back to Bach.

But anyway, the intro is very cool and it reminds me a little of one of my own tunes as EM/FM “The One”!

1970s, 1979, album review, Deodato, EM/FM, funk, jazz fusion, review

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Eli Reviews: Love Island – Deodato (1978)

I’m on a fanatic run of Deodato. I exercised a lot of musical fanaticism last year when I had resolved to listen to album a day, falling even more in love with Herbie Hancock, George Duke and discovering then obsessing over Japanese artists Masayoshi Takanaka and Casiopea.

Eumir Deodato is blowing me away – composer, arranger and killer keyboardist. My only exposure to him before somehow coming across this album was through his famous funk rendition of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which I think I first heard in the Peter Sellers movie Being There. It seems to have been a habit of his to include at least one unusual cover on his albums. On this one, it’s a surprisingly tasty lounge funk version of Take the “A” Train.

This one and an Edwin Starr tune called “Chariot of the Gods” are sort of disruptive inclusions as it’s otherwise a concept album of island-themed music, almost more in the 60s lounge music/jet-setter/exotica trend but with 70s hallmarks like Rhodes keyboard, synthesizer, funk guitar, drums and farty bass (that’s a good thing). It’s lush with soft brass on two of my favorite tunes, “Tahiti Hut” and “Love Island”, and funks hard on the two intro tracks, and then “Pina Colada” later one – there’s some funky jazzy legends across the record, including Harvey Mason, Larry Carlton, George Benson and even Maurice White and Philip Bailey.

The writing is just so good across the record. All the songs are deftly written, with really engaging arrangements and expert solos. Deodato uses a crazy trombone sounding vocal effect (listed as ‘vocalanger’ on one set of credits) for a solo on “Love Island” and elsewhere takes super interesting Rhodes solos.

I’m super-inspired by this guy – stay tuned for more Deodato!

1970s, 1978, Deodato, funk, jazz

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Eli Reviews: AM Waves – Young Gun Silver Fox (2018)

I keep getting excited when I hear of a modern Yacht Rock band, and I keep getting disappointed. Cue disgruntled spiel: “music these days…” But it is true. I am disgruntled, and music these days just isn’t as good.

Young Gun Silver Fox is a team of a young singer-songwriter and an experienced old muso who met on Myspace back when, well, there was Myspace. It’s a cool story, but I don’t think it’s made for a great album.

For those who don’t already know, Yacht Rock is an after-the-fact name for certain adult-contemporary pop music of the mid-70s to the early 80s that featured blue-eyed-soul vocal stylings, sophisticated jazzy chord changes, tight grooves and pristine production. The easiest way to illustrate it is with the Michael McDonald era of The Doobie Brothers, but there’s a whole corner of the internet enthusiastic about whether songs from the era are Yacht or Not. Anyway, it’s some of my favorite music.

Unfortunately, all this modern retro-gazing often is coupled with the modern tendencies to look shallowly at things, and to lazily be derivative. Stranger Things did it with 80s movies, Vulfpeck does it with 70s jazz funk, and The Midnight does it with synthwave culture.

AM Waves gets the production quality component of Yacht Rock right, in that it sounds great. The wrapper is shiny. Meanwhile, meaningless lyrics sail by about it being midnight in Richmond and things vaguely aren’t the same as they were, and banal descriptions like lighting a cigarette get a full two bars to sit with the listener. Sudden music changes appear to derail any nice groove that’s winning you over as if to prove the musical vocabulary these guys have. “Lenny” is a song about having another drink, presumably from a Lenny, sung repetitively in falsetto over various musical tropes. “Take It Or Leave It” just about gets under my skin with the groove and a couple of nice chords until insipid backing vocals come in to repeat every one of the meaningless lines. That’s basically the story for the rest of the record.

Which is sad, because in searching back through the Yacht Rock catalogue (organized, of course, after-the-fact) they’re really not all winners either. So the world does need fresh new Yacht Rock. I’ll be producing some soon, but with my limited budget it might not make the cut on Yacht or Not…

2000s, 2018, pop, songwriting, Yacht Rock

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Eli Reviews: Friend Of A Friend – Homi & Jarvis (1983)

I started REALLY getting into 80s music around the time of the pandemic. If we were talking Hall & Oates, pre-2020 I would have said Abandoned Luncheonette (1973) was my desert island selection; since that weird time of isolation I was only about Ooh Yeah! (1988). During this time I was using almost all my waking hours to study music production and mixing online and basically, it seemed to me like the most authentic music I could record in my situation and at my technical level was synthesizer-based music, with retro electronic drum sounds and big reverbs and vocal effects to disguise what I feared would be amateurish recording and mixes. These instrument and effects all lived in my production software, as did I for most of this time.

I also became obsessed with the [dying] trends of synthwave and vaporwave, two different takes on 80s musical redux, mostly made by bedroom producers. These styles of music production emphasize and exaggerate different respective musical touchstones of 80s popular music: synthwave mostly being an edgy, pulsing instrumental image of driving in a neon night city, and vaporwave being a reverberant pastiche of RnB-inflected pop, as you would have heard in a mall.

(I really honed in on vaporwave in as EM/FM, on ‘Close Enough’.)

All that to say, these retrowave musics are usually exaggerations of these past tropes. What I love most about this album is that it’s almost more vaporwave than vaporwave. It’s full of sparkling keyboards (master arranger and GOAT sparkly-keyboardist Dave Grusin produced and played on this record – another reason to love it) funky, trebly basslines (courtesy of Marcus Miller) and a range of jazzy poppy tunes that would be yacht rock if they were produced differently.

“I’m In Love Again” is an iconic intro to the album. The arrangement is perfect, the chorus is super-catchy, there’s great jazzy chords pulling the ear along, a great solo section. But it’s really where it’s lacking that makes me love it: something in the mix or master stage has the record feeling like it’s almost amateurish or done on a budget, which is generally what vaporwave is designed to sound like. The vocals are less than perfect. I love it.

The writing credits bounce between the two singers and several other contributors. There’s precious little about this record on the internet and only a little on the two artists. Amanda Homi seems to have continued in an alternative sort of world music career. Her contribution “You Got Me Fallin'” hits me in all the spots, avoiding cheese with its purity and tasteful synth textures.

Even the weaker songs I find enjoyable for the depth of their arrangement details, credit to Grusin’s taste for harmony and groove. Lee Ritenour, David Sanborn and Harvey Mason Sr. also bring the goods – even Toots Thielemans makes an appearance, on ‘Some Hearts’. Cool key change in this one too.

1980s, 1983, Dave Grusin, EM/FM, songwriting, synthwave, vaporwave