Sold By Volume

My Jazz Weekend

2012-01-29T22:30:00.013-05:00

I have all these records and from time to time I feel I should justify that by listening to them. Accordingly, I attacked the jazz shelf, reaching not for the canon, but rather for the sentimental favorites culled from the rather unstructured way one found about things in the pre-internet era with the limited pocket money of a teenager.

First up was Weather Report's Tale Spinnin'. I imagine there are purists and rejecters of "fusion" who won't have much to do with them, and their sole hit ("Birdland" from 1977's Heavy Weather) does feel a bit gimmicky. However, on this record, the sheer exuberance of the playing (particularly of trap drummer Leon "Ndugu" Chancler, poached from a Santana session at the studio next door) and the rhythmic complexity, far from any plodding funk moves, is something I've always found kind of dazzling. Also I think the integration of the electronic sounds with the more conventional jazz instrumentation puts it on the same shelf with Herbie Hancock's landmark Sextant.

Following that was Return to Forever’s Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy. I don't know if the science fiction title reflected Chick Corea's Scientology involvement but to a kid who read nothing but Michael Moorcock for a year, LP titles like that were not off-putting. I have always considered the record itself their own perfect fusion moment. Falling between the Brazilian Flora Purim and Joe Farrell phase of Light as a Feather (which I love) and the "progressively" more noodle-y releases of the Al Di Meola era, this one owes a lot to the comparatively unsung guitarist Bill Connors. Hyper-complex rhythms played at hyper-speed, timbres continually exploding with ring modulation and wah-wah – I wouldn’t begin to know how to sell someone on this any further, but have never tired of it myself.

I should think mention of The Paul Winter Consort must mostly evoke yawns and slight shivers of discomfort, as visions of comfortably Episcopalian New Age events at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Saving The Whales, present themselves. I can't help you with that, but will periodically return to "Africanus Brasileiras" which closes the group's 1970 live album Road where the pan-cultural stylistics implicit in the song title do not result in some kind of lumpy porridge; there's a lilting intro, derived from a Ugandan folk melody, which leads into a roof-raising take on Luis Gonzaga's "Asa Branca" with everyone in the group singing harmony. The result quite transcends the original, itself a lovely and key piece of the north Brazilian forró style, which we can hereby credit Winter with disseminating 20 years before David Byrne.

I have many shelf inches of 1950s vocal records of jazz standards and can't always reach past them for the more esoteric stuff. Last night, perennial favorite June Christy's first solo LP (after her Stan Kenton years), Something Cool (1955; yes, I have the 10" release from the prior year as well) was the perfect way to treat my neighbors, sometime after midnight, to the sound of me hollering along with her takes on "I Should Care", "Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise" , "This Time the Dream's On Me", "I'll Take Romance" and so on. Christy was for me an adult discovery, in part because of my probably not atypical impatience as a young person with the perceived corniness of standards. However, these are melodies I love and they carved formative neural grooves, owing to the up-tempo, instrumental be-bop versions, sixteenth notes overflowing, through which I first discovered them all (working my way back to actual country music via the Flying Burrito Brothers and Grateful Dead along a similar axis). Hearing them actually sung with words, and learning to appreciate the elegance of that style of lyric writing has been a fantastic benefit, unforeseeable at the time.

The June Christy record (to my surprise, as I glance at the credits) has a song called "Lonely House", co-written by Langston Hughes and Kurt Weill. Now I imagine I know everything, especially about mid-20th century America, but could certainly not have told you those two collaborated (look up the somewhat forgotten Broadway musical Street Scene for more info!). This morning’s breakfast platter was the title track from Gary Bartz's I've Known Rivers and Other Bodies , which has lyrics adapted from one of Langston Hughes' best-known poems. Bartz is not that polished a singer which lends the whole thing a quality I admire. The record is from the double-LP Live at 1973 Montreux series that also gave us McCoy Tyner's superb Enlightenment; this is music that made me what I am and now it may be slightly rubbing off on you!

After listening to that, I briefly addressed Oregon, continuing the Paul Winter theme. They have also perhaps not aged that well, and interestingly the track I return to most frequently, Canyon Song from the record Distant Hills, is uncharacteristic because Colin Walcott is playing a drum set instead of his customary tabla drums - so they’re kind of trying to rock out with 12-string acoustic guitar, acoustic bass and oboe, which gives it a charm I've never quite managed to summarize – listen for yourself.

Finally, as laundry reared its dreary head, I put on Cannonball Adderley's Things Are Getting Better, from 1958. I've never quite "gotten" jazz vibraphone (Milt Jackson on this one) but I consider that my failing. Adderley's tart alto is supported by Art Blakey, who automatically makes a record good, and some characteristically fine piano from Wynton Kelly. This is a thrift store find of the past decade, but the 1970s association is with NRBQ's second album, Scraps, on which they do a medley of the title track from this record and the Mercer-Allen 1944 standard "Accentuate The Positive" - nice to finally understand everything that was going on in Terry Adams' head at the time.

Air Above Mountains

2010-11-10T11:29:00.003-05:00

One of my formative musical experiences was seeing a Cecil Taylor solo piano performance when I was 17 (in Helsinki,no less!). There was no possibility of following individual notes or harmonies in the deluge coming out of the piano - instead it seemed to call for a new way of listening, something like seeing the fractal patterns of coastline seemingly too irregular to make sense of from a closer vantage point. Currently recreating the experience by listening to the two-part Air Above Mountains, recorded around that time. I've been on Taylor binge the past few days, including such famous ensemble works as Unit Structures, but something about his solo work provides the real transcendent experience.

Notes on London Review of Books, February 3, 2005 (Volume 27, Number 3)

2010-10-31T15:01:00.004-04:00

Linda Colley on N.A.M Rodger: the superiority of British Sea Power is a mid-19th century construction, not consistently supported by the actual history of the preceding three centuries.

Joyce’s “Stephen Hero” is a reference to “Turpin Hero” – Dick Turpin, a highwaymen and folk-hero, subject of ballads and broadsides, was probably really just a thug.

Context for “Godzilla” - not only were Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh in the Japanese public mind but even more recently, 1954, a boatload of tuna poisoned with radiation by US Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb experiment had been sold in Japan before the hospitalization of its crew with radiation sickness was known. The Emperor himself stopped eating fish.

Emma Richler (daughter of Mordecai) has written two books, Feed My Dead Dogs and Sister Crazy about growing up in a big, eccentric E. Nesbit-styled family. This turns out to be more psychologically complex in real life than in Y.A. novels but the books sound charming all the same.

White Mozambican Mia Coutu, who writes in Portuguese (hence lusophone) sounds well worth reading. The Last Flight of The Flamingo and Sleepwalking Night, at least, have been translated into English.

Mendelssohn a fascinating character, must listen to more of his music. Wagner’s anti-semitism partly originates in personal rivalry with Felix, from whom he (Wagner) stole quite freely.

Documentary film Mondovino is “substantively about the world of wine and taste, but formally it’s skilful agit-prop against the forces of globalisation.” (Steven Shapin)

Alfred Wegener’s 1915 “The Origins of Continents and Oceans” posited the existence of the Pangaea supercontinent which was not commonly accepted until the late 1960s. Also beneath Yellowstone Park is a “supervolcano” whose effects, should it erupt, would be much more cataclysmic than most of the things we worry about. It is 40,000 years overdue for its cyclical eruption.

Comedians and Hoofers

2010-02-24T09:13:00.002-05:00

Rainy February Monday nights are hard to salvage, but all travel should be as painless as a fast 3 train to Bergen Street and the two block walk to Freddy's Backroom. Freddy's is ordinarily a bastion of bar-band rock, but the creative furnace known as Mother Earth (Kyle Clyde and Dylan Hay) moved their base of operations from Port D'Or (their own living room) for one night only. I arrived a bit late, regrettably missing Ramble Tamble (whose name and MySpace tracks both get lots of points for future exploration).

First up (for me) was a trio called Try Cry Try. The lead singer, intriguingly cross-dressed in black leather pants, stiletto heels, halter top, scarf and hairpiece (the latter more of a prop than transformative wardrobe element), has a kind of psychodramatic vocal style (picture someone screaming "don't tell me to calm down!" repeatedly), while the bassist and guitarist, in black and white doom metal face paint, play black and white doom metal, but with a lo-fi edge accentuated by the "drummer", a hand-held cassette player with a vocal mike taped to it. The show climaxed with some smashing of cement blocks and overturned tables, all strobe-lit by artist Jessie Stead.

Following that was "Charlie the Singing Dog" whose name is accurately descriptive - a couple of humans accompanied on singing and hand drum. Charlie sat on a drum stool with a microphone and at the end of his set, he sort of scurried around to all four corners of the stage, as if securing the perimeter.

The old vaudeville admonition that you never want to follow an animal act was put to rest by Mother Earth, whose own psychodrama (more Maya Deren than Artaud) is extraordinary. The two times I've seen the duo, they start at opposite ends of the performance space, and work their way towards each other (using portable amplification devices to make some sounds on the way), ending in a sort of yin-yang clash/reconciliation - a stylized wrestling match, wrapping one another in plastic and so on. One of the most visually striking moments this time was the plastic wrap being stretched between them as they strained about 8 feet apart, like a visual representation of gravitational bonds. They typically end by hustling "offstage" (out of the room) in a whirl.

My other favorite Kyle Clyde performance that I've seen so far was a piece for electric guitar and fluorescent light tubes in which the latter, besides being visually compelling, are used to induce all kinds of hum and feedback in interaction with the guitar, with results quite different from the many other ways of playing the instrument.

Hip and Well Read

2009-09-26T14:57:00.005-04:00

It is no secret that performances attended via advance tickets and weeks of anticipation are often less exciting than those attended on the spur of the moment. As such, the AC/DC show at the Meadowlands center in New Jersey (we'll omit the name of whatever corporation currently owns the arena) on July 31, tickets purchased that day at 5 pm, was more exciting than the one 10 months earlier at Madison Square Garden.

Similarly (though of course there are always other factors) not having been aware that Japan's Yura Yura Teikoku were playing at the Music Hall of Williamsburg until that day (9/18/09) certainly contributed to what an unexpectedly awesome show it proved to be. I have heard a handful of their records but those never had quite the impact as some of their more stylistically highly focused contemporaries (High Rise), so I went with medium expectations and left feeling it was one of the best performances I'd seen in my life (up there with The Ex at CBGB in 1992 and other such obscurities). Set and setting being what they are, I may not succeed in conveying much of the excitement, but I'd urge anyone to see them anytime.

There is a certain loosely defined Japanese power trio aesthetic of the past few decades, many of whose practitioners I have managed to see (the aforementioned High Rise plus Fushitsusha, Minimokoto, Green Milk From the Planet Orange, Overhang Party et al.). Yura Yura Teikoku are on that spectrum, but some of their most thrilling moments were not the psychedelic noise-guitar freakouts but the motorik extended two-chord trance-inducing segments, reminiscent of course of Germany's Neu and some of their latter-day inheritors (e.g. Washington D.C.'s Unrest). At times the guitarist abandoned his instrument and accompanied his keening tenor vocals solely with a pair of maracas, while the rhythm section maintained a tightly wound skeleton. A bass-player of unwavering patience is required to make this kind of thing work, which it did.

Catafalque and Quincunx

2009-06-03T08:37:00.003-04:00

For me and my friends, and presumably others of that approximate generation, an essential part of the mid-70s/mid-teenage quasi-counterculture canon was the illustrated writing of Edward Gorey. Though we may have sensed his linguistically extravagant, at times absurdist, mock-horror was perhaps not precisely a lost continent from the map of early 19th century Gothic literature, I’m not sure we quite realized he was living and writing in New York City at the same time Television and the Patti Smith Group were playing at C.B.G.B. – at the very least he seemed to be some obscure and chronologically displaced pre-War New Englander like H.P. Lovecraft.

In any event, Gorey’s love of arcane words continued to intrigue me for many years as I gradually found out what they all meant, but I somehow missed the derivation of "Amphigorey", with which he titled a pair of collections of his work. Lazily conflating the prefix "amphi-" (meaning "both" or "double") with "anthology" and thinking it a portmanteau word with no other reference, I was surprised recently to find the French word “amphigouri” in the pages of Le Rouge et Le Noir and accepted my Larousse de Poche’s gloss of it as “gibberish”. A week or so later, I immediately stumbled upon it again, in an English translation of Raymond Queneau’s Witch Grass. Thinking the translator might have allowed herself a bit of liberty, I turned to the O.E.D., to find that “amphigouri” and “amphigory” are both accepted in English usage. The derivation is uncertain but perhaps related to “category” and “allegory”.

As for Queneau, his French title is Chiendent (dogtooth). Though "Witch Grass" may be the North American plant name for the exact species which that French name refers to (Dichanthelium boreale), it seems like the pun or multiple meanings of the title could have been echoed in translation with a little less botanical fidelity. How about "Hound's tongue", of the genus Cynoglossum, part of a family which includes wild comfrey, a Native American medicinal plant of uncertain relationship to the old World comfrey (Symphytum officinale), or "horehound" (brothels are a persistent theme in the book), a folk term for a flowering plant of the Lamiaceae family, which includes mint?

Peripatetic

2009-06-01T23:53:00.003-04:00

On a recent fine May midday, I set out to walk a pleasant two miles to Mazzotti Music to pick up a fixed guitar amp and found the usual plethora of books that seem to line my path everywhere. To begin with, a street giveaway carton yielded up four volumes of legendary early 70s Detroit ghetto naturalist Donald Goines. Whether I need to read all four remains to be seen - Daddy Cool went down fast like the kind of snack food that leaves you feeling a bit queasy.

A block party in Park Slope provided an exemplar of a somewhat different African-American literary aesthetic, Wanda Coleman, whose Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968-1986 was published by Black Sparrow Press, so you know (if you are familiar with their work) what a distinctive look the book has. Coleman's curriculum vita (I see from the credits) includes a stint with Anna Halprin's Dancers' Workshop, so you might further connect the dots with having seen Daria Martin's Minotaur, a film of a Halprin-choreographed duet, when it was showing at The New Museum earlier this spring.

Strolling around street fairs in Brooklyn, I have found, gives you a reasonable chance of seeing The Gowanus Wildcats; Saturday was my second sighting. They are a drill team (not step dancers, as they always remind you), 10 early teenage girls from a public housing project, whose level of precision is perhaps more folk art than West Point, but all the more engaging for it (here's a segment).

Finally, guitar amplifier retrieved and bánh mì sandwich consumed, I headed off to the Cake Shop for an evening of what Time Out sort of touted as hipster metal. I got there in time for Darsombra, a one-man band from Baltimore. With 8-string bass, guitar, a vocal mike and about 30 effects pedals, Brian Daniloski (barefoot on his own Persian rug) creates huge throbbing waves of winedark sound that could pretty much pass for electronic music without the little bit of doom-metal subculture trappings. The set was perfectly paced and timed – quite exciting.

Philadelphia's Stinking Lizaveta followed – I have seen them a handful of times and felt respectful but never quite enthralled. On this occasion, whatever those inhibitions were got thrown to the wind and I felt, at least for the duration of their set, like they were the best band I'd ever seen, a form of selective amnesia that often affects for me some subset of a particularly good show, but doesn't always sustain itself to coming home and writing about it. Seismic exuberance, raw power...I fear I will cheapen my transcendent experience with rock critic hyphenations (instrumental prog-metal-skronk etc) but comparisons abound with all sorts of things from Return To Forever's epoch-defining Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy to Quebec's Voivod and everyone there knew they had seen something remarkable.

Devil In De-Tails

2009-05-30T13:34:00.004-04:00

I stopped by Williamsburg's excellent bookstore Spoonbill & Sugartown a couple of evenings ago, picking up Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe and E.H. Gombrich's A Little History Of The World. Gombrich is, of course, principally known for The Story Of Art from 1950 but his Little History was never translated and published in English until its posthumous appearance in 2005.

It was intended as a book for children, originally published in German in 1936 as part of a series of "Wissenschaft für Kinder" and its tone is a bit coy but I suspect there will be insights and helpful summaries to be had for adults as well. It reminds me of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Number Devil, a fanciful presentation of some basic mathematics for children. The store, already a regular stop on my city rounds, went up a notch in my estimation when one of the staff mentioned he had attended and enjoyed an Escape By Ostrich show a couple of months ago.

This particular evening I was en route to see Tyvek and Cause Co-Motion, both of whom were as good as I have ever seen them. In complimenting drummer Josh Feldman on Cause Co's brisk and propulsive set, I employed some sort of locomotive image but their somewhat minimalist, lo-fi aesthetic begs a slightly different metaphor - let's say they are the musical equivalent of the coolest Go-Kart you've ever seen.

At this point in history, almost all rock bands are plainly operating in reference to and/or opposition to some existing sub-genre, set of aesthetic constraints, and so on - some renew them more convincingly than others. The opening band on this occasion, Imaginary Icons, come out of a late 70s UK post-punk tradition that they don't transcend quite as effectively as Tyvek and Cause Co-Motion do their respective jumping-off points, but they put on a fine performance with a bunch of good songs - I'd see them again.

Detroit's Tyvek occupy a more garage-y part of the lo-fi spectrum. Every time I see them, the line-up is slightly different - this time with only one bass-player and drummer (both roles have been duplicated on other occasions) but an electric organ added, the sound was thick and focused. No one in the room (and I may well have been the oldest person there, excepting The Homosexuals' Bruno Wizard) could possibly have seen the Velvet Underground in their prime, but I can't imagine this was any less compelling and certainly can't be compared to any experience that could be had sitting at home listening to records, however revered.

What Are You Listening To Lately?

2009-05-20T22:05:00.004-04:00

Regrettably, few questions make me draw a complete blank more effectively than "what have you been listening to?" despite, or because of, the fact that I am listening to music more or less constantly and probably hear one or more new-to-me records a day. Perhaps trying to write some of it down will yield some useful results.

I know I listened to The War On Drugs' Wagonwheel Blues today – hardly more than an hour ago, and I enjoyed it just as thoroughly, more even, than every other time I have heard it. Adam Granduciel's unabashedly Dylan-esque lyrics and delivery duke it out with a wall of psychedelic-tinged acoustic and electric guitar, wheezing Al Kooper-ish organ and so on – a sonic rush that's kind of new and old at the same time. Much more exhilarating than the new Dylan album, though that has its keepable moments as well.
One of my favorite spots on Wagonwheel Blues is 3/4ths of the way through the 10-minute delirium of "Show Me The Coast" where the wide-screen sounding stereo mix suddenly collapses to mono and is slowly restored to stereo over the next half minute – subtle and hardly a footnote to the whole record but that spot (and the whole song) delights me every time.

Today and yesterday and the day before, I listened to copious chunks of this 17-CD Music of Islam collection. Too much to try to summarize it all but one of the high points I've gotten to so far is "Volume 5: 'Aissaoua Sufi Ceremony", recorded in Marrakesh, particularly the 40-minute long "Dikra Rebbania" which I'm guessing (based on musical intensity) is some kind of climactic point in the ceremony. Searching on the title phrase itself doesn't yield much other than links to the recording.

Without making any attempt to thoroughly bolster the claim, and very briefly acknowledging my own connection with the label, I don't think Chicago's Drag City Records puts out anything that is not good. Particularly high in my rotation of recent months have been the past two records by Bill Callahan (who you once knew as Smog), Woke On A Whaleheart and Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle. The latter gives perhaps a bit too much leeway to his more somnolent side, but the last 4 (of 9) songs have kept me thoroughly happy on their own. The closer "Faith/Void" (multivalent reference for you rock historians) is 9 minutes of subtly stunning repetitive bliss. Despite its ostensibly anti-religious message (the principal lyric is "It's time to put God away"), it is quite reminiscent of one of those rambling mid-70s Van Morrison mystic epics whose spirituality it echoes and simultaneously rejects.

The Fisherman and The Jinni

2009-05-14T23:55:00.002-04:00

It seems like the Cultural History section of a bookstore could contain almost anything – in practice, books about food and tattooing seem to predominate. I went through three of Mark Kurlansky's books (on the former subject) in pretty quick succession some months ago, beginning with Cod which I'd recommend to anyone as succinct and fascinating. The only problem with these semi-pop histories is they give one a lot of slightly glib and very repeatable "facts" that roll right off the tongue in subsequent conversation (the Basques arrived in the New World before Columbus but kept the source of their huge catches of fish a secret, and so on) without really rigorous footnoting. Additionally, they tend to see much of human history through their single lens. Nonetheless, persuasive and well worth reading.

In Salt even more so than in Cod, he purports to explain vast swathes of human endeavor in terms of the pursuit of a single commodity, one which is at least a fundamental enough item that the argument seems convincing. One thing I enjoy about history of this sort is when it takes for granted that you already know certain things or can pick them up by inference without a great deal of tangential explanation. For example, the chapters on China left me feeling I had a better grip on the succession of dynasties than any number of less successful attempts to read an entire book on Chinese history.

Even aside from what an enjoyable writer Kurlansky is, and how you feel about food writing in general (and oysters in particular), The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell is as engaging a history of New York City as any I have read. Also both this book in its picture of New York and Salt with regard to England make it quite clear how the story of pollution and destruction of the environment in the course of food production is by no means a problem that just appeared in the last half century.

Finally, last week I picked up Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage which completes the story of the cycle of production and consumption. It also combines a perfectly paced history of its subject with an inescapably alarmed conclusion about what we have brought ourselves to. Along the way (and this book is quite carefully footnoted), she eludicates some remarkable aspects of her subject. I particularly liked the story of "the invention of litter", part of a concerted campaign by an industry front group called KAB (Keep America Beautiful) to shift the blame for pollution onto individuals and away from the corporations who were (and are), by an enormous margin, the principal cause of the problem. KAB's productions include an early 60s "educational" film narrated by Ronald Reagan and those mawkish 70s television ads in which an American Indian sheds a single tear over a despoiled landscape.

Memories and Memoirs

2009-05-13T21:34:00.007-04:00

Not to give them a swelled head or anything, but The New York Review of Books' NYRB Classics imprint is pretty consistently stunning – I feel greedy just surveying the list, of which I have a dozen or so.

One of their more modest publications is John Williams' Stoner, an almost unbearably sad story of a mid-Western academic, a professor of literature at a fictionalized version of the University of Missouri at Columbia who lives through the first 2/3rds of the 20th century. Raised by dirt-poor farmers who never appear to understand his pursuit of literature, he only manages intermittently to communicate his transforming love for it to anyone else, his career itself largely running aground on the shoals of academic politics. He marries badly and the marriage in turn generates a sole unhappy child. His deathbed scene where he fails to reconnect with his now alcoholic grown daughter is particularly devastating and I turned from this to Point To Point Navigation, the second volume of Gore Vidal's memoirs, hoping for a bit of wit and uplift, only to find the first 80 pages of that almost exclusively describing (and who can blame him?) the relatively recent death of his partner of 50 years, Howard Austen. Yet Vidal certainly doesn't regret a thing and John Williams asks us to think twice or three times about what constitutes a successful or unsuccessful life. Happiness, if you needed reminding, seems to come at best in flashes.

If you are going to read Vidal's memoirs (and you should certainly consider it), start with Palimpsest, the earlier volume, which follows a more conventional autobiographical chronology and structure through the first 39 years of his life. Picking up thereafter, Point To Point Navigation is rather loose and rambling and repeats a lot from the earlier book. The death of Howard Austen is in many ways its focus, but I didn't come away feeling that I knew him at all ("knowing" only in the sense that one can know anyone solely through reading someone else's description, of course). In addition to the recursive narration, hardly any chapter is more than three pages long, a device that mostly suits the fragmentary nature of the memoirs, yet seems even odder towards the end where a more sustained sequence (which is actually mostly long quotes from other people's biographical writings about Gore) is broken up arbitrarily by the chapter divisions. I'm plainly not selling this book too hard; read the collected essays United States (1952-1992), then Palimpsest then borrow this from someone and get through it quickly, wishing Vidal himself enough years for a third volume.

In Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (first mentioned yesterday), he discusses the error of people who believe memoirs to be absolutely factual retellings of some ostensibly raw experience, unmediated by literary shape. There's no reason to believe Nabokov, the master of the unreliable narrator, would make such a mistake and, as such, his Speak, Memory scarcely needs to be approached differently than any of his fiction. It's a quick read and anyone looking to extend the experience might consider the two-part autobiography of Anthony Burgess Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess.

I suppose anyone who lives long enough to write two volumes of memoirs is likely to experience enough of the slings and arrows of time passing to make it hard to avoid a few sad stories. British playwright Alan Bennett's two largely autobiographical volumes, Writing Home and Untold Stories, came out when he was 60 and 71 respectively. In the interval he had time to be diagnosed with and recover from cancer, the recounting of which slightly sobers the tone of the second volume, though he manages to be characteristically funny nonetheless. Writing Home is a frequently hilarious and at times brilliant collection of essays, literary criticism, diary excerpts and other short writing. One of its most moving and fascinating segments is a series of entries recounting the story of a more or less insane old woman who had nowhere to live but a small van type of automobile (one that didn't actually run) whom Bennett, through a combination of charity and inertia that I suspect we can all recognize, allowed to have her vehicle towed into his tiny London front garden, and live there for the last 15 years of her life.

My delight in Bennett's writing also served to make me embarrassed that I'd scarcely heard of him, though I recognize film titles like The Madness of King George and The Secret Policeman's Ball. Most recently, his play The History Boys ran on Broadway for half of 2006 to considerable acclaim, forcing me (though I did not see it) to reconsider my rule that no play called "Anything Boys" is worth seeing - perhaps I can still hold the line at the spelling "Boyz". Other "firmly in the zeitgeist" sightings include his early 60s satirical revue "Beyond the Fringe" being mentioned in Stephen Davis's history of The Rolling Stones, Old Gods Almost Dead, as a cultural event of parallel significance to Muddy Waters' 1958 tour of the UK with the Chris Barber jazz band.

The Silk Road

2009-05-12T20:23:00.002-04:00

Robert Byron's The Road To Oxiana is a funny and casually erudite travel diary, covering 10 months of travel in Persia and Afghanistan. The 1930s, from this distance at least, feels like the last time you could go somewhere in Asia and find its culture not yet Westernized, plus there was still an aristocratic class with the money and free time to meander around the globe, with all the positive and negative results of amateur exploration. The actual writing of the book is odd and varied and quite modernist. Paul Fussell, in his introduction, says the book is to travel writing what Ulysses is to the novel and The Wasteland is to poetry - a pretty heady claim! Byron was specifically in pursuit of certain kinds of Islamic architecture and art that were relatively underrated at the time by the European academic world (have a look at all the photos on this page to get an idea of what he was after).

Having, in a sense, read The Road To Oxiana on Paul Fussell's say-so, I was also reminded of his book The Great War and Modern Memory because the PG Six Band has occasionally covered Fleetwood Mac's "Dust" whose lyrics (despite the lack of credits on the LP sleeve) were adapted from Rupert Brooke, a poet who is usually mentioned in the same breath as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen as one of the quintessential literary figures of World War I. Fussell's book is about the literary culture that grew up around the war and posits its profound impact on 20th century literary consciousness, particularly the almost inevitable predominance of irony as the only way to bridge the gap between the high-minded and neatly structured ideals of war that the British brought with them out of the comparatively peaceful 19th century and the indiscriminate, brutal and often pointless slaughter that was the reality. Also for those (like me) who feel woefully ignorant of the bare facts of WWI (Passchendaele, Somme, Ypres - at best one knows that one doesn't know the significance of these), you can pick up a lot of basic history along with your analysis of sonnets.

The British Prime Ministers Series of Winter 2009

2009-05-11T23:53:00.007-04:00

I have been posting book reviews on the GoodReads social-networking site for about two years. I suspect they are read by no more than half a dozen people, nor could this blog claim a much higher readership, yet I have occasionally been faintly troubled - suppose it is not the same half a dozen people?. Not wanting anyone to miss these mots, I debated reposting some of that writing here, aware also that redundance and excessive cross-posting is bad internet manners. Finally GoodReads itself has somewhat solved the problem by a recent stylesheet change in which the reviews started appearing in a transparent popup window such that the underlying text now renders them illegible (and I always suspected the popup site design was a deterrent to reading them to begin with). So, exonerated of all charges of laziness, in fact performing a veritable public service by restoring my carefully crafted word-science to the notice of a select public, I commence.

I picked up Lytton Strachey's appealingly slender biography of Queen Victoria last fall at my favorite Upper West Side dollar book stall. I wasn't sure what to expect but the opening pages seemed like a hilariously gossipy approach to royal biography, yet in fine literary style, and I found myself zooming through. Summing up after finishing, "gossipy" is not quite the term, lest one encompass it in the same breath with Andrew Morton and the like, but I gather that Strachey's somewhat irreverent style set a new standard for biography that is still admired and emulated. You already know that he was one of the Bloomsbury Group with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster et al. and his Eminent Victorians in some ways defined the modern notion of the "Victorian" age. This biography is consistently engaging and I'll recommend it to anyone who wants to know a bit more about 19th century British history (or who hasn't yet realized that they do).

It reminded me of a stack of rather weightier "tomes" on the subject that I pulled out of a dumpster at a posh UWS palace across the street from that bookstore where the old-time artistic and intellectual tenantry has been steadily yielding to financiers who don't read! - you can't even find The Economist in their recycle bins, it's all Country Living. Strachey's dozen page portraits of the predominant political figures of the time (Robert Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli) inspired further investigations, starting with a biography of Gladstone. I also start pursuing these lines of inquiry to satisfy my curiosities about sometimes rather fleeting pop culture references (conveniently there's an earlier entry here on this topic): for example, the English Prime Ministers of the 19th century, particularly Gladstone and Disraeli, are hugely significant (in highly fictionalized representations) in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy (the early 21st fantasy masterpiece you should move on to after completing Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy), so I have for some time wished I knew more about them.

Sir Philip Magnus' Gladstone: A Biography was my starting point and it proved to be an excellent use of a few days - constantly referring to wikipedia for clarifications like "Who was Bismarck?", "who fought the Crimean War and why?" and so on, went on a long way to dispelling my general sense of ignorance with regard to 19th century European history. It was, however, long, and the similarly chunky Asquith by Roy Jenkins is languishing on the coffee table with a mere 150 page bite taken out of it. The years of his premiership aside (which I never actually got to), Asquith is part of an interesting and historically noteworthy lineage – his descendants (by birth or marriage) include actress Helena Bonham-Carter and novelist Emma Tennant.

Benjamin Disraeli (who was both novelist and Prime Minister) is very much the bête noire of Gladstone's biography, but I thought reading one of his novels (Sybil, or The Two Nations) might provide more pleasure and interesting insight than adding yet another unfinished biography to my list. One of Disraeli's oft-commented upon "qualifications" for office was his ability to flatter Queen Victoria; the rapturous description in here of the Virgin Queen's ascent to the throne amidst tweeting birds seems almost a caricature of such flattery. As literature, Disraeli's novels have been challenged by the test of time - huge undigested chunks of his theories of history alternate with the plot, improbable characters come up conveniently to explain things in long monologues, but this was also well-written and funny enough of the time. The Two Nations of the title are the rich and the poor - Sybil herself is one of those impossibly virtuous and graceful Victorian novel heroines. As the daughter of an artisan, her nascent romance with the second son of an aristocratic family would seem to be impossible because of the class divide, but rather than their ultimate union being achieved by the exact democratizing social upheaval which is the ostensible theme of the book, it turns that her family actually are of the aristocracy, having been swindled out of their hereditary lands, a deceit that ultimately comes to light. So the happy ending, such as it is, more reaffirms the existing social order than anything else. This contradiction is, I believe, characteristic of Disraeli's slightly muddled set of beliefs and opportunistic approach to making his way in politics at the time he wrote it.

Soup To Nuts

2009-01-26T22:23:00.001-05:00

I have for some years been reading both Margaret Drabble and the late Iris Murdoch quite dedicatedly (about a dozen books each) and have juxtaposed them in my mind as the Beatles and Rolling Stones (respectively) of British letters of the past half century. This comparison doesn't hold up on a number of levels (e.g. the 20 year discrepancy in their ages, partly mitigated by Drabble's first novel having appeared only 9 years after Murdoch's), but I'm sticking to it. (Sometime, I'll get around to recent Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, Murdoch's coeval from the post-WWI baby boom, and fit her into the equation too.)

In any event, Drabble (the principal subject of this blog's debut post) is the sunnier of the two, even when she is taking on weighty and difficult themes. Murdoch's obsession (I think that is not overstating) with the destructive but irresistible lure of infidelity and its attendant demons, jealousy, envy, rage and despair (did I leave anything out?) dominates her work. I have just finished 1978's The Sea, The Sea which was no exception. It also falls into the subcategory of "rather creepy middle-aged male narrators" that she had already developed in The Black Prince and A Word Child. These protagonists, with a not-so-subtle hint of Humbert, tend to be distinctly unreliable. The Black Prince 's Bradley Pearson is the most Nabokovian – in The Sea… the implication seems to be more that no one reports honestly in matters of sex and love.

The Sea…'s Charles Arrowby has certain other compulsive habits in his narration (he is ostensibly writing memoirs), one of which is the excessively punctilious placement of single quotes (inverted commas, to our UK friends) around any word or phrase that is remotely vernacular or even just metaphoric. Another is recounting in some detail each of his meals, prepared in a style jestingly called "gastronomic mysticism" by one of the other characters but actually, by current standards, quite admirable in their use of simple, fresh, predominantly plant-based ingredients.

As a tribute to Iris Murdoch and the unlovely Arrowby, I report my last few dinners: Saturday, I sautéed shallots and garlic, added steamed rainbow Swiss chard and some Great Northern beans to the pan, fried up two links (cut in half-inch segments) of chicken sausage, and mixed it all up with a pot of brown rice. Sunday's goal was to wash only one pot as much as anything else, so I boiled Fontina and prosciutto ravioli, threw in a handful of green peas and topped it with shredded Asiago. This evening, despairing of the fact that all the brands of sausage at the nearby market that tout their ethical, ecological and health attributes are made from chicken, I bought pork sausage with sage (no doubt engineered in unthinkable squalor), cooked it thoroughly, browned some onion and beet greens, and had it all over rigatoni. The beets themselves (from which the greens were taken) roasted in the oven for 45 minutes, wrapped in foil sachets with olive oil, salt and pepper - the first of three went with the dinner, the other two will enliven tomorrow's lunch.

First Editions

2009-01-24T21:45:00.004-05:00

There is a plainly a bit of class hierarchy among thrift stops - the charity with which a given store is aligned, the inevitable connection between its neighborhood and who donates and shops there and so on. So it is not so noteworthy that I was in a Brooklyn Heights Housing Works rather than the 135 St Harlem Goodwill when I came upon a rather lavish 12-LP collection of 20th century orchestral music, commissioned, recorded and released by the Louisville Orchestra in their 1954-55 season. [What's always irked me is you don't find rare free jazz or even much in the way of good gospel or salsa in the Harlem thrift stores - it's the same old battered Judy Collins records as everywhere else - some sort of conspiracy?]

The Louisville Symphony, though quite long-established, may still not have quite pulled itself into the top 10 U.S. orchestras as measured by however they measure these things, but its decision, taken around 1950, to champion the music of living American composers and start a record label to broadcast it has remained a claim to fame.

The set I bought is packaged in the manner that the phrase "record album" was coined to describe - two boxes with half a dozen paper sleeves bound together on the left, with a vinyl record in each, so you page through to make your selection. The program notes are on separate 12-inch squares of paper, inserted loose into the front of each box.

The actual music - well no one I know including me listens through 24 LP sides of mid-20th century orchestral music in any kind of hurry. The immense diversity of humanity and its artistic production does get a bit overwhelming at times like this. I read through wikipedia articles on relatively obscure composers like Paul Creston and Halsey Stevens, seeking connections with things I know more about and, to be honest, struggling a bit to find anything very compelling in their music. There's lots of sturm und drang: trumpet blare, tympani thunder, contrasting pastoral flute segments, neither cacophonously dissonant but nor, even when they are categorized as neo-romantic, is there much memorable melody to latch on to. Long rich lives - Pulitzer prizes, distinguished careers teaching at USC, writing definitive biographies of Bartok, spouses and children - well, I already said it's a big world.

It is interesting to me that Creston taught composition to the somewhat better known John Corigliano who in turn taught Nico Muhly, who has diversified his own composing with some marvelous string arrangements for the likes of Will Oldham and Björk. Muhly's arrangements on "Cursed Sleep" from Will Oldham's The Letting Go have single-handedly earned my admiration. Between his pop music connections and savviness with regard to myspace and blog use, getting himself interviewed by Pitchfork etc, Muhly stands some chance of bringing this sort of music back to a wider audience. (Note to self: see Carnegie Hall premiere in March?)

So far, the bigger names in this collection, and the ones whose pieces I feel more likely to return to, are Henry Cowell and Alan Hovhaness, who can both be loosely considered in the tradition of "maverick" American 20th century composers (throw in Harry Partch and call Charles Ives their forefather while we're at it), characterized in varying measures by a kind of deliberate experimentation far beyond the modernism of the Second Viennese School, inventing their own instruments and a tendency to bring some mysticism to bear on their aesthetic, yet never rejecting compositional values so firmly as John Cage or the Fluxus composers. Cowell invented the world's first electronic drum machine, pioneered the use of tone clusters on the piano (at times the performer might need to use a whole hand or forearm to strike a large set of notes), was a handsome young man and confused me for a couple of teenage years by having no connection to my favorite avant-garde rock band Henry Cow. And, his first composition teacher was Pete Seeger's father!

Barandgrill

2009-01-19T11:30:00.004-05:00

My bandmates in Escape By Ostrich and I typically go out to eat after rehearsing and not infrequently end up at Duke's on East 19th Street in Manhattan. The restaurant is one of a pair, and it is one of the unfairnesses of life that a moderately successful restaurateur will open a second instance of his or her successful venture, only to have it immediately labeled a "chain" and lose credibility with the likes of me. Duke's retains some of its claim to down-home Southern cooking authenticity by contrast with the velvet-rope horrorshows that are its neighbors around the corner on Park Avenue South. We could perhaps have a similar dining experience further downtown at Acme Bar and Grill or the Great Jones Café, but this is a custom that predates my involvement in the band, it saves Willie Klein from having to take a cab home with his violin, and so we stick to it.

One evening at Duke's, Chris Nelson (bon vivant and multi-instrumentalist, who I once tried to label "the nearest thing to a genius you can run into on East 12th street at 9 am when you are both late for work" in a Time Out NY piece about The Scene Is Now, only to have it cut as superfluous [I will double-parenthetically embed the fact that I was not yet in any band with him at that point]) decided to order some out-of-the-ordinary, yet classic cocktail. We settled (the matter being a group decision) on the Singapore Sling, known to me at least, and I presumed everyone else, as a reference in Joni Mitchell's song "BarandGrill" from 1972's wonderful For The Roses. In the song, she romanticizes working class American life, evocatively if not necessarily accurately; in retrospect, the couplet "none of the crazy you get/from too much choice" is intriguing - the American working class now seems most driven to distraction of anyone by excess choice.

In any event, the waitress had not heard of the Singapore Sling nor had the bartender any idea how to make one. Chris probably settled on the more familiar Manhattan, leaving me to wonder "is our children learning" and why aren't their 9th grade English teachers introducing them to Joni Mitchell (as mine did). I also went home to consult my copy of Charles Schumann's 1997 American Bar. This book is amusing, in part because it was written by a German of the sort (not to miss an opportunity for sweeping cultural generalization) who guards classic American culture more rigorously than we do. As such, he makes clear his book is "not…the usual thousand-and-one cocktail recipes" (he limits himself to 500 or so classics), is not afraid to decry as a "bungler" any barkeep who would allow his guests to combine cocktails willy-nilly, and so on. Glancing at the prefatory material, it is never quite clear why his title includes the word "American" unless it goes without saying that cocktail culture is quintessentially American. The Singapore Sling itself, though, is more the product of Anglo-Asian colonial culture, said to have been invented at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore - hence it was probably known to Joni Mitchell's waitresses as a remnant or cousin of 1950s Tiki Culture exoticism.

There is, you won't be surprised to hear, some debate about the exact components of the Singapore Sling but I like Schumann's asceticism and will give you his formulation.

¾ - 1 oz lemon juice
¼ oz sugar syrup
1 barspoon powdered sugar
1 ½ oz gin
soda
¼ - ¾ oz cherry brandy

You shake up the first four ingredients, pour them in a Collins glass which is then filled with soda, leaving room for the brandy to be added last.

No Higher Resolution Available

2009-01-18T00:05:00.001-05:00

You may or may not live in a world where the phrase "rare Finnish prog folk" causes an immediate Pavlovian click on the "download" link, but if you do, you may already know about Scapa Flow's sole release Uuteen Aikaan. Its 1980 date is only one of the factors destining the group to obscurity, progressive rock having largely given way to new wave rock by then, and Googling subsequent activity by the group members (keyboardist Eero-Pekka Kolehmainen seems to have been busiest) is confounded by the relatively small inventory from which Finnish names are drawn.

In any event, I could certainly have stood on the bus next to any of them in my 1978 half-year in Helsinki. Singer Pia-Maria Noponen had some subsequent association with a band called Threshold, who also boast a connection with the somewhat more famous (as Finnish synthesizer players go) Esa Kotilainen. He emerged from the actually quite significant groups Tasavallen Presidentti and Wigwam (as we approach consensual reality, my copy of the U.S. release of the latter's Tombstone Valentine has a big blurb of praise from Lester Bangs on the cover), and launched a series of occasional solo records (that continues to this day) with 1977's Ajatuslapsi. I purchased that within a few months of its release in a quite serviceable record store located among a set of underground shops in Helsinki's central train station (Eliel Saarinen's apotheosis of 1919 modernist architecture), which in turn reminds me of the exemplary Latin record shop that once stood in New York’s Times Square Station (its replacement has lost a lot of the sabor of the original).

Not to let free association take us away from Scapa Flow altogether, though you should also take a moment to read about the geographical feature from which the group name is taken. The record is a fine mix of flute, keyboards, guitar, male and female vocals, plus rhythm section, quite polished in the manner of Mellow Candle (though they are a bit too revered in the 70s progressive-folk canon to admit too close a comparison) - without raising expectations too high, it is worth a few listens, though not transcending a genre that history has firmly consigned to its margins.

Farsings of Farses

2009-01-17T21:40:00.003-05:00

After a vigorous evening of running around Brooklyn in 10° air (seeing Adam & Dave's Bloodline at Bar Matchless - one compelling song out of the four I heard; trotting over to the larger, yet somehow more intimate Glasslands for The Pictish Trail, another fine Fence collective performer, with Viking Moses; maintaining the farsing spirit with a 2am second dinner of top-notch falafel at North 7th Street’s Oasis), the following late morning called for something milder. At the top of the stack, Now Make We Merthe, is a 1968 collection of "medieval carols" on the semi-legendary Argo record label. The title of this entry makes its appearance in the liner notes, where it makes sense in context, and the collection is still in print on CD, so information about it is not hard to come by.

Glancing over the expected instrument credits (psaltery, lute and the like), my attention was caught by the "heckelphone." This, interestingly, reveals itself to be not an "early music" instrument at all, but an innovation by the German instrument making Heckel family in 1904, from when it has been used by composers as (relatively) diverse as Richard Strauss, Edgard Varèse and Paul Hindemith. There are no more than 100 heckelphone players in the world (corresponding with the number of instruments that actually exist), and my heart leapt as I found (via wikipedia) that the early 21st century cultural compass has room for a North American Heckelphone Society whose inaugural meeting was in 2001 at the determinedly ecumenical Riverside Church.

How the heckelphone was chosen for this recording is anyone’s guess but presumably more purist arrangements would have called for a couple of the more characteristically medieval double-reed shawm (which came in many sizes), and the heckelphone offered a match with the higher register oboe that neither the cor anglais nor bassoon could quite provide.

The wikipedia heckelphone entry mentions that of 150 ever made, only 100 are known to still exist. Though time is never kind to exquisitely crafted obscurities, I fell into a more specific speculation. Having spent the afternoon reading W.G. Sebald’s quietly devasting Austerlitz which very slowly reveals itself to be about the fate of a Czech Jewish family in the 1940s, I began to envision the heckelphones of Mitteleuropäische Jewish musicians not so much smashed in pogroms, as moldering past the point of salvage in the meticulously cataloged SS warehouses that held the possessions of the "evacuated."

The world being now so stuffed with ubiquitously available information and resources, I was hardly surprised but certainly impressed by this photo blog which follows the itinerary of Sebald’s books, mainly by the Borgesian trick of retaking the photographs with which the narratives themselves are punctuated - I tip my hat!

Days Start Getting Longer Now

2008-12-23T00:56:00.001-05:00

If Philip Glass's early minimalism is hectic, kinetic and primary-colored – a Mondrian painting come to life – and Steve Reich's compositions for mallet instruments are like gentle sun-dappled rivers, listening to Phill Niblock's pieces is like standing on a runway waving those colored flashlights as jet planes roar over you. I enter Niblock's Chinatown loft (for his annual winter solstice festival) to the sould of three notes, just above middle C, ever so slightly out of unison so they beat in great seismic sine waves – 20 minutes or so without a pause. This is carried on in similar increments for the next three hours, though occasionally live musicians wander around the large, crumbling loft space, playing along. The intense volume of the music from the speakers renders the live instruments the subtlest possible additional element – one strains (delightedly) to hear exactly where they fit in, though one viola player was good enough to hold her instrument directly over my head for a couple of minutes (as I reclined in a black canvas butterfly chair – by far the best seat in the house, which I recall from prior years), so I had the full electro-acoustic experience.

The music, despite its intensity, does tend to move to the background of awareness and films from Niblock's series The Movement of People Working, projected on two walls and half a dozen TVs become the focus of attention. His wikipedia entry describes them as well as I could - interesting that they (if I'm reading right) date mostly from the 1960s, as it's a bit hard to tell. The predominance of rather fancy wristwatches on the wrists of peasant manual laborers provides an interesting (and welcome) contrast to the somewhat timeless quality of the (in many ways pre-Industrial revolution) rural rhythms on display. The more repetitive actions, coupled with the style of the music, inevitably bring to mind Godfrey Reggio's films with Philip Glass, but Niblock's work is considerably less edited and far less heavy-handed in making any points that might be there to be made. The extended time scale of the work itself, and its presentation (6 hours at a time, every Dec. 21st for years), contributes to the undoctrinaire quality.

Ian Anderson (disambiguation)

2008-12-20T00:36:00.002-05:00

For several decades it has been confusing enough that one musn't let the prominence of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson overshadow the fine contributions of Ian A. Anderson to the musical world (his circle of association is too big to summarize here but if you are not familiar with Wizz Jones, Mike Cooper and Maggie Holland, you have many happy hours ahead of you).

More recently, it has become necessary to distinguish a third Ian Anderson, though he conveniently operates under the pseudonym Pip Dylan. Ian is the brother of Kenny Anderson (aka King Creosote) and Gordon Anderson (best-known of the lot as a founder of the Beta Band, currently doing business as Lone Pigeon and as part of The Aliens). Based in the Kingdom of Fife, the three are just the tip of the Fence Collective iceberg.

Pip's adopted surname is no accident as there is a strong early Bob Dylan feel on his CD Of All The Things I Can Eat I'm Always Pleased With A Piece Of Cheese. Considering also Zach Cale's Illuminations (whose very fine new record See-Saw you should hear), it seems the New Dylans of the new century aim to evoke the feel and atmosphere of 60s Dylan without the lyrical specificity.

(Dylan himself, rapidly tiring of being "voice of the generation" found even his most throwaway surrealist lyrics subject to the same earnest exegesis as his earlier work. Unlike logocentric music critics (with their degrees in literature and history, scarcely able to distinguish minor from major chords), I frequently don't concern myself with lyrics as long as they are not so bad as to be distracting - the expressive qualities of the singing style, vocal timbre and melody suffice. Perhaps I should trot this explanation out for my Swedish connections who often ask how I can enjoy the many excellent releases on their Silence record label without understanding the "texts").

So long-winded aside aside, I can't quite tell you what Pip Dylan's songs are "about" but that doesn't detract from my pleasure or, I wouldn't be surprised, yours either. His use of nylon-string guitar instead of steel-string is also a bit of a departure from the Dylan mold - Leonard Cohen is the next easiest comparison in the 60s canon and there are similarities of mood on certain songs. Being a modern release (and a homemade one), there are fragments of drum machine sounds and various tumultuous sonic experiments which entirely displace the singer-songwriter model by the end of the record. These proved to be the perfect soundtrack for my stroll througn an exhibition of the rivetingly beautiful-ugly paintings of Marlene Dumas. My follow-up selection of the Sic Alps' U.S. Ez proved to be equally compelling in context - they are exonerated for not living up to the burden I unfairly placed on them of being the next Times New Viking.

Look Back In Anger

2008-12-19T22:27:00.000-05:00

Rock songwriters (especially those with highbrow pretensions), often, magpie-like, appropriate snippets of culture from various media - a catchy phrase brings a bit of prepackaged significance. As a curious young music fan, I frequently found myself being led down all sorts of interesting paths in pursuit of the origins of these references. Sometimes these investigations take longer than others, as a mere 29 years after the 1979 release of David Bowie's song "Look Back In Anger" (on the record Lodger), I got around to reading John Osborne's 1956 play of the same title.

Like me, you have probably been vaguely aware that Osborne and his play exemplified a small literary movement of the late 50s in England whose participants were dubbed the "Angry Young Men", a convenient analog to the Beats in America. As usual with such newspaper-driven genre labels, one wonders how many of those associated with it would willingly claim affiliation. In this case, there is also a big overlap with a set of poets called The Movement, another journalistic coinage but having a bit more dignity. In any event, manifestos and aesthetic statements of purpose were made and published, anthologies issued and the Establishment defied, at least until the group were old enough to become the Establishment themselves.

Look Back In Anger's central character is indeed angry at everyone and everything - England, its monarchy, its class system, women, journalism. Trying to imagine what England (somewhere in the Midlands) was like in the mid-1950s, one does picture a straitened, somewhat bleak place, still oppressed by the tail end of postwar poverty - the contrast with the America described by Jack Kerouac couldn't be much sharper. Sex, as we know from Philip Larkin (usually considered one of the Angry Young Men/Movement figures) was not due to arrive until 1963, and Winston Churchill (in his third term as Prime Minister) had just finished presiding over the dismemberment of the British Empire. As with some other plays of groundbreaking social significance (A Raisin In The Sun comes to mind), it's not that much fun to read, but perhaps reading plays in general isn't the best way to enjoy them.

I did very much like a 1970 book by John Wain (also loosely one of the "angries") called A Winter in the Hills. Set in Wales and accordingly steeped in its culture, the novel is a sort of social realism, but too colorful and varied to get the cliched "grim" prepended to that term. The basic story describes a struggle that's still quite timely - locally owned and independently operated businesses being pushed out of the way by an unsympathetic conglomerate. Wain wrote 13 other novels, but apparently, were he remembered at all, it should be for his poetry.

How High The Moon

2007-07-29T00:32:00.000-04:00

A good trip to the Salvation Army has inspired a revival here. First up, The Nearness of You, a compilation of Frank Sinatra tracks from his Capitol era on a mid-70s budget Pickwick release (the rule in thrift-shopping is you buy any Sinatra on Capitol but this is stretching the point a bit). The collection is quite listenable however - of note are Rodgers and Hart's "Lover", "You Brought A New Kind of Love to Me" (its earliest appearance may have been a 1930 film called The Big Pond with Maurice Chevalier), "It Could Happen To You" (done at a rather slow tempo - I prefer June Christy's brisker take on Something Cool, a desert-island disc of mine, as it happens) and the Mercer/Arlen "That Old Black Magic".

Next is the Jan Garbarek Group's Photo With Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows and a Red Roof (ECM, 1979). The principal incentive to get this was the presence of Bill Connors, who was the guitarist in the first electric version (superior to the Al Dimeola incarnation) of Chick Corea's Return To Forever, but his contribution doesn't quite solve the problem, the problem being that this mid-late 70s ECM stuff is the musical equivalent of Impressionist painting.

A Willie Nelson/Leon Russell double-LP called One For The Road (CBS, 1979) seemed best approached with no expectations and lo and behold, with that as the context, it is just fine. The choice of material ("I Saw The Light", "Heartbreak Hotel", "Don't Fence Me In") didn't cause anyone any sleepless nights but the combination of two of the most distinctive and appealing voices in American popular music of that era goes a long way toward mitigating a bit of laziness in the "R" half of the A&R equation. The 1979 date also means no crap-sounding digital recording techniques were employed.

Picked up a few more items, not all of which can be commented on without listening to them, but The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, of which I already own at least one copy, is on its way to some other lucky recipient's collection and Emmylou Harris's 1981 Evangeline fulfils another dollar-bin shopping rule, namely that there are no Emmylou Harris records that aren't good. This one seems to be no exception so far with impeccable song selection, including "Hot Burrito #2" (co-writer Chris Ethridge plays bass on the Nelson/Russell album in fact), two Rodney Crowell songs, Paul Siebel's "Spanish Johnny", the title track by Robbie Robertson and so on.

Formerly Harmony Burlesque

2007-05-28T15:07:00.001-04:00

Picture if you will a vision of the future from 40 years ago, a Jetsons-styled robot in the process of exploding, with springs and sprockets flying out. Now imagine the robot is the Feelies fronted by Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna trying to imitate Joan LaBarbera and you’ve pretty much got the idea of Baltimore's Ponytail. (Or you could elaborate and liken them to Don Caballero imitating the Feelies [still exploding], a comparison I thought of while watching them, then dismissed, then found out they are going on tour with Battles, who are, I don't need to tell you, ex-Don Cab). About three of their songs fulfilled the promise implicit in all the above - I'd see them again!

The headliners were Japan's DMBQ. Based on the couple of records I'd heard, I thought they might deliver the straight-up early 70s stoner rock in a more uncut fashion - as it happens, their divagations into more noodle-y space jams were not unwelcome and they pulled it all together with a 5-minute closing wall of sound feedback blare from the guitars and bass while disassembling the drum kit and thrusting pieces of it into the crowd, finishing with most of its parts heaped up in almost vulnerable looking little monument.

The other main feature of the evening was the Pakistani Tea House on Church Street, courtesy of Tahir - you can read what these Yelpers have to say about it, but ignore the ones who are grumpy about the decor - it doesn't aim to be anything more than a fluorescently-lit steam table joint with exceptionally tasty food.

Far From the Madding Crowd

2007-05-27T18:47:00.000-04:00

Headed to DUMBO for a show at an improbable venue, the Water Street Restaurant and Lounge, which is the sort of place for which the term "fern bar" was invented - unambitious cuisine served in a genteel decor whose pretensions to fine dining are somewhat at odds with the large television over the bar showing sports. The music was in their downstairs space which is large and generally a fine place to hang out - lots of oddly placed columns, though, which must serve some structural requirement as they don't serve any other and generally make the stage end a bit cut off.

In any event, some ambitious young promoters chose the spot to assemble an evening around Jarboe (now styling herself The Living Jarboe). Anyone who followed the evolution of the New York underground rock band the Swans through the 80s and 90s has a pretty good notion of who she is and what to expect at a show. Her voice is quite low-pitched and she has a strongly emotive-expressive style. On the continuum of singers comparable in one way or another, she falls somewhere between Nico and Diamanda Galas - more technically proficient than the former, not trying to be so dazzling as the latter. Her set was quite perfectly balanced - not much more than seven or so long-ish songs, totalling around 40 minutes, accompanied by adept but not flashy acoustic guitarists (with effects pedals) and Michael Evans (once of God Is My Co-Pilot) on a pared-down drum kit. Although her credit on the first Swans record on which she appeared was "scream", she is quite a conventionally beautiful singer when she wants to be.

Her aesthetic ambience (and that of her audience) is quite noticeably "goth" - while her music is not stylistically so different from what you get at the average "freak folk" show, the far greater incidence of tattoos and black fingernail polish in the crowd and onstage stakes a certain claim (although the distribution of seasonally unsuitable headgear between indie rock and goth shows is comparable).

The promoters also livened up the between-band segments with the short films of Czech neo-surrealist Jan Švankmajer, who I also didn't realize was quite so gothic - more literally so than the black nail crowd as his work includes filmic realizations of several Edgar Allan Poe short stories and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the ur-text of the 18th and 19th century Gothic literary school. I'd recommend a newcomer to Švankmajer start with "Dimensions of Dialog" currently available on Youtube in two parts, although it seems like something that might not last long - while you're at it this excerpt from the film with music by astonishing French bassist Joëlle Léandre also merits a gander.

The show was well worth the trip and, stepping out just after midnight into the third consecutive perfect evening of early summer weather (a balmy 75°F), I ascended to the Brooklyn Bridge promenade, thanked God I wasn't at the beach or anything, and took in the immensity of the city night.

Yksi, Kaksi, Kolme

2007-05-22T23:24:00.000-04:00

I stopped by Artists and Fleas on North 6th Street in Williamsburg and had a poke through someone's dollar bin which yielded a post-Mutantes solo Rita Lee (circa 1980) about which there isn't much to report - if the term BraPop doesn't exist, I hereby coin it. If the most interesting thing that can be said about a record is that it was allegedly popular with the British royal family...

A better score was Shalamar's second from 1979 called Three For Love - their records are always worth picking up because they usually contain a couple of keeper songs that wouldn't necessarily make it onto a greatest hits collection. The band itself (best known subsequently, if at all, for launching Jody watley's solo career) typifies what I consider the golden era of disco music which actually started circa 1979 when the Comiskey Park Disco Demolition Night was supposedly signaling its end. After all the Studio 54 mania, Time magazine stories, your aunt taking disco dancing lessons etc, the serious dancers and clubgoers (Blacks and Latinos, gay whites) whose music it had been to begin with, resumed dancing and never really stopped.

The early 80s brought the Paradise Garage and West End records, S.O.L.A.R. records in Los Angeles (Shalamar's label), and the first few Madonna singles (not to forget Taana Gardner, Fonda Rae, some of Sylvester's best work, Teena Marie, The Weather Girls etc) and was also the last time dance music recordings were made by live musicians (improvements in electronic instrument technology and the changing aesthetics which spawned house and techno left, by the mid-80s, Washington D.C.'s go-go music as the last genre exempt from the drum machine).

Anyway, Shalamar are pretty easy to return to periodically and I do, though Jody Watley's solo work never caught my attention to the same extent and while her exercise video was not her finest aesthetic hour, she's become sufficiently financially independent that she no longer deals with record companies and puts out her records herself, which I can only applaud. Slowly this is bringing me around to her 2006 release The Makeover which only has one really remarkable song but I've returned to it quite a few times as well, called "Bed of Roses", a collaboration with jazz-inflected electronica group 4 Hero that shows her and them to great advantage - which is really all I meant to say.

Internal Combustion

2007-05-22T19:22:00.000-04:00

Listened twice today to Internal Combustion by percussionist Glen Velez - an excellent record! The CD is a 2003 reissue on the Schematic label of what was presumably a vinyl release in 1985. The record is almost entirely solo percussion pieces for various frame drums - North African and Central Asian variants of the humble tambourine, the Irish bodhran and so on.

The pieces are generally repetitive with a regular pulse and no extreme dynamic shifts - a gentle avantgarde-ism that should appeal to anyone who likes Steve Reich's early percussion work (on which Velez has played). The exquisitely precise timbres of the instruments and the fact that the recording captures all their nuance is where much of the beauty lies. Often in Western music, popular and in the concert hall, "exotic" percussion instruments are employed for a bit of passing color and are tucked off to the side of the stage or recorded listening field. In this case, they are in the foreground and miked with such detail that your head could be inside the drum (in a good way!). Every snare rattle and ping of finger on taut goatskin drumhead is delicately rendered.

I also very much like the fact that such quintessentially acoustic music keeps reminding me of experimental electronic "dance" music, particularly Thomas Brinkmann, a similarity that probably hasn't escaped the folks at the Schematic label, whose usual stock in trade is just such music.

Monitor Street

2007-04-10T01:36:00.000-04:00

The corner of Monitor Street and Greenpoint Avenue is the location of Uncle Paulie's, a modest truckers' coffee-shop/pizzeria by day and recently the scene of live underground rock shows put together by the redoutable Todd P. Its location is right across the street from the Newtown Creek-Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant, the daytime aspect of which is suitably post-apocalyptic (you can check this Flickr set for more views) but at night, when the tops of its towers are illuminated in some kind of ultraviolet light and the neighboring buildings are all scrap metal yards with guard dog signs and concrete structures with their gates left open because they really contain nothing but the most unsalvageable refuse, you can feel that you've just arrived outside Mordor.

Fortunately a quick right turn (as you dodge the sweeping eye of Sauron) places you amidst friendly faces and interesting rock bands - most recently, on April 7th, Double Dagger drove up from Baltimore (I'll let you find their MySpace page yourself - hints for Googling: they are called Double Dagger and they are from Baltimore - you may not however, immediately find singer Nolen Strals' collaborative art blog 99 Drawings In 99 Days, well worth a look), Metalux drove in from elsewhere in Brooklyn and Green Milk From The Planet Orange flew in from Japan.

As the sole band about which I had no notion, Double Dagger proved to be the unexpected surprise which every evening out should have. A vigorous drummer and bassplayer, as the sole instrumentation, provided a necessarily minimalist but tensile backdrop to Nolen Strals' vocal and physical method acting - on record, his singing seems a little more conventionally emo, but live it's all pretty much transformed by his interaction with the audience. At first his persistent caroming around, singing right into people's faces and bumping into them seems like predictably confrontational tactics, but it becomes clear that he's too gentle about it for that analysis. Ultimately the effect he creates is more like one of the more manageable forms of autism, as if he is operating by a different set of rules about how to interact with people. It's still a bit disconcerting but any number of factors (from his between song remarks to the implicit social contract of the young artist circles in which the band travels where the weirdness tends to be rather contained) combine to make it feel more collaborative than threatening. Of the various approaches to challenging the performer-audience relationship, from G.G. Allin's ordure-flinging to Robert Fripp perching unceremoniously on a high stool, this one seems worth a return visit.

Also worth a return visit (now that I've completely run out of steam for writing about the evening) are Metalux, an electronics duo you should also have no trouble locating on the Web (add the term "carbon" to your search) - part of why they are great is they are not "electronica" - they play electronic music without an Apple logo in sight or an audible rhythmic pattern that could function on anyone's dance floor anywhere. Jenny Graf plays some guitar and has this amazing looking homemade synthesizer with alligator clip connections and a pre-digital era touch-pad controller, while M.V. Carbon combines keyboard and reel-to-reel tape loops made on the fly, which she then modifies by manipulating the metal reels as if they were turntables.

Green Milk From The Planet Orange are yet another Japanese power trio, of which there are currently quite a number - not as alien as Fushitsusha, as inventive as Minimokoto or as needles-in-the-red as High Rise, the three nonetheless purvey a high energy brand of drone/hard-rock psychedelia that was thoroughly convincing while it was happening. They sit down to play as well, which in a packed venue with no stage was a bit of limitation, although occasionally at the start of a song, they stood up on their amps, made the devil horns hand sign to the audience, swung their hair around - generally conveyed "we come to rock" - and then sat down again to resume their intricate finger motions.

Back On The Horse

2007-04-04T22:56:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the gap - too much to write about rather than too little!

Just finished George Gissing's New Grub Street, a late Victorian novel focused on the struggle between art and commerce, with the latter, justifiably or no, the clear winner. No character in the book who does not have money ends up anything other than dead or obscure and the characters who become well-to-do by luck, initiative or both, continue to prosper as we wish harder and harder that the novel's deeply cynical point of view were not so vindicated.

It is also, in a sense, a meta-novel, as the characters themselves, all striving in the literary world of their time, continuously debate the relative merits of M. Zola's naturalism versus Dickens' use of farce and melodrama to make his novels tick. Gissing himself, considered a naturalist who evolved into a realist (someday I'll really understand that distinction) is not above a bit of farce and melodrama himself when it serves to keep the plot moving, ennoble an otherwise doomed character with a dignified death and so on.

Although it is not an accepted literary school, Gissing might best be called a pessimist. He is not dispassionate enough in his presentation of grim realities to hide the fact that his sympathies lie with the losers, yet the two main characters who come out on top at the finish (and who he has constructed skillfully enough that we can't actually despise them, at least I don't think we are supposed to), end the book with this bit of dialog:

"Ha! isn't the world a glorious place?"
"For rich people."
"Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils!"

Busman's Holiday

2007-03-15T15:59:00.000-04:00

Club music songs are very much like Marimekko fabrics - a few elegantly simple design ideas in sort of modular pieces that can be reliably recombined and usually work out, as long as you're not expecting anything other than what they are.

Pulling a mid-90s UK house 12" named "I Believe" by an ensemble called the Happy Clappers out of the "to be listened" pile pretty much guaranteed a certain kind of listening experience, with the only variable being whether it would actually be good or not (it proved to be pretty good).

Were there any doubt that this was to be a well-crafted specimen of its time and place (and not much more), a glance at discogs.com shows that they had two hits, "I Believe" and "Hold On," which they rereleased in endless 12" vinyl and CD configurations and then recycled them through a series of compilations, most containing the word "Ibiza" in the title.

The lyrical phrases "I believe" (sometimes punctuated with "in love") and "comin' to ya" alternate over a 4/4 kick drum, some congas, the standard slightly gospel-inflected three-chord piano vamp and some synthesized strings, and, of course, hand claps.

None of this explains why these records are sometimes convincing and often not - the precise tension and release structure (where the kick drum drops out for a bit, the piano chords pause or accelerate and so on) is not obviously quantifiable. For that matter why is "If You Should Need A Friend" by Fire Island (hmm, who are they appealing to?) better, or in what ways is it better?

For one thing the piano part has four chords and more chromatic motion between them and there are synthetic horn blats in place of the strings. The lyrics, although banal, attempt to be about something rather than just generic feel-good dance floor hollers and singer Mark Anthoni injects a little gritty expressiveness. At the opening, before the lyrics start, he takes a simple two-note wordless melodic fillip and jumps back and forth between his falsetto head voice and high tenor register to very good effect.

The record label, by the way, is Junior Boy's Own which I've found to be pretty reliable - I'll have to see what else is kicking around here on their imprint - in the meantime, should you (for example) find several hundred in a dumpster, give them a listen!

Brass Monkey

2007-03-13T02:55:00.000-04:00

There was a flurry of rediscovery around here centered on The Acoustic Folk Box, which was inversely inspired by missing Martin and Eliza Carthy (and Norma Waterson) at Symphony Space a couple of weeks ago.

The box itself has many pleasures, one of which is a track from Martin Carthy's early 80s quintet called Brass Monkey. The group combined Carthy's guitar and voice with fellow Albion Band alumnus John Kirkpatrick on concertina, along with percussion and brass instruments, trumpet, trombone and saxophone (sorry not to list everyone's name and dozens of other affiliations). They made two vinyl records on the legendary Topic label in 1983 and 1986 and the two were combined onto one CD, The Complete Brass Monkey, in 1993.

The Acoustic Folk Box includes "The Maid and the Palmer," the single best piece from their eponymous first LP, and the second LP, See How It Runs, has one equally astonishing song, called "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid." On both, Kirkpatrick's playing on the various small accordion-type instruments (concertina, melodeon, button accordion) has a remarkable propulsive quality - you can feel the air pumping in and out of the device, urging on the rhythm like a bellows stoking a fire. The brass parts, lending throughout an air of the concert hall or military band which takes us away from the farmyard, have an almost modernist edge, with their repetitiveness and the slightly off-kilter folk metric patterns - lots of dropped crochets and two beat measures. The parts, to my wildly free-associative way of thinking, are reminiscent of Rhys Chatham's marvelous "Waterloo, No. 2" (try this snippet on Last.fm which should give you the idea).

Finally, the lyrics to "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid" are intriguing as, according the liner notes, the song was originally titled "The Handweaver and The Chamber Maid." The change of focus from petty rural class rivalry to the industrial revolution, the factory maid now representing the new class that is replacing the handweaver, is quite brilliant. Furthermore, despite his family's disdain for factory girls, the narrator seems only too happy to give up the "wearisome trade" of the weaver who is "so bent that he's like to crack" and instead "trudge to the mill in the early morn", where the girls are!

The other big reminder upon revisiting the box was find out more about Eliza Carthy - her closing track, "10,000 Miles," is one of its high points and her 2002 release Anglicana, currently digitally unspooling for my delighted ears, suggests that was no fluke - more to come!

Pourquoi Je Chante

2007-03-03T20:03:00.000-05:00

I was browsing through the track list of "Ultra Chicks Vol 1: Filles In The Garage!" (a collection of French 60s female pop - there were at least 6 volumes in a bootleg series) and noted "Stella" among the many first name-only noms d'étape. I recalled that this was almost certainly the same Stella who subsequently married Christian Vander and they founded the still extant progressive rock band Magma in 1969 and with a few seconds of Web searching, my recollection was proved correct.

Rather than repeat myself on Magma, you can read a quick and entertaining summary in this Time Out New York piece and I'll do a post culled from my secret desert island discs catalog on my two favorite Magma albums at some later date.

Meanwhile it is Stella Zelcer Vander who is of interest today. One of the so-called Yé-yé Girls, Stella apparently became disenchanted with the superficiality of the musical style, hence her eventual move to a rather more esoteric musical realm and now bills herself as "the anti-yé-yé girl" on this rather elegant MySpace page (it's so rare that these things look good, it's sort of a cause for celebration when they do - compare Magma's own page).

My friend's digital copy of "Ultra Chicks..." proved to be corrupted on her track "Nouvelle Vague Blues" - it was just white noise, and surmising this not to be the original intent, I went on the hunt, only to find everyone on Soulseek had the same corrupted copy. Finally, I tracked down a 2-CD compilation that came out in France in the late 90s called La Collection Sixties des EPs Français. Forty tracks of this stuff may be more than the casual fan needs, but it is thoroughly enjoyable in the right doses.

The "Nouvelle Vague Blues" itself fulfills the promise of its title, with a jazzy backing track and lyrical references to "Jules et Jim." The song "Beatniks d'occasion" (audible on her MySpace page) also takes an ironic look at fashionable Bohemianism, although some of the songs recorded when she was very young (she started at age 13) are charming for the opposite reasons - "Douée Pour La recré" is a schoolgirl complaining about how tedious all her academic classes are and she's best suited for recess, and "Les parents twist" is (I'm assuming) a complaint about oppressive parents based on some sort of Americanized teenage slang ("Mon Dieu, que c'est triste, d'avoir des parents twist!") - just the sort of linguistic borrowing Jack Lang campaigned against during his tenure as Minister of Culture!

Finally, don't miss this interview. Also, I noticed a lot of this French 60s pop is tagged with "velocipede radio" on last.fm, a phrase I can't find anywhere else, so I'm going to contribute to its spread by using it here (but not on Del.icio.us which doesn't support two-word tags!).

The Name Of This Blog

2007-03-01T23:50:00.000-05:00

The phrase Sold By Volume is the title of a 10" vinyl record by the band Tono-Bungay (which I am in). It was actually coined by Robert Dennis, so I am hereby giving him credit, even though I have now appropriated it.

You can hear a track from the record on the band's MySpace page, read clever blog entries there, look at long lists of experimental rock bands - and so on!

Never Bought A Ringtone

2007-02-25T00:59:00.000-05:00

Like any self-respecting music fanatic, I prefer to have heard of or heard everything first (preferably before it comes out) but awards like the Grammys serve an effective winnowing function for figuring out what to listen because it is culturally significant in some way that might not have to do with musical merit. With that in mind, I still couldn't get past the third song of Stadium Arcadium, but the Dixie Chicks' Taking The Long Way Around (a band I always wanted to like but never quite made the jump) has proved to be a keeper. The title track retells the classic American rebel/road myth with economy and style. There's the self-consciously girly but still charming "pink RV with stars on the ceiling" and a passing reference to the anti-war remarks upscuttle (belabored subsequently on the song "Not Ready to Make Nice") but also a couple of awkward lyrics - the opening quatrain's reference to "...houses in the same zip codes/Where their parents live" is a little too sociological and "wouldn't kiss all the asses that they told me to" is sort of trite Nashville vulgarity, "take this job and shove it" redux.
My absolute favorite songs, the ones currently on endless repeat, tend to be where the vocal harmonies are so dense and gorgeous that I don't even notice what the songs are about ("Bitter End" and "Silent House", the former distinguished also by 12/8 meter, which I favor unreasonably). "Lubbock Or Leave It" is powered by a grainy Telecaster riff that evokes the Bakersfield modern of Dwight Yoakam, for me a preferable California country-rock reference point to the Eagles from whom I have a lifetime prejudice against the word "easy". Apparently the seemingly thin-skinned country music audience has a problem with this one too - I'm just reminded that I need to find and relisten to Terry Allen's semi-legendary Lubbock (On Everything). Finally, I was struck by the use of banjo (presumably played by Emily Erwin) - we are, I hope, through with the authenticity police scolding pop-country bands for using traditional country instrumentation as window dressing, and in fact the staccato, tactile timbre of the banjo tends to sit in the mix more like whatever the East Asian sounding stringed instrument is on the East Flatbush Project's "Tried By 12" (perhaps having Rick Rubin as producer has something to do with it).

Dumpster Diving

2007-02-13T04:41:00.000-05:00

One step below the dollar bin trawling, certainly in price and possibly in dignity (though rarely in degree of satisfaction), is picking records straight out of the trash. One recent foray turned up a number of items which may delight us over the coming days; Leonard Bernstein conducting his own three symphonies and Ravi Shankar on Apple Records performing the soundtrack to a film called Raga, which I suppose must be a documentary about Ravi Shankar (circa 1970, Howard Worth director), but this evening's high point is Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's "Missa Romana in F", as beautiful a baroque mass as you could want (for "6 Solo Voices, 2 five voice choirs, and double orchestra"). The sacred works that get their own chapters in history books are those like Bach's Mass in B Minor, which are monumental like Michelangelo's Medici Tomb Moses but sometimes you don't want something quite that heavy, and Pergolesi provides quite a refreshing contrast.

Also appealing is the fact that the record label credit is Harmonia Mundi/BASF. I believe the current multinational chemical corporation called BASF is the same - I once thought of them (when I thought of them at all!) principally as manufacturers of magnetic recording tape who branched out into the music industry by funding and distributing smaller record labels, most famously the German jazz labels Saba and MPS which yielded several fruits of my teenage forays into the ever more obscure, particularly Association P.C.'s Erna Morena.
Further aesthetic pleasure comes from the Unipak sleeve, a style which all BASF productions I've seen came in (I suppose they held the patent), a gatefold LP jacket with the slot for the record only accessible from the middle of the inside. There's a comparable CD sleeve design - reaching randomly towards the shelf, I find the Wiretapper 14 compilation came in such a package.

Good Will Hunting

2007-02-11T23:25:00.000-05:00

The best vinyl dollar bin trawling on the Upper West Side is (in descending order) Gryphon Books at 81st and Broadway, the church basement thrift store at 96th and Amsterdam and the Salvation Army store on 96th Street west of Broadway, with the Goodwill on 79th street a distant fourth (or fifth if you count the amount of good stuff I've gotten from sidewalk vendors), but the headline was hard to resist.

Recent acquisitions in this realm include Carolyn Hester's self-titled 2nd LP from 1960 on Tradition Records. She has the vibrato-laden soprano which, particularly through Joan Baez, came to exemplify the earnestly ethnomusicological approach to folksong "collecting" that characterized the folk revival until Bob Dylan came along and injected a dose of scruffiness. Were you to write a formula for the model early 60s folksong LP (one cover of "House of The Rising Sun", check, one song in Spanish, check, one spiritual with liner notes about the performer's great respect for the American Negro, check), you would probably come out with this record. On the other hand, you can never have too many versions of "She Moved Through The Fair" and Hester chooses to go with the version of the last verse in which the young bride is dead and appearing in ghostly form.
The most iconic photo of Hester from the period is this one with a pre-fame Bob Dylan at her side and ubiquitous 60s folk session bass player Bill Lee (Spike's dad) to the right.

Also worth its dollar is Exuma's fifth record, Reincarnation, from 1972, on Kama Sutra/Buddha. Exuma (birth name McFarlane Anthony McKay, of Bahamian origin) was one of not too many black performers in the mid-60s Greenwich Village folk scene and sounded enough like Richie Havens that it would be hard to skip the comparison altogether. Working from a high sandpapery tenor and rapidly strummed acoustic guitar, his arrangements on this record include lots of percussion, and keyboards as needed. Starting with a bit of Belafonte-ish hokum called "Brown Girl" (which reminds you of the Buddha label's bubblegum origins), he takes an unexpected turn into a fairly faithful version of Paul McCartney's "Monkberry Moon Delight" distinguished from the original (which had only come out a year earlier) by escalating the comically aggressive surrealism of McCartney's vocal performance to a more genuinely crazed level. What could be fairly standard early 70s folk rock gets a lift from Exuma's broad range of vocal styles and the somewhat dark, mystical edge to a lot of his lyrics, with frequent references to Obeah, the Bahamian flavor of the syncretistic Afro-Caribbean religion called Santeria or Voodoo elsewhere.
Exuma's whole story is readily available at wikipedia and elsewhere - the record collector in me is, of course, intrigued by the stories of lost early 80s albums in micro-editions on barely extant labels that were anthologized in 1986 by ROIR records on Rude Boy, his final release.

Greetings!

2007-02-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

I think this blog will be principally about what I listen to and read, with some mention of my own modest additions to the world's mountain of words and music.

Today's words of choice belong to Margaret Drabble. "The Millstone" is her third novel (of 17 so far), published in 1965. I have read close to a dozen of her books, and the biographical blurb at the front of each always mentions that The Millstone won the Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize (a fine Welsh name, I don't need to tell you). (The answers.com description of this prize and who has won it seems as good as any other).
In any event, the frequent invocation of the prize caused me to assume (in an unexamined kind of way) that this book must be somehow slightly better than some of her others, so I started it thinking I might be dazzled. This is in general not a good way to start anything, since it tends to increase the chances of disappointment. In this instance, we know, or suspect we know, that prizes are given for all kinds of reasons other than intrinsic merit, or cannot be regiven to subsequent and possibly better works as they must be spread around to newcomers.
Also, there's something slightly jejune about the notion of "a prize" attaching itself to anything, carrying as it does connotations ranging from gold stars in kindergarten to blue ribbons for the finest pigs, plastic toys in cereal boxes and so on. In thinking about it, I free-associated my way over to Johann Gottfried Herder's 1772 essay "On The Origin of Language" ("Über den Ursprung der Sprache") which is invariably referred to in histories of linguistics and the philosophy of language as "Herder's prize-winning essay" - apparently a nod from the Berlin Academy was career-making in late 18th century Germany, as Kant was also to discover.

All of which has distracted me a bit from just reading the book - I'll get back to it and let you know how it turns out. After having recently finished her Radiant Way trilogy, which is quite grand in scope, I find returning to her 60s books, enjoyable as they are, tends to shrink the world back to the emotional lives of well-educated young mothers coping with tiny cars and grim National Health waiting rooms.

As for listening, I continue to plow through a small mountain of 90s club music 12" vinyl that came my way, discarding about 10 for each one I hold on to. Today's keepers include "The Copper Groove" by Freestyle Man (aka Morris Brown aka Sasse, real name Klas Lindblad) which is quite melodic and highly repetitive, with a sort of hushed spoken male vocal whooshing in and out, never grabbing the center of attention - pretty characteristic of late 90s German electronic dance music. The SatelliteRecords.com sticker on the sleeve tells me it's "House, Deep" and who am I to argue?
Also of note are six quite stylistically disparate mixes of UK soul singer Jaki Graham's version of Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody". One mix that stands out is by Dave Way (who I hadn't heard of but has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Macy Gray to the Spice Girls - all the big names!). His approach is comparatively sparse, with that kind of loping West Coast hiphop groove, punctuated by an angular five-note melody that is on the verge of being in the wrong key. It's a refreshing contrast to the Development Corporation remixes which are busy and entertainingly anachronistic in some ways - surely even in 1994, those synthetic horn blats that seem borrowed from a Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis Janet Jackson production sounded dated.

Finally in the CD walkman (someone looked at me holding it today and asked "what happened to your ipod") was a CD combining two (1970-71) releases by Australia's The Master's Apprentices (or The Masters Apprentices - no two sources of info, including their album covers, are in agreement about the apostrophe), called "Choice Cuts" and "A Toast to Panama Red." Most people would put these two on any short list of essential Australian rock albums of the progressive rock era and they earn their spot. Despite a few period-specific tendencies for which your tolerance may be limited (a Tull-ish flute moment here, a 7/4 time signature there, massed high vocals that almost hint at Queen), there's a lot of straightforward blistering guitar-playing that tends to carry the day more often than not.

By the way, the milesago.com site linked to in the preceding paragraph appears to be the spot on the Web for Australian music info, now that Ian McFarlane's Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop is no longer online. I was slightly annoyed after having purchased the latter to find the whole thing was available online. Now that I've put the book in storage, I am double-crossed that it is no longer there!