15
And his taste was 40s big-band jazz. The sound of those voices on the
Ray Conniff records I thought was superb. I was about nine or ten at
this point. And every morning, before I went to school, I'd put one of
those records on. I remember these winter mornings, hearing these
amazingly lush, soft, silky voices, and I thought it was a beautiful
sound.
8
Again, Eno was fascinated by the sound itself, having at this point no historical or cultural
context in which to place such music: "I was just interested in it, for some reason. I didn't
know where it came from or what jazz was."
9
The Enos also had a player piano, which Eno
"absolutely loved" and "played all the time. All we had were like old hymns, like `Jerusalem'
and so on, which I thought were beautiful. And I think that the kind of melancholy quality of
those is something that's actually persisted in anything I've done since."
10
Traces of all of these early musical influences show up in Eno's own published musical out-
put, which begins about a decade later. The sense of strangeness resulting from contextless-
ness is something he has explicitly endeavored to capture in most of his music. Echoes of
early rhythm and blues and rock'n'roll turn up in the "idiot energy" (the phrase is Eno's) of
some of the songs on his solo albums of the early 1970s songs which occasionally borrow
specific instrumental textures from music of the 1950s, whose generally economical and
transparent arrangements Eno attempted to emulate. The fascination with Afro-American
rhythms is most clearly marked in his 1981 collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the
Bush of Ghosts, though evident elsewhere as well. What Eno calls the "lush, soft, silky qual-
ity" that he admired in the Ray Conniff Singers is a near-constant feature in his ambient mu-
sic, finding its most literal expression in the electronically treated vocals of Music for Air-
ports. And finally, the "melancholy" strains of the player piano hymns resonate particularly
strongly in several of Eno's ambient synthesizer pieces which resemble grand, textless, dia-
tonic organ hymns.
Among his influences from the popular music world of the 1960s, Eno has singled out for
special mention the unique New York band the Velvet Underground and the prototypical Brit-
ish rock band the Who. By this time, Eno's conceptual world would have expanded to the
point of having more of a context in which to place the music, and in the case of the Velvet
Underground, context is all-important, since they were directly associated with the pop art
movement of Andy Warhol, who used them to provide the music for his moveable multi-
media show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, in 1965. Context was also important for the
Who, who began as heroes of the Mod scene in England and were among the first to create
concept albums, a development that culminated in their rock opera of 1969, Tommy. Both
bands were known for their self-conscious primitivism, and they showed Eno "that it was
possible to occupy an area between fine art sensibility and popular art, and have the ambiguity
work."
11
More specifically, Eno dreamed of a blend of music that would utilize the Who's and
8
Tannenbaum, "Cage and Eno," 67. In another interview Eno cited Jack Teagarden as an ex-
ample of the kind of big-band jazz he heard from his uncle's collection. Loder, "Eno," 27.
9
Loder, "Eno," 26.
10
Loder, "Eno," 26.
11
Larry Kelp, "Brian Eno: Making Fourth World Music in Record Studio," Oakland Tribune,
11 Feb. 1980, C-7.