Digging up a treasury of pirate songs

LEERING, full of menace and the threat of pain, “15 Men on a Dead Man’s Chest” is arguably the most famous pirate song ever committed to tape (and thanks to its refrain, “Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” it also ranks among the more pro-booze sing-alongs in the children’s section of the music store).

But as a genre, pirate music remains obscure even by musicologists’ standards. To spotlight a genre that has all but disappeared -- as well as cannily promote their summer blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” -- Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski commissioned an expansive compendium of such seafarer music, “Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys,” due Aug. 22 on Anti- Records. Its 43 tracks include contributions from Sting, Bono, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Loudon Wainwright III, Van Dyke Parks and Bryan Ferry among an eclectic roster.

“It’s really an unexplored area of folk music,” says Hal Willner, the compilation’s producer. “If you’re gonna go chasing the roots of real rock ‘n’ roll, this was emotion at its rawest. The original punk music.”

Willner, who has assembled tribute albums to Charles Mingus, Nino Rota and Kurt Weill, trawled rare record stores, EBay and sheet-music archives in search of his sunken treasure, which eventually totaled some 400 songs. Then he broke them down into different groupings.

“There are different kinds of pirate music,” he says. “Sea chanteys are call-and-response work songs -- they’d be doing stuff like hauling up chains all day. People also tended to do songs about life at sea. And there were stories of pirates. I called them ‘pirate ballads.’ ”

Recording took place in London, Dublin, New York and Los Angeles with Willner enlisting old friends (including Bono and Ferry) and such new collaborators as John C. Reilly (an actor with a sideline in music who appears on two tracks) whom Willner met while working as music supervisor on the summer movie comedy “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” And despite the obvious opportunity to do up the pirate shtick, the producer decided to play it straight.

“I tried to keep ‘funny’ out of it,” Willner says. “I didn’t want to hear any ‘aaarrrgh’-ing on the record.”

Throughout, he kept an open dialogue with Verbinski and Depp, who called Willner speaking in his “Pirates” character Capt. Jack Sparrow’s slurred English brogue.

“I always heard Johnny Depp was a method actor,” he says. “He got on the phone as that character once or twice. He sent me a number of e-mails signed ‘Captain Jack.’ ”

A second “Rogue’s Gallery” (not affiliated with “Pirates of the Caribbean” or its distributor, Disney) is in the offing for next spring with tracks expected from Keith Richards and Tom Waits. “I could have made 12 volumes of this stuff,” Willner says. “Maybe we all wanted to be pirates when we were kids.”

His style of reggae is still raging

SUMMER idyll and reggae riddims go together like barbecue and beer. So perhaps it’s fitting that the recent release of seminal Jamaican producer King Jammy’s compilation “King at the Controls” (which spans his hits from 1985 to ‘89) provides a kind of primer on what has become the de facto sound of the season: bass-heavy, irresistibly danceable digital reggae.

Before 1985, live instrumentation and multipiece backing bands were the genre’s one and only sound. Everything changed that year when King Jammy entered a Kingston studio with Wayne Smith and a cheapo battery-operated Casio keyboard to hammer out “Sleng Teng,” the hypnotically rhythmic single that would revolutionize reggae.

“I was thinking about the future,” King Jammy explains. “This music had been going on for a long time. So we needed a change for the digital era.”

Flash forward 20 years. The digital sound -- as used by Sean Paul, Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, T.O.K. and others -- has largely supplanted live instruments, dominating the reggae charts, influencing hip-hop and pop performers like Rihanna.

King Jammy is philosophical about his continued influence on the pop charts as embodied by Damien “Junior Gong” Marley (his “Welcome to Jamrock” recycles the King Jammy-produced “World A Reggae”) and a certain Orange County pop-ska quartet.

“I love No Doubt music,” the producer says. “They have their own style of reggae music. But reggae is reggae. We, the Jamaican producers, pioneered the thing. So if somebody takes it somewhere else, it doesn’t

matter to me. As long as it’s going.”

Gill’s project

just kept growing

WHY release one album when four CDs will do?

That seems to be the reasoning behind country superstar Vince Gill’s October release, “These Days” -- what an MCA Records news announcement breathlessly touts as an “artistic tour de force” and “an unmatched outpouring of virtuosity and energy.”

Encompassing country, bluegrass, jazz and rock, the self-produced four-CD, 43-song set features guest appearances by Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall, Gretchen Wilson and Lee Ann Womack, among others.

“I started looking at all these songs I had and going, ‘Shoot, I want to record that song, and I want to record that song,’ ” Gill says in the press release. “I just kept checking with the other musicians to see if they were available. I had no deadlines, no rules or anything like that.”