When Easy works
Easy listening has been damaged by its own name more than by anything on the records. The phrase suggests something made without effort, when in fact it is the branch of popular music that demands the most from an arranger: every part audible, nothing in anybody's way, and no solo long enough to make the listener choose.
Henry Mancini wrote film music that works without the film. Jobim wrote songs with harmonic movement that jazz musicians are still mining. These are not simple records that happen to be pleasant. They are difficult records that have been made to sound simple, which is the harder trick.
Early morning is when you want music that asks nothing and still rewards attention if you happen to give it. Nothing else on the dial manages both at once.
Where it came from
Easy listening is a chart before it is a sound. Billboard started one under that name in 1961, for records that were selling steadily to people who were not buying rock and roll, and the name has been doing the genre damage ever since.
What was actually happening was an arranging boom. Film scoring had trained a generation to write for a large ensemble that had to stay out of the way of something else, and when Henry Mancini's Moon River took the Oscar in 1962 the trade learned that the same skill sold records on its own.
Bossa nova arrived in the middle of it. Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd's Jazz Samba reached number one in 1962, Brazilian harmony entered the American songbook, and the quietest music on American radio briefly became the most harmonically interesting.
Easy: five records
- Henry Mancini, 1961Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Moon River aside, listen to what the rhythm section is doing. It's a jazz band pretending to be an orchestra. Mancini used a harmonica and a whistling chorus where an orchestra was expected, and won two Academy Awards for it in one night.
- Antônio Carlos Jobim, 1967Wave.
Claus Ogerman's arrangements, almost no voice, and the most relaxed record ever made by someone working that hard. Jobim is barely audible as a singer on it by design; Ogerman's strings do the work and the composer is left playing piano and guitar behind them.
- Astrud Gilberto, 1965The Astrud Gilberto Album.
An untrained singer who understood that not reaching for a note is itself a decision. She was twenty-four, had recorded almost nothing, and sang in English she had learned phonetically, which is a large part of why the phrasing is so level.
- Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66, 1966Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66.
Brazilian rhythm, American pop songs, two voices in unison. It should not work. Mendes rebuilt the group for an American label and had the two singers deliver English lyrics in unison without vibrato, which no other Brazilian act was doing.
- Burt Bacharach, 1969Make It Easy on Yourself.
The same songs everyone knows, played without a famous voice in front of them. The construction becomes visible. Without a singer in front of them the songs reveal their construction: bars of five and seven, key changes mid-verse, and melodies that no one would write to be easy.
The honest objection
Bacharach appears here and on the lounge page, which is sloppy, and I know it. The alternative was to put him in one place and leave the other page weaker. He genuinely belongs to both rooms; splitting him across two would be tidier and less true.
The faces on the records
William Gottlieb photographed the New York clubs between 1938 and 1948 for Down Beat and the Washington Post. The Library of Congress holds the negatives; the pictures are in the public domain.
