Welcome to the TV Thread.
I’m guest hosting this week to talk to you about about Night Music, a special show that ran in the late 1980s and featured the most amazing musical guests. Not a show dedicated to chart toppers but to the living legends of the era. A show that had featured avant-garde luminaries like John Zorn and Kronos Quartet along with more crowd friendly legends like Mavis Staples and Dizzy Gillespie. It’s a show that I had heard about for years without ever seeing it but when YouTube came along, I finally got to catch some clips and experience bits and pieces of the show and finally during lockdown, I got to really dive in deep and sought out full episodes and binged the show properly.
Night Music as it’s commonly known now didn’t begin its life under that title. When it first aired on October 3, 1988 and for the entirety of it’s first season, it was known as Sunday Night. NBC’s idea was to create a sister show for Saturday Night Live that would air the following night hence the simple title of Sunday Night (SNL was also originally simply titled Saturday Night). This show would essentially invert the progenitor’s formula. Instead of being a comedy show that dedicated a small portion of it’s runtime to musical guests, Sunday Night would primarily be about musical guests and only feature a light sprinkling of comedy.
To anchor this show, NBC brought in two musician-hosts: Jazz Saxophonist David Sanborn and Jools Holland, keyboardist for the band Squeeze. Sanborn was essentially the show’s straight man while Jools Holland was relied on to provide most of the show’s comedy. The musical guests were an eclectic mix but because the budget was limited, the show mostly avoided artists at the height of their stardom but was densely packed with luminaries. Legends such as Marianne Faithfull, Curtis Mayfield, and Betty Carter were among the first season guests as well as younger but slightly left of center acts such as The Roches, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and The Lounge Lizards. The show would also weave in some archival footage from the likes of Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald.
It didn’t take long for Sunday Night to start to feel like David Sanborn’s show. The show’s original house band featured keyboardist Philip Saisse, guitarist Hirram Bullock and drummer Omar Hakim under the direction of bassist Marcus Miller but Sanborn was featured so frequently that he felt like the band’s fifth member and a key driver in the show’s musical direction. This was of course in addition to being the main host. Meanwhile, Holland who was featured much more infrequently as a musician was saddled with a thankless comic relief role in a show that clearly did not genuinely require a comedic element. It was an ungrateful task that tended to interrupt the show’s natural flow and made him feel superfluous. Holland was at his best when he could simply show off his piano chops like when he performed a piano duet with the legendary Dr. John.
All the performances captured the show are of value, many of the artists featured were infrequently featured on the television of the era but where the show really shone was in its willingness to get bold in its programming and not only feature the musical guests but combine them in interesting ways. One of the performances from the first season that’s become emblematic is the episode 19 performance where the saxophone colossus himself, Sonny Rollins, accompanied Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen in a performance of the latter’s Who By Fire. For my money, Leonard Cohen’s music has never sounded better than in this exact moment.
For it’s second season, the show had a new name Michelob Presents Night Music or more informally, Night Music which is how the show is now commonly remembered and referenced today. The title wasn’t the only thing that changes. Most significantly, Jools Holland was not retained with David Sanborn taking on sole hosting duties. Don’t feel too bad for Holland though. His experience on Sunday Night, gave him the impetus to create a musical variety show of his own. Launching in 1992, Later… With Jools Holland still airs on the BBC to this day. Not a bad way to land on your feet.
Other changes to the show were ditching the archival footage which always felt like filler on a show so focused on live performance and broadening the palette in terms of the artist bookings. The show now had a title sponsor, Michelob who saw the show as a natural extension of their then ubiquitous The Night Belongs to Michelob campaign, a campaign that had incorporated musicians such as Phil Collins (both solo and with Genesis), Roger Daltrey, Steve Winwood and most relevant for our purposes Eric Clapton, an artist whose participation in the show was financed by the beer commercial as an extension of it’s ad campaign featuring the later’s After Midnight.
Rest assured however that despite Clapton’s appearance, the show did not surrender it’s guest roster to the kind dad rock acts that dominated the Michelob campaign. While there was definitely more rock content, the show had its ear to the ground and incorporated acts from the nascent alternative scene such as The Pixies and The Red Hot Chili Peppers who co-mingled with an even more diverse group of artists including avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galas, Congolese singer Papa Wemba and jazz luminaries such as Abbey Lincoln, Pharoh Sanders and even the legendary prince of darkness himself, Miles Davis. There was more to the show however than simply having a great roster of guests. It also had a tremendous free sprit as exemplified by a clip where Sonic Youth, Sanborn, the house band and even the Indigo Girls collaborate on a cover of Iggy Pop’s I Want to be Your Dog.
Sunday Night / Night Music aired it’s last episode in April of 1990. It has never been released on physical media. Presumedly, the show would be a licensing nightmare and the costs too prohibitive for a show that never rose above cult status but since the show aired during the glory day of the VCR, tapers have kept the show alive. You can find many clips as well as entire episodes online. Even the Debbie Harry episode (202), the one that inspired the most copyright strikes and felt like the show’s Eldorado can, as time of this writing, be found on YouTube. It’s not a complete recording but it’s better than what was available in 2020 when I was binging the show.
The videos online seem to come from multiple different sources as the quality varies, some of the episodes have commercials edited out, some don’t. During lockdown, when I felt deep into the rabbit hole, I found myself comparing different uploads of key peformances to determine which was of better quality (or more accurately least bad quality since we are talking about VCR recordings here). It was a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole. At the time, I was intending to prepare something for this site’s Late to the Party feature but eventually I just moved on without completing the project so I’m grateful for today’s opportunity to finally make something of this idea and talk about this legendary show.
Today’s prompt is: What is your favourite music-centric TV show?