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Album Savings: £2.35 compared to buying all songs
- Original Release Date: 25 Nov 2005
- Format - Music: MP3
- Compatible with MP3 Players (including with iPod®), iTunes, Windows Media Player
- Also available in CD Format
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| Song Title | Artist | Time | Price | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Play | 1. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - 1. Tramp with Orchestra (string quartet) | The Hampton String Quartet | 27:08 | £3.39 | ||
| Play | 2. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - 2. Tramp with Orchestra (low strings) | Orchestra | 15:16 | £1.89 | ||
| Play | 3. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - 3. Tramp with Orchestra (no strings) | Orchestra | 4:48 | £0.79 | ||
| Play | 4. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - 4. Tramp with Orchestra (full strings) | Orchestra | 6:06 | £0.79 | ||
| Play | 5. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - 5. Tramp and Tom Waits with full Orchestra | Tom Waits | 19:38 | £2.59 | ||
| Play | 6. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet - 6. Coda: Tom Waits with High Strings | Tom Waits | 1:47 | £0.39 |
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
45 of 46 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Rarely, very rarely, one comes across a piece of music so moving, so powerful, that it causes a slight but permanent shift in the way you look at life. The last time it happened to me was listening to a performance of Duruflé's Requiem in the chapel of St John's College, Cambridge, on Remembrance Sunday. Years passed without anything touching the heart to quite such an extent - until my wife played me "Jesus' Blood". She had heard it on her car radio and had to pull over for a few minutes to recover.
It penetrates the soul like a hammer drill. Even in isolation the old tramp's voice, its frailty bolstered by his simple faith, is enough to snap the heartstrings. Add the wonderfully sympathetic Gavin Bryars orchestration, sometimes extremely simple, other times rich and lush, and you have a the most unlikely blend of vocal line and harmonic backing that fixes you in the strangest way. It is a musical and lyrical match with a dimension that you can see and feel, yet is impossible to describe in words alone. The use of suspensions and surprise cadences over the tramp's humble hymn tune are certainly part of the magic. It is so profoundly involving that you soon give up trying to understand what's going on and just let the music take you to places you've never been before.
Tom Waits' gravelly vocal contribution has been criticised as an intrusion, but I don't find it so. Since the piece is already so full of visual imagery, I quickly found myself imagining him as the Victorian gravedigger come to take the old tramp away, and then he made sense.
Amazon's US-based site contains many more reviews than there are here, nearly all wildly enthusiastic about the piece but with a few who seem to loathe it. How anyone could find "Jesus blood" anything but brilliantly imaginative and intensely moving beats me. But that's human life. And human life is what this piece is all about.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This piece really is a life-changing experience. A minimalist work of epic proportions, it uses as its main subject a loop of a old tramp's simple song of faith, combining it with a shifting, kaleidoscopic set of accompaniments to produce a curiously moving yet uplifting piece. Be warned - this is not for everyone; it will be too long for some, while others will dismiss it as too repetitive. But if you're like me, after a few minutes you won't be able to stop listening (I stayed glued to the spot for the full hour and a quarter), and you won't want it to end. This is one of very few pieces which has moved me almost to tears. Astonishing.
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Gavin Bryars' premise is simple and yet extremely effective. He made a loop of a homeless man, a tramp, singing an innocent childlike religious ditty, and created a minimalist symphony around it. The old man keeps singing the same verse throughout the 74 odd minutes, over and over, while the backing orchestra accompanies as a quartet, with strings, with horns, with no strings, and other variations. At the climax, the old man is joined by Tom Waits, who has made a career out of being a counterfeit wino. Waits initially seems like the perfect choice of accompaniment to the old man, his voice gravely and sad at times, but then booming and strong; never do I believe that Waits has anything to worry about, and certainly does not need the help of Jesus. The old man however is sad, melancholy, nostalgic, and finally, hopeless; by the end of the recording he sounds like a defeated man, someone in desperate need of help, a child (and yet the listener knows that no help is coming, ever). While Waits accompaniment initially sounds like a good idea, and I think this was what drew me to this recording in the first instance, I was left wondering whether the recording would have been better, maybe less theatrical and more real, without him.
This is a beautiful recording, if somewhat overlong. Bryars has taken 20 seconds of recorded material, almost ambient in the way it was captured, and spun a deeply moving piece of music around it. This is not easy listening; do not put this on in the background as you cook. This requires you to sit down and listen. As such its unlikely to be played very often, but on those odd occasions, when its raining outside, you are alone, and you wish to drift into a world of melancholy for an hour or so, this is a fine portal.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Indispensible
From Philip Glass's sadly now defunct Point Music label comes the definitive recording of Bryars' finest work. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Mr. Warren M. Fisher
haunting
It's weird, its repetitive, you can't describe it without sounding strange. But it is emotive, it is great background music and it helps you concentrate. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Peter Hammond
Pretentious and awful
Having been a massive Tom Waits fan, I bought this on the back of the reviews on Amazon but I wish I'd been a bit more circumspect. This is real garbage. Read more
Published on 23 Sep 2009 by Neil Hodge
Don't mistake Tom waits for anything
What has he to do on this wonderful record?
He's just pretending to be down and out.He's kitsch.Manie'! Read more
He's just pretending to be down and out.He's kitsch.Manie'! Read more
Published on 14 Aug 2007 by RATZO
Minimalism for listeners who loathe minimalism
As a classical music listener who hates the music of Glass, Adams etc, as being puerile, this cd is an exception. Read more
Published on 24 July 2007 by Geoffrey Bellamy
mesmerising
this is a simply spellbinding piece of work.i just happened to tune into radio 3 during late junction and caught the last ten minuits or so, and it so moved me it cant be put into... Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2005 by anthony mills
Puzzlement to wonderment on one piece of plastic
Starts off with croaky old 50's tramp and then teases its way up into a multi-layered heart rending composition which demands repeated listening. Read more
Published on 13 July 2001
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