696 Tom Waits - Closing Time (1973)

Studio Album - Jazz/Folk

About the Act:

Tom Waits is an American Blues/Jazz/Experimental singer/songwriter/musician. 

He started out as Jazz and morphed into more blues/folk with some decided "experimental" elements. He has created a kind of hobo/beat poet persona. He has been incredibly successful worldwide. He has also worked as an actor. Since his first album in 1973, he has had 16 more.

About the Album:

This was Tom's first album.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

As a reviewer, I feel like I am often asking myself what genre music is. This is because I am going to need to describe it, and it's easier to describe if you have words. I mean I could go into detail about notes and rhythms, and tunes and harmony and instrumentation, and traditions, and scenes and expectations, or I could say "it's jazz". It's a bit like describing some food, and saying it has flour, eggs, sugar, marge and then how it's made or just saying "it's cake".

Record labels also like genres, it helps them sell the music, because it sets up expectations. I guess this is similar to being in a café and ordering cake, you have some sort of idea what it might be. If you order cake and you get soup, you might be confused, and unhappy.

Musicians don't always care if their music is cake or biscuit or flapjack, or soup, they just want to make something good. Some of the most notable musicians are those that span those genre descriptions. This album is a bit like that. To use genre terms, it's kind of Jazz, kind of Folk, kind of Country and kind of Blues, but although it's varied, it's not disparate, or at least not very. Sometimes the term Americana is used as an umbrella term. It was only after I had thought about this pretentious introduction, that I found out that Tom and his producer were working at cross purposes. Tom wanted to make a Jazz album, and the producer wanted to make a Folk album. The result is a bit of both, and it's tasty. 

Let's do some description. This is a mostly mellow album, not many tracks have strong beats, and some have no percussion at all. They are a laconic and laid-back meander through various subjects like seeing an old love again, or making a connection with somebody, or ice cream vans (although I suspect that's a metaphor). The instrumentation is mostly folky, with an upright bass, and piano, and sometimes trumpets, which is partly where the jazz feel comes to the fore. It's musically fairly simple but rich and sophisticated in a black-polo-necked-jumper kind of way, and actually in production reminds me of much later albums, around 2000 onwards that use stripped-back warm production to sound like this.

And I liked it. It's evocative and effective and a great album for listening to while driving country roads in the dark.

7.8/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/67F2ya9fonXH0jVVgLa7sb

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTMN6OMDTnKnOXV1DY-ZbUqiCCtFCrA6a

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_Time_(album)