Picture: Nicky J. Sims/Redferns
Look within the house supplied for feedback on Elvis Costello’s report card, and also you’re positive to see the phrase “plays well with others.” As singular a stylist as he’s, Costello has at all times sought intriguing collaborators and had the musical savvy to make these partnerships work.
Down via the many years, Costello has entered into tasks with top-tier artists from the realms of pop, classical, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and extra. A few of these recordings are celebrated as milestones, and others are secret gems.
Strings and issues
The primary full collaboration Elvis ever launched was the soundtrack to G.B.H., a 1991 BBC TV drama collection that featured Monty Python’s Michael Palin in a uncommon non-comedic function. Costello composed the music in partnership with Richard Harvey, who initially earned consideration as the primary man to play crumhorn in a rock band (Seventies neo-Renaissance proggers Gryphon) and went on to do scads of soundtrack work.
Whether or not Costello hadn’t but marshaled the boldness to impose his personal fashion on the proceedings (unlikely) or he simply fancied doing one thing utterly outdoors the rock/pop realm for a change, there’s nary a hint of rock to be discovered within the G.B.H. music, which was all orchestrated by Harvey. Elvis will need to have gotten a cost out of it, as a result of 4 years later, the pair reunited to attain the collection Jake’s Progress. However this time, one piece, “Grave Dance,” bears a touch of Costello’s different life, that includes his guitar and The Sights’ Pete Thomas on drums.
Between his Harvey tasks, Elvis crafted an bold album with The Brodsky Quartet, a British string quartet that had already been working for about 20 years, concentrating on normal classical repertoire. With Costello’s more and more agile vocals and the quartet’s vivid traces as the one instrumentation, 1993’s The Juliet Letters is an exciting mixture of chamber orchestrations with lyrics based mostly on the thought of letters written to Shakespeare’s Juliet Capulet.
In 2001, Costello would carry one other classical artist into his orbit, however with completely totally different intentions. Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter turned recognized within the 90s for her work in opera and lieder, however on the Costello-produced For the Stars, she lends her luminous pipes to nominal pop songs. With accompanists together with Elvis and his right-hand man Steve Nieve on keyboards, she tackles a principally new batch of Costello songs in addition to tunes by the likes of The Beatles, Tom Waits, The Seaside Boys, and Ron Sexsmith.
Jazz and old-school pop
Like most British rockers of his technology, Elvis Costello might need ended up promoting sneakers if not for the affect of American music. Rising up with a father who was a gigging jazz singer, he at all times had jazz in his blood. As early as 1982’s Imperial Bed room, he was crooning self-penned jazz tunes like “Almost Blue,” a track later coated by Chet Baker.
So, Costello’s pairing with jazz guitar trailblazer Invoice Frisell shouldn’t have appeared like such a stretch when the 2 joined forces for a set on the Costello-curated 1995 Meltdown pageant in London. The duo’s efficiency was documented on the EP Deep Useless Blue, which mixed Frisell’s guitar noir with Elvis’s smokey pipes for stripped-down, jazzed-up takes on Charles Mingus’s “Weird Nightmare,” the present tune “Gigi,” just a few Costello compositions, and a brand new tune the pair wrote collectively.
Elvis’s preoccupation with the fashionable, quirky pop tunes of Burt Bacharach and Hal David was such that as early as 1977, when his friends had been neck-deep in punk, he was performing a rocked-up model of their traditional “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” as heard on the live performance album Stay Stiffs. However in 1995, Costello acquired the prospect of a lifetime when fortune aligned his path with that of Bacharach himself.
By means of the magic of Hollywood, Elvis had the chance to write down a track with Bacharach for the movie Grace of My Coronary heart, which adopted the profession of a Carole King-like character performed by Ileana Douglas. They got here up with the heart-shattering “God Give Me Strength,” finally coated by all people from Bette Midler to Charles Lloyd.
Emboldened by this triumph, Costello and Bacharach determined to do a whole album collectively. In contrast to their first co-writing expertise, which concerned sharing concepts via faxes and cellphone messages, they got here head to head to write down a brand new batch of songs. The fruit of the partnership was 1998’s Painted from Reminiscence, a lush, velvety batch of tunes that take the sound Bacharach established on his 60s smashes for Dionne Warwick someplace new however timeless. Confronted with the problem of fronting Bacharach’s flawless preparations, Costello upped his vocal sport, bringing extra precision and fervour to his supply and, at instances, even coming off like an old-school belter.
On tracks just like the slinky “Toledo,” the sad “This House Is Empty Now,” and the plush “The Sweetest Punch” (which nearly makes heartbreak sound pleasurable), Costello and Bacharach crafted the sort of elegant grownup pop that hadn’t been heard since Burt and Hal’s preliminary run. The album made the largest affect of any of Costello’s collaborative releases. “I Still Have That Other Girl” even received a Grammy for Finest Pop Collaboration with Vocals.
As if to underline the endurance of Painted from Reminiscence even additional, in 1999, Invoice Frisell reentered the Costelloverse to place out The Sweetest Punch, adapting every of the Costello/Bacharach tunes in an instrumental jazz mode with hotshots like trumpeter Don Byron and drummer Blade. Cassandra Wilson popped up for a few visitor vocal spots, as did Elvis himself.
Reaching out for the roots
In 2005, within the wake of the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans, Elvis Costello collaborated with Crescent Metropolis R&B large Allen Toussaint on The River in Reverse. That they had labored collectively briefly a few instances earlier than. However after assembly up in New York when Toussaint fled the devastation of Katrina, they began cooking up a challenge that will symbolize a ray of positivity for Toussaint’s badly wounded hometown.
Costello sang some Toussaint-penned killers from the previous, and the 2 wrote a batch of latest tunes to enhance them. As Costello instructed Inside Entertainment’s Nicholas Jennings, “I wanted to introduce Allen’s compositional voice first on the record, for people who didn’t know his writing,” including, “There’s the irony that Allen’s songs like ‘Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?’ and ‘Freedom for the Stallion’ have found their moment as much now as when they were written.”
In 2013, Costello reached out for some Roots connections of a special type. Elvis first labored with hip-hop/funk heavyweights The Roots once they backed him as the home band for Late Evening with Jimmy Fallon in 2009. After enjoying collectively on the present just a few instances and discovering their musical mindsets meshed effectively, they determined to make an album collectively. Sensible Up Ghost does what any profitable collaboration ought to, bringing each artists someplace they wouldn’t have ended up on their very own.
On the 2022 EP The Resurrection of Rust, Elvis dug additional into his roots than ever. Within the early 70s, he and Alan Mayes had been a longhaired pub-rock duo known as Rusty. In a transfer not in contrast to Tom Petty’s 2007 revival of his pre-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch, Costello reunited with Mayes to make the Rusty report that by no means occurred. An natural mix of people, nation, and rock flavors, the EP options covers of tunes by Nick Lowe, outlaw nation cult hero Jim Ford, and Neil Younger, plus a few authentic tunes that date again to the duo’s early days.
For many artists, the tasks talked about right here may have constituted a whole catalog. However for the hyper-prolific Costello, they had been simply temporary busman’s holidays within the midst of a launch fee that will make the Energizer bunny look like a slacker. Nonetheless, these titanic team-ups expanded Costello’s already eclectic horizons and even added a few profession peaks alongside the way in which.
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