Smuggling Downtown: Alan Licht on Hal Willner's Night Music
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In Writing The world's greatest print and online music magazine. Independent since 1982 Smuggling downtown: Alan Licht on Hal Willner’s Night Music April 2020 Hal Willner, 2008. Photo by Michael Schmelling “Hal came up in a music industry that no longer exists,” observes Alan Licht, in his tribute to the US producer The basic assumption that life as we knew it will not be the same as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic was confirmed for many in several different music worlds on 7 April, when producer Hal Willner died, aged 64, with symptoms associated with the disease. Willner was a ubiquitous presence in New York, famed for his path-breaking, smartly eclectic 1980s tribute albums to Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill and Walt Disney, higher profile productions of Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull albums, and a day job selecting music for sketches on the US TV show Saturday Night Live. It In Writing was the SNL gig that led to a spin-off late night music show, originally dubbed Sunday Night but retitled and better known as Night Music, on NBC. Produced by SNL’s Lorne Michaels, hosted at first by Jools Holland and smooth jazz saxophonist David Sanborn but later only Sanborn, the show only lasted two seasons from 1988–90, and Willner became the show’s chief music producer for the entire second season. Little remembered but epochal (in its own weird way), Night Music remains the most sustained vehicle for his vision to be exposed to a mass audience. Nearly all of the episodes can now be found on YouTube, and upon hearing of Willner’s passing I went back to revisit them, having only seen a handful the first time they aired. Each show featured four or five performers doing a song or two and then a couple of collaborative numbers at the end of the programme. These would be punctuated by vintage performance clips that had never seen the light of day on MTV or anywhere else back then – Aretha Franklin, The Platters, Count Basie, Son House, Sonny Rollins, The Kinks, Billie Holiday. If you crosscheck the line-ups of the tribute albums with the lists of guests on the show, you find the likes of Bill Frisell, Debbie Harry, Donald Fagen, Was Not Was, Todd Rundgren, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Sting, Van Dyke Parks, Phil Woods, Charlie Haden, Syd Straw, Ken Nordine and Aaron Neville cropping up on both. Critically acclaimed artists who were major label mainstays despite a lack of consistent commercial success were also welcomed (The Roches, John Hiatt, Dr. John, Nona Hendryx, Graham Parker, Warren Zevon). There was an emphasis on 1960s music veterans, bringing free jazzers into the limelight – Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra – as well as R&B greats (Allen Toussaint, Pops Staples, Carla & Rufus Thomas, Al Green) and a number of 60s rockers (Ray Manzarek, Jack Bruce, Richard Thompson, John Cale, Bob Weir, Carlos Santana – Sanborn himself had started his career with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band). Night Music’s format too was descended from the more freeform programming tendencies of the 60s and 70s. Willner cited promoter Bill Graham putting Led Zeppelin, The Bonzo Dog Band, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk on the same bill as a precedent he took to heart (the classic Graham bill of Neil Young, Miles Davis and Steve Miller also comes to mind). The show’s graveyard shift slot (12:30 on Sunday nights) was in keeping with the midnight cult movie screenings that had proliferated in that era, not to mention the eccentric offerings to be found perennially on late night radio and television. Night Music’s guests were mostly cult artists, and you could plausibly label Willner’s aesthetic ‘cult Americana’ – considering Van Dyke Parks’ characteristically off-kilter arrangement of “My Country Tis Of Thee” that kicked off the second season, the cover version of “White Light White Heat” that Willner persuaded bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley to record for a film soundtrack, his witty pairing of “The Star Spangled Banner” with William S. Burroughs’s reading of his story “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” on Saturday Night Live, or his masterstroke of setting old NBC Symphony Orchestra recordings behind another Burroughs reading, of his witheringly sardonic “Thanksgiving Prayer”/ Willner also worked with Allen Ginsberg, and it’s easy to see how the Beat writers’ prototypical hipster view of American culture – cockeyed and clear-eyed all at once – rubbed off on Hal very decisively. In Writing Night Music #201 1989 Stevie Ray Vaughan, Pharoah S… Clip includes Van Dyke Parks’s rendition of “My Country Tis Of Thee” Willner also had his ear to ground with New York’s early 80s downtown avant scene and was able to sneak it into the series to a limited degree. A whiz-bang four turntable Christian Marclay performance feels a tad askew trailing middle of the road turns from Todd Rundgren, Taj Mahal, Nanci Griffith and Pat Metheny, but when all five band together for a rousing rendition of “Never Mind The Why And Wherefore” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, in full 19th century naval attire no less, the combination pays off (and, as with the Weill or Rota tributes, makes a succinct testament to America as a melting pot through the back door of classically European music). John Zorn leads the house band in a rendition of Naked City’s “Snagglepuss”, which in context sounds like every episode of the show smashed into a three minute highlight reel, with thrash metal, hard bop, funk and free blowing bouncing off each other every 20 seconds. In the 80s one couldn’t help noticing the similarities between Willner’s productions and the various cross-pollinative projects that were percolating in New York at the time (Zorn’s own tribute to Ennio Morricone, The Big Gundown, Laurie Anderson’s Mr Heartbreak, star studded genre-mixing albums like The Golden Palominos’ Visions Of Excess and Kip Hanrahan’s Coup De Tete, even Bill Laswell’s production of PiL’s Album) These efforts can be further traced back to another frequent Willner associate and Night Music guest, Carla Bley, and her sprawling 1971 triple LP jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill, which enlisted Viva, Linda Rondstadt, Jack Bruce, Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, John McLaughlin, Paul Motian and Michael Snow, among many others. In Writing Night Music #107 1988 Marianne Faithfull, John Zorn, Aaron Neville, Rob Wasse… John Zorn and band performing “Snagglepuss” is 28.45 minutes in The pinnacle of Willner’s smuggling of downtown sounds onto the airwaves arrived with a mid-season episode which comprised Sonic Youth, Evan Lurie, Diamanda Galás, Daniel Lanois and The Indigo Girls (apparently an appeasement for the show’s talent coordinator, not a Willner pick per se). This was as far out as the series ever got (although the Conway Twitty/Residents/Kronos Quartet show two weeks later was close). The culture shock of Sonic Youth’s frantic, discordant take of “Silver Rocket” following The Indigo Girls’ strummy alt folk “Strange Fire” still says a lot about how far the 80s indie rock underground was from even the fringes of the pop world of the day, and how removed New York’s art noise scene was from the musical currents of the rest of the country. As the show comes to a close, the Lurie group is joined by The Indigo Girls and Lanois for a version of the cowboy standard “Red River Valley”; Sanborn thanks the guests, and then announces “Now we’re gonna go from one classic American song to another – here’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog”,” as Sonic Youth charge into The Stooges anthem, with Sanborn and The Indigo Girls hopping along for the ride, providing what must be the most liberating climax and perfect summation of the whole series. The ultimate epitaph, however, comes at the conclusion of the inaugural season’s seventh episode, the first one that Willner guested on as music producer. Jools Holland turns to Willner on camera and asks, “What has it meant to you, this great production?” Hal sheepishly replies, “Oh, it was wonderful. But what have we learned tonight? If one life was changed, it was all worth it.” The audience applauds, and Jools responds, “I think you’ve changed many lives,” turning to the audience, “hasn’t he?” In Writing Sonic Youth - I Wanna Be Your Dog Live on Michelob Presents Night Music (Rest… Yes, he had. And he cannot be replaced. Hal came up in a music industry that no longer exists, where producers were conversant with a broad range of genres and musicians. He apprenticed under the tutelage of Joel Dorn, who produced everyone from Roberta Flack to Yusef Lateef, but Tom Wilson, whose production credits span Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Randy Weston, Herbie Mann, Eddie Harris, Bob Dylan, Patty Waters, The Velvet Underground, Simon & Garfunkel, Hugh Masekela and The Clancy Brothers, is an even more apt forebear. Willner’s particular genius was in finding ways of getting all those disparate acts on the same record, the same concert stage, or the same TV show. He was adept at locating common ground that the musicians involved might never have otherwise realised that they shared, and developing short-term concatenations by redrawing the maps of music communities. Metaphorically, you could say that social distancing was fatal to Hal Willner, because he lived to bring people together; he tried to eliminate whatever distance existed between fans of Kurt Weill and fans of Lou Reed, between The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Toots Thielemans, between Shawn Colvin and Tim Berne, between LL Cool J and Elliott Sharp.