Gino’s Heritage

And now the decade’s gone and nothing turned out right

I clearly remember the first time I heard Nightwalker. In this age where all the songs of the world are just a click away it is hard to imagine the relative scarcity of music in the days before the internet.

A hint from my bandleader led me to Gino.

The go-to place for discovering new stuff was a shop that rented out records. This was in the late seventies and early eighties. If subscribed you could take home with you a maximum of five albums for a week. They were checked for dust and scratches and reluctantly handed over. Black shiny discs that held the secrets of the universe.

Back in my room came the ritual of listening for the first time. The slow lowering of the needle on the narrow landing strip.

The opening and title-track of the Nightwalker album starts with city noise and a gentle melody embedded in the rhythms of the street. And as a softly voiced, intriguing speaker makes you lean in, I turned up the volume, centred my head between my Philips high fidelity speakers (inherited from an upgrading uncle) only to be smacked in the face by the following seven-second crescendo. I was stunned and then confused.

The music was very impressive, but I didn't understand what I was hearing. Some songs even left me indifferent. Some were too complex. It was new and unknown. Unfamiliar to my teenage ears.

I think I only listened to it twice that week. I copied it onto cassette, as I had done with almost every album I could get my hands on. The whole point of renting was to add them to your collection of tape loot. You could either buy one or rent ten.

A year or two later I played back that Nightwalker tape for the first time and didn't believe my ears. How could I have missed these gems? Were they even the same songs?

My love of music is as broad as my curiosity. And while some Gino Vannelli albums are still in that special suitcase for all that I cannot leave behind, the most valuable thing Nightwalker has given me is trust. A special kind of trust.

So many use their intuition as an excuse to be judgmental. They guillotine their way through the day without flinching. Proud of their ultrasharp intuition. They even use it after the fact; the bad feeling they had from the start is used as further proof and licence to gleefully hack away at what lies behind. Love at first sight has the same nasty edge. Too rough for my taste.

The intuitive voice is gentle. It often just makes that tiny, one syllable, meaningless noise. Maybe it hears the one tone slightly out of place, or senses a barely perceptible atmospheric shift. It is so easy to ignore.

Intuition lives in a different place than judgment.

There is no such thing as judgmental intuition. They are opposing forces. One is open, the other is closed. Or rather, the intuitive opens, not by force, but by navigation. Water seeping through invisible cracks. Finding the impossible path. Through constant openness it feels its way forward. Soft and super-sensitive like the feelers of a snail. It whispers implicitly what cannot yet be said aloud. In a conversation, it is the one struggling to find the words. The introvert is neither shy nor vague. In a universe of constant change, it is the sensitive who is most alert. Opening up is the courageous act that the explicit ignores. The extravert fears silence. Discovering the solid never was solid to begin with is avoided at all cost.

Trusting the inner voice is almost never a single decisive moment. And closing the feeler hatch to decide may lead to clear action, but it always comes at a cost; the loss of the only navigational tool we have.

We live in a world where far too many people go through their day with their hatches closed. We live by planning, we are guided by decisions, we are ruled by judgements. Sometimes our own, more often those of others. A protocol is certainly helpful, but it can put our intuition on death row. Good plans or detailed maps are great reminders, but the navigation itself must be done with sensitive openness. I wouldn't want my doctor to touch me without intuition. In fact, we are better off stopping all attempts at progress before we have found our way back in.

If you agree, then this has a massive impact. It changes the whole character of human endeavour. It dethrones the present kings and queens. It allows every single soul to participate. The leading voice is the inner voice. The loud voice follows and serves. The reality of our world is made up of all the voices. Including those we do not like, do not understand or do not even hear.

Nightwalker taught me that I wasn't a fixed entity. I had changed. What had been out of reach had now come into my sphere, simply because I let it. Something new had become accessible. An eight-song record expanded my experience. It turned out I wasn’t hard shelled. Seek and you will find wasn’t an answer, it was a promise. Intuition is a tool, a gift for navigation. Not just to travel the world of seemingly hard physical matter. The intuitive voice navigates the fluids of love running through. Keep listening.

Love is learned. Sometimes it takes a while...

I know it gives me away as a hopeless romantic, but the lyrics of these eight songs probably planted the seeds of courage and audacity to write on Substack in a tongue not my own. For me English is the language of songs....

The last track on the record is the song of my love for my love....

…she was a flower child when she came into my life...

The rest of this post is for geeks only...

I Believe has a saxophone solo in the middle. And when I was recording my TDK C90 cassette version, the needle got stuck and repeated the same circular groove three times before I gave it a nudge. It added a perfect two bars to the solo and they became part of the song. I always miss the extra beats when I listen to it now.

The combination of songwriting and incredible musicians has kept me in awe for over forty years. Towards the end Santa Rosa has a break in that complex guitar and Rhodes line that I (as a drummer) practised for ages and never got right. Vinnie Colaiuta was one of those drummers I admired but was in a different league. He is also frustratingly good on Joni Mitchell's 'Wild things run fast'.

One of the things Spotify lacks (among a long list of other 'slightly' disrespectful shortcomings) is credits. I want to know who worked on the things I care about. Studying the sleeve of a record to get to know the writers, musicians, engineers and sometimes production histories makes visible the universe of relationships hidden in every recording. And it leads to discovery. Bernie Grundman was the mastering engineer on Nightwalker. How wonderful it would be to click on his name and see all the records he worked on. Aja by Steely Dan, for example, and then look at the credits and see that Michael Omartian played piano on the title track. Only to discover this guy is also responsible for the sound of Kenny Rankin’s hugely underrated...well you get it, one thing leads to another. Because I am not sure who Algo is, but his rhythm sucks most of the time.....

I gravitate to Gino’s older stuff, like Brother to Brother and less to his mainstream attempts at pop. One of the three occasions I saw him perform was in the Dutch rehearsal studios of the Metropole Orchestra. Hearing this technically flawless singer up close, backed up by several dozens of Europe’s best was an unforgettable treat.

One of his albums not on Spotify is Yonder Tree, it has several jewels. For example this lyrical tune which also needs some getting used to. It has a similar rapid crescendo, crazy difficult odd meter drums, it challenges the three octave range of his voice and is a showcase of visual writing:

Hail to the shaman and his cardboard drum and the riffraff dancing in the sun
I sing for thee
Praise to the ugly and the dispossessed and the genius born of the viper's nest
You have set me free
Hey, you cranks and you clowns with your heads hanging down
I bring good tidings to you
For all the talent that he has Jehovah don't play jazz like the devil do

See the rose sprung from the heap of dung
The shafthorse hot and heavy hung shamelessly
Check the star dust oozing in the mud on its pilgrimage to flesh and blood
Now ain't that you and me
Hey, you Shakespeares in rags little heretics and hags
To thine own self be true
Well, he may be beautiful and king but Jehovah he don't swing like the devil do

Birdman, Birdman, what's the word, man
Into the night we go
Billie, Billie, knock me silly
Sing to me soft and low
Save me from losing my soul to a heaven as cold as ice
I'd sooner be a free man in hell than a prisoner in paradise

So I toot my toot for the man with root
Hey, fifer on the E-flat flute play on, play on
All you sinners and you infidels you you artful madmen bound for hell
Come sing along
Come on, you potty-trained saints spouting' isms and ain'ts
Dig the poetry my man
Well all deference to his throne
Gabriel he don't play no saxophone like Coltrane can…

Youtube Gino Vannelli ‘Jehova and all that jazz’

Let me know if you have a ‘special’ album of your own!