Dial "M" for Musicology

Fearsomely Authentic

I have just finished listening to Raising Sand, the T-Bone Burnett-produced Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration that won Album of the Year.  To me, the thing sizzles, and I’m a fan of neither country music nor Plant.  I never liked Zeppelin much; I thought of them as screechy, strutting posers and only really, really liked a few odd songs (“Kashmir,” “Boogie With Stu,” “Hot Dog,” and “Hey Hey What Can I Do” come to mind).  But here the entire thing is magic: Krauss and Plant blend superbly, with no diva-isms from either, and T-Bone Burnett proves, once again, the extent to which he owns the recording process.  Here’s why: Country mawkishness (she done left me, yore dyin’, etc.) are suddenly not mawkish, but nakedly human.  The textures are spare but perfect (banjo, fiddle, and autoharp spice up a lean, taut instrumental and recording aesthetic.  And as for that:

Jay Bellerose’s almost impossibly wonderful drumming sometimes sounds random, sometimes sounds as if he’s so tired and sad he can barely get to the beats, sometimes evokes the low-tech industrial drive of an old machine shop, and sometimes crackles with rockabilly energy.  Add to this instrumentalists, including Burnett himself, of such command and experience that the feel of each song is blisteringly vivid and authentic.  One does not think, “Oh, a rockabilly number”; one thinks “My God, I’m hearing not only the best of 1956, I can hear Eddy Cochrane, Ricky Nelson et al. breathing in the background, and the grease and sweat of the time to boot.”  This for number after number: a great song is given a superb interpretation by the singers, unimprovable instrumental treatments, and a recording aesthetic that captures an entire cultural ethos, somehow, be it blues or country or lament or rockabilly or whatever.

If this sounds like polysyllabic, pretentious slop I don’t care.  Listen to the CD yourself.  You will admit I’m right.

Reactions to the Record II

So I’m back from Stanford; this meeting was absolutely superb (the first one in April 2007, which I reported here, was also superb).  I have to love the sort of meeting where someone  (Denis Hall, actually) can come up to me at a reception and say, “I need your address, so I can send you that Hungarian Rhapsody I played.”  Now, I don’t believe I even asked for it; he knew I’d want it, probably by noting my reaction when he played it—but these are people who know enough about each other to know what we’re interested in.  A couple of people who liked my musical examples asked me for copies, and I was able to give them copies on the spot.  I heard ancient recordings, originally on Edison cylinders, by the likes of August Wilhelmj (1845–1908), Anton Arensky (1801–1906), and Sergei Taneyev (1856–1915), who studied theory with Tchaikovsky and piano with Nikolai Rubinstein, and was Skrjabin’s teacher. 

Not bad, eh?

Questioning performance practices orthodoxies—especially ones you yourself held—was a red thread running through several of the papers.  Taking sacralization of the Urtext head-on, George Barth ruminated about what can be learned from the heavily-edited editions of Beethoven piano sonatas—von Bülow, Schnabel—that are still habitually reviled by, well, performance practices types like us.  David Milsom not only talked about Joseph Joachim as an interpreter, he put on his Joachimian hat and interpreted Brahms’s Second Violin Sonata in that mode.  Will Crutchfield and Rebecca Plack did wonderful things with the song repertoire, remind us all how it really ought to work: rhythms and tempo deriving from the poetry and the projection of it.  Jonathan Summers talked about the extent to which students reflect their teachers, and can pass on Great Traditions—variable, of course, which is what makes it interesting.  Sandra Rosenblum talked about a specific case of this, where grand-student Raoul Koczalski was considered to have inherited Chopin’s manner of playing from Karol Mikuli.  I agree with her, but one can easily misapply that information.  I am an inheritor of the J. S. Bach tradition, as follows: I studied at UCSB with Peter Yazbeck (upon whom be praise), he studied with Lubka Kolessa at the Toronto Conservatory, she studied with Nikolai Rubinstein and Franz Liszt, Liszt studied with Carl Czerny, Czerny studied with Beethoven, Beethoven studied with Haydn and Mozart (well, only a lesson or two), Mozart played and studied with Johann Christian Bach, who studied (of course) with his father Johann Sebastian.  Which means that anything I say about Bach is Sinaitic truth. 

Or not.  But the extent to which one student can pass on a teacher’s “tradition” is a worthwhile question to ask, in any given case, and particularly when the case is being made with great shrillness.

I—first up, after the welcomes—talked about improvised ornamentation in Chopin’s Nocturnes and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, noting that notated score excerpts and examples from the dawn of the recording era by prominent pianists indicate that it could be either profoundly style-literate or just running fingers—the sort of stuff we look down on.  The problem is that some of the running-fingers stuff was, well, by Chopin himself, and Liszt students.  What do we do about that?  I suggest that we in the performance practices discipline have been guilty of a rather large oversight; “how Liszt played” is never modified by his audience, as if he’d play the exact same way for yokels and cognoscenti.   So how do we factor that in?  My conclusions were that we should become more style-literate—practicing musical style more than individual pieces, in certain cases.  Moreover, practice of pure technique (a long discredited part of piano pedagogy) actually provided people with tools they could use in improvising, so we might consider that, too.  It was very well received; people told me it was the most on-the-edge thing there, they think it should be published, etc.

Imagine a subdiscipline where the holders of orthodoxies are the same ones who are dismantling those orthodoxies and questioning their own recent statements, all the while gleefully listening to new recorded discoveries.  Imagine a field where, at least with a certain number of us, the sheer “isn’t this cool!” aspect trumps most ego considerations, and we’re too happy running forward—pell-mell, falling all over each other—to protect turf, cling to unworkable ideas, etc.  We’re simply figuring it all out as we go.  One could, you know, live like this.

No shortage of really interesting new information, in other words, and great conversation, and performances.  (And I haven’t even mentioned the pianola performances.)  Now it’s back to reality, and other forthcoming events.  Oh, yes, and toasting the Inauguration!

Who Will Remember What I Know?

[Updated with some links.  I just can't believe what's out there.]

“Who will remember what I know?” is a favorite line from a John McCutcheon song.  McCutcheon is a favorite folksinger, a Rounder Records artist, whose CDs accompanied a certain percentage of Ben’s childhood.  I always liked this line, and so I am using it to title a blog that memorializes things I know about but almost no one else does.  In no particular order, I will list ten 45 RPM singles that I always play whenever I find myself sifting through my singles box, which has to be retrieved from Remote Storage (a.k.a. the laundry room), then riff  upon them.  Some of these are good, some are just weird, all are noteworthy to me for autobiographical reasons…and probably to no one else.  You will almost certainly never be able to hear more than one or two of these, yet I needs must bear witness to them, even though I be yea verily screaming into the void.

Because They Matter To Me (God spare my twisted soul).  Happy New Year, if I can’t manage anything before then.

1.  “The Martian Hop” by the Newcomers.  This is not the more famous original version by the Ran-Dells (“We have just discovered an important note from space/The Martians plan to throw a dance for all the human race”), made famous by Dr. Demento.  No, this is an inexplicably straight-faced soul version by the Newcomers.  My brother worked at a couple of different radio stations, and radio stations always received free promotional copies of oddities, abject dreck etc. that desperate companies and artists implored them to play.  Other masterpieces I remember (but didn’t save): “Father Mackenzie” (by, of course, the band Eleanor Rigby), songs titled “Nocturnal Emission” and “My Family Was Gay,” etc.  You’d stare at these singles—whether you heard them or not—the way you’d stare at a car wreck.  I was told later that an entire batch of these grim testaments to doomed human endeavor were sold at the local swap meet for $10.  The young buyer was assured they were “unreleased hits.”

 2.  “Overture to the Sun” (A theme from the film Clockwork Orange [sic]) by Terry Tuckers [sic] Orange Clockwork.  There is an isolated little track by this name, a pseudo-Renaissance dance, by Terry Tucker that was used for the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange.  I think this was playing when lead character Alex has first been “cured” and is being publicly tormented to demonstrate how his violent impulses have now been curbed.  Anyway, I found this in a singles bin when I was in England in 1975–76: Not For Sale—Promotional Use Only.  The little dance has now become an exceedingly boring synthesized round-and-round-and-round over both sides of the single.  (It is not this version, by the way.)  I used to use a variety of versions of this tune for a ballet exercise, and so the sheer weirdness of Tucker’s long-shot at wider play appeals to me.  I may be the only person on earth who knows or remembers this version.

3.  “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Sailor (I think 1976).  Sailor was a Dutch band who had a couple of hits when I was in England, and who I saw on Top of the Pops.  This one is a tribute/send-up of a movie-musical showstopper, and its words are clever and the music well put together.  I have another song of theirs called “Glass of Champagne” as well. 

4.  “Arms of Mary.”  Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, also 1976.  Live version here.  

Not sure why I like this; it’s sort of a bland pop ballad.  Possible reasons:  1) the subject matter is about all I was thinking about at the time; and 2) so many other things on the English pop charts were so appallingly bad that certain mediocre things sounded great.  You don’t believe me?  Fine: look up the bands Showaddywaddy, the Bay City Rollers, the song “The Last Farewell” by Roger Whittaker, the song “Back in the New York Groove” by Hello, “Goodbyee” by I can’t remember who, “Don’t Play Your Rock and Roll to Me” by I can’t remember who…

GOD.  YOU’VE JUST NO IDEA HOW BAD IT WAS.

5.  Bev Bevan, “Let There Be Drums,” 1976.  This is a cover of a Sandy Nelson song.  Remember Sandy Nelson?  Very “Sing Sing Sing”—interesting clips of him, discussing drumming history and theory, can be found on youtube.  This is Rock spun down to its DNA: a bass line (played on a lead guitar) alternating with solos.  Bev Bevan was the drummer of the Move and E.L.O., two of my favorite-to-the-point-of-idolatry bands, and so I snapped up this solo effort the second I found it.  For no real reason, he double-tracked the drum part.  I did meet him and the rest of ELO backstage at the Portsmouth Guildhall, the night of (I think) June 19, 1976…

6.  “Washington Square” by the Village Stompers.  Mid-1960s, folk revival, Dixieland meets Klezmer, this song is so great it’s like a drug.  It was also used as the soundtrack for a black-and-white documentary about Greenwich Village that my family saw as an added feature (they did that then) in Lake Arrowhead in, perhaps, 1966 or ’67.  This song and “Love is Blue” obsessed me—something about the chord changes—when I was ten or so.

7.  “River Bayou” by the Beckies (mid-1970s); co-composer and pianist is Michael Brown of the late-1960s, New York-based Art Rock ensemble the Left Banke (“Pretty Ballerina,” “Walk Away Renee”), though he was not a member of the band proper.  Brown’s was one of the approaches to what I then called “Classical Rock” that I liked far more than (say) Yes, Genesis, Focus etc. who I found to be impossibly ponderous.  I also liked piano-based bands rather than “keyboard”-based bands.  Still do.

8.  “You Can Run” by the Shake Shakes.  I know nothing about them except that they were a band based near Pomona, California (where I lived for seven years, and next door to Claremont).  Great song (late 1970s, I think, though it has a 1960s pop feel), fine performance, Eddy Cochrane recording ambiance, sank without a ripple.

9.  “Call My Name,” by Jimmy McCullough, maybe 1975.  A solo effort by the boy guitar genius of Thunderclap Newman (“Something in the Air,” “Hollywood,” “Accidents”—staples of the Los Angeles underground radio playlists) and later of Paul McCartney’s band Wings.  He had issues (N.B. understatement) with substance abuse, and died at age 26 (maybe 1976?) from heart failure.  A superb track, later reissued with odds and sods (including two other versions of the song) on a CD devoted to him.

10.  “Ship of Time,” by Jaim.  The keyboard player in this UCSB-based band (Late 1960s, I’m guessing), was Paul R. Bishop, who was later my piano teacher in high school, the first non-old-lady teacher I ever had.  (I believe he now on the music faculty of Scripps College, in Claremont, CA, my hometown).  I envied Paul his sightreading ability (his everything ability, really—he was also an organist and harpsichordist and composer…AND he had been in a rock band, damn it!), his car (a gold Mercury Capri), and his utter coolness.  So when my brother later ran across both this single and another by the same band, I snapped them up.

Thus this installment of absurdity.  Certain of these numbers might better have been categorized under "Music and Torture," but there it is.  Wishing all and sum a warm, safe, and loving holiday season.  

Expert Witnessing

“He. Has. No. Case.”

Thus my son, on the recent Joe Satriani lawsuit, in which he claims that Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” (I assume that the recent Grammy nomination is not coincidental to the suit), uses substantial portions of his instrumental song “If I Could Fly.”  It’s the “I used to rule the world; seas would rise when I gave the word” lick.  The resemblance (melody, repeated chords IVmaj7—V—iii7—vi, at least to my ear) is clear.  My son’s argument is that it’s in a different key (irrelevant), that it is not nearly as important in Satriani’s song as in Coldplay’s (irrelevant and, I think, wrong: the rest of Satriani’s song is noodling), and that there aren’t any words and it’s so much better than the Satriani (irrelevant and quite, quite right).  The Satriani is six-and-a-half minutes of godawful noodling interspersed with that lick, and it sounds to me rather like a bland 1970s instrumental.  Satriani sounds like Satriani: absolute command over his instrument.  His tune, however, does nothing for me.

These are the issues that are going to be debated in court, I imagine.  I think from time to time about the process of expert witnessing, and all the things that are involved, so I explained to Ben some of what was likely to go on at the trial.  The poor lad was outraged: “WHAT?!  People get paid to listen to songs and talk about the differences, and compare them? I would pay to do that!!”  Yeah, I said, but you don’t just walk in and blab.  “Of course not!  You have to do the research, which means listening to a lot of other songs, which you’d want to do anyway!”  Well…  “OK, Dad, I see your point; if it’s crappy music…”

I will be interested to see how this plays out.  I imagine there are a lot of other issues, legally: other music that has used the same lick, likeliness of influence, whether the cited music is common enough to be outside of copyright, etc.  One suspects that the persuasiveness of the attorneys in question will have a good deal to do with the success of either side’s perspective.  Shades of the “My Sweet Lord”/”He’s So Fine” lawsuit, at least in my memory.  There’s probably a much bigger pool of cases to talk about, cases that have gone both ways. 

Watch the news.  I can’t help but wonder why the lawsuit was announced after the Grammy nomination—it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Satriani smelled money, or notice, or something; he can’t have missed the song before this point.  I’m not in his shoes, though, as illustrated by my own experience: 

One of the very few ballet exercises I was proud of writing was a ronde de jamb par terre in kind of a mushy Scots idiom; it’s on the first of my two ballet CDs.  Years later, I heard another ballet CD from the same company that seemed to copy me, and even got a professional musician friend to verify my suspicions.  So I—huffily—asked the woman who owned the company about it (a dear friend; the woman who trained me as a ballet pianist).  She was mortally offended, and she asked the other pianist, who explained that his piece was…a Scots folksong.  So I got a copy of the folksong on interlibrary loan, and…my piece sounded a hell of a lot like it.  I thought I’d made it up.  Maybe I’d heard it on Garrison Keillor’s show a week or two before, because someone told me it was performed on the show…

So one of my best ideas was, indeed, really good.  Unsurprisingly, I probably didn’t think of it; my aural memory was better than I knew, and when I thought “Oh, maybe I’ll try something pseudo-Scots” in the ballet class, I played an actual Scots folksong I had heard but didn’t know I’d remembered.  I was not wronged; the only wronged people were those I questioned.  Sigh.

Warren Zevon once said in an interview, “You’re better off not knowing where it comes from.” 

I believe it. 

I wonder if Coldplay will? 

Lost Genius

Some time ago, Phil blogged here in expectation of my friend Kevin Bazzana’s book Lost Genius about Ervin Nyiregyházi, a bona fide child prodigy who never quite figured out how to live on planet earth, even though he lived to 84.  I finally got my hands on the book, and to my weird sensibility it’s a page-turner.  It is true that there is much of a too-much-information nature (Nyiregyházi’s failings, sexual proclivities, etc.) but to those of us who know his recordings it is a fascinating story.  He has been called “Liszt incarnate” (Harold Schonberg) but the picture is more complex than that: he really could produce volcanic effects that no one else could, he really did take tempi that ranged from personal to incoherent, he really did take liberties that ranged from daring to insane, and he really did think in music, as one might expect of a bone fide prodigy.  Some of his writing (in English, I mean) seems like overheated raving, but it makes sense if conceived as a musical passage—repeated sounds driving to a climax, etc.  (To a former lover:  “The elements!  Elements!  Elements!  Fate!  Fate!  Fate!”)  He wrote compositions on many aspects of real life, such as “Bernard Goetz vs. the Punks”  or “The Failure of the Dutch Consulate to Grant Me a Visa” (Kevin told me about that one).  His compositions—which were legion—seem to be almost involuntary in some ways: obsessive, reliant on low registers and late-Lisztian chromatics, but seeming weirdly non-progressive or -developmental.  It is as if he composed as other people take notes: rendering his experiences and emotional states in tones, as if that was a necessary mental process.

 

Some regarded him as a pianist of colossal importance, and some thought him a self-centered crank or even incompetent.  We talk about the demise of “personal” styles, but for the most part we can’t really abide them; we complain about note-perfect playing but in reality we demand it.  Let’s try again:

 

To listen to a Nyiregyházi performance is to hear a not only inaccuracy (he didn’t practice regularly, and by the time he resurfaced in the 1970s his technique was basically a ruin) and tempi that might be considered capricious, or even incoherent.  This recording offers several apt examples.  So: a joke, a lunatic?  Rather, a real window into nineteenth-century pianistic style: only What They Did to a certain extent, but more important is the because-I-want-it-this-way stance.  There is an individual personality of titanic power in his performances, however bizarre his personality may have been, his playing had the Ring of Truth, the sense of sheer conviction and individuality for which the best nineteenth-century pianists were celebrated.   We find idiomatic Hungarian-Gypsy playing, dark Hungarian grandeur and brooding, and a full orchestral palette of dynamics and timbres.

 

Worth studying for a wide variety of reasons, his playing commands full attention, a rare, rare reaction today.

Thick Context

Hooray for Dial M’s 200,000th hit! On my own side, I just FINISHED revising my book, Chopin’s Polish Ballade, for Oxford University Press. I still have to muck around a bit with the musical examples, printing it out etc. and send it to them, and the copyediting and proof phases lie ahead, but as far as the writing: DONE. Among the things I’ve had on hold because of various other tasks is this blog, now almost two months late.

This year, for my birthday, Brother Joel sent me this retrospective of Elektra Records, a 2006 compilation set from Rhino UK. I know, I know. I’m sorry. I’m sure your siblings are also very nice. Another professional note about Brother Joel: when I was doing research for my Raga Rock article in the late 1990s, he was basically my Research Archive: books about the Yardbirds and Kinks and so on, obscure recordings and outtakes, the works. He played different versions of “Running Bear (Loves Little White Dove)” over the phone at one point, so I could compare approaches to rock and roll Indianism, and I remember thinking, en passant, “Perhaps not everyone has these resources…” I gave the paper at a Popular Music meeting, and at the end all the guys in the audience (mostly English, Sociology, Cultural Studies etc. profs from east coast universities) got up and stormed the front. “Where’d you get that stuff? That was wild!” Well, the JB sound archive in Los Angeles. Actually, I’m the only one entitled to use it… Oh, your premium institutions don’t have access to these materials? Really? Their shoulders slumped in dismay. Wa-al, ah jes’ live’n Greeley but, y’know, we do our best…

To the point. In addition to some fairly geeky inclusions (photos, postcards, pins etc.) this package contains not only five CDs—four of chronological anthology and a fifth of eccentricities—but also a book about the various artists signed and nurtured during founder Jac Holzman’s tenure there (1950–73). Of course, there are plenty of familiar names: Eric Clapton, the Doors, Judy Collins, Jackson Browne, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Bread, Carly Simon, even Queen, etc. But there are plenty of fascinating artists, lovingly chronicled in the accompanying book, of whom you may not have heard: Ars Nova (long among my faves, with my youthful Art Rock fixation, but why “Fields of People” rather than “I Wrapped Her In Ribbons”?), Clear Light, the Rainbow Band, Aztec Two-Step, even the stoner humor of Jack S. Margolis (A Child’s Garden of Grass). I am at minimum a few years younger than the original target demographic for this music, but am culturally close enough that I understand whereof they were singing: love, protest, drugs, weirdness. Take Dave Peel and the Lower East Side: my brother had the original Have a Marijuana LP (1968), and it consisted of 1) what sounds like a live recording in the village, 2) the F-word, 3) tee-hee drug humor (this is category in which the included track, the Alphabet Song, falls: “ABCDEFG, LSD and DMT…”) etc. Not included on this anthology is their “Happy Mother’s Day,” which is darker (“Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Mother’s Day, I am your son, I am a runaway/Living on the East Side, always getting stoned, always getting high: I’m glad I’m not home!”—latter-day reviews of the album, many them justified, may be found here). My enjoyment of this anthology is both that of encountering unfamiliar music and revisiting zeitgeists familiar from childhood, and that of study: this is a profoundly musicological package, with its representative inclusions and documentary materials, and it betrays the deep scholarly passions that have always informed a sector of rock fandom. Spending time with this material is, for me, bliss: Old Bore At Play.

But the context! Of course, I’ve always loved Roger McGuinn and the Byrds, and remember reading about Byrdmania. As it happened, though, I never heard any songs by the Beefeaters, McGuinn’s pre-Byrds band. To hear “Don’t Be Long” is to remember the Beatlemania industry and all the copycats trying to latch onto a good idea. (May I say that McGuinn’s subsequent Byrds and solo and folk work was a much, much better idea, but we all come from somewhere, nicht wahr?) Song after song on this wonderful anthology produces similar thoughts: oh, wow, right, School of Joan Baez! School of Peter and Gordon! An interesting folk./art/psychedelic/blues blend… Fascinating, wonderful stuff (with a couple of real turkeys, of course), and illustrative of the almost ridiculous level of imagination and creativity that was bubbling out of the clubs in those years. Recordings like this put the stuff we all do know from those years in a new kind of relief; emphatically, it is not that the artists who eventually achieved commercial success were better; there’s far too much caprice in the music business and audience taste and warring benevolent and malign influences of the stars and planets for there to be any coherent explanation. It is just that to hear an anthology such as this one is a powerful reminder of how deep the musical culture was.

Imagine if more survived from other blisteringly creative eras: Florence in the early years of the seventeenth century, Vienna in the final third of the eighteenth, the improvisations of the Parisian pianists of the 1830s…

I know; there are only so many hours in the day. For those who enjoy aural time-travel, though, this anthology has my strongest recommendation. Thanks, Brother Joel!

Nonesuch

Yesterday I took out a favorite record of my youth: French Dances of the Renaissance, an old Nonesuch record by the Ancient Instrument Ensemble of Paris. Now, to my friends, colleagues, and cognate scholars in the Performance Practices sub-disciplines who cringe whenever they hear Old Early Music of whatever kind, let me just say: pace. (Recte: STFU!) Decades ago, I would barricade myself in my room and listen to recordings like this, and recordings by the New York Pro Musica, and various other things, and these were sounds unlike anything else in my environment. Maybe they aren’t even my favorite recordings of this repertoire now, but it’s like the pop music of one’s youth; even if no longer completely relevant, they take you back youthful feeling of doors opening wide, musical terra incognita. Medieval and Renaissance music? In my early college ears, it was just mind-blowing, regardless of the quality of recordings and performances. So, now, I take out my old vinyl, with Renaissance dances played on modern harpsichords and some vibrato in the vocal pieces and so on. Throw on that certain recording, and all the youthful electricity is back coursing through the veins, and the Southern California Santa Ana winds whip across my face, and the delicate beach zephyrs of Santa Barbara waft in dorm window and caress the skin. Really.

Seems unjust that this privilege should only be accorded to a few, I know, but those of you who opted instead to become filthily dishonest politicians from Alaska have other rewards. In hell, too, I hope.

Where was I?

So, out of the record jacket falls an advertisement. “All Nonesuch releases are $2.50 each, both mono and stereo.” Oh. Interesting. Of course, in my local record store I guess they weren’t selling that well; I remember an entire couple of bins of Nonesuches going for 97¢. Yes, 97¢!! I would love to tell you that I dumped all the money I had on Morton Feldman’s Silver Apples of the Moon and French Baroque Music and Lukas Foss and Schumann and Mendelssohn partsongs and everything else I’d never heard but…no. Like any other idiot, I only bought, even at prices that obscenely low, what I thought I’d enjoy. To wit: Baroque Trumpet stuff (ensemble, trumpet and organ, etc.—I no longer listen to these much because I don’t like piccolo trumpet, and now that my son plays real Baroque trumpet and I know what a bigger instrument should sound like), Renaissance Xmas music (well, how can you resist it?), Scott Joplin etc. It wasn’t until later that we got Paul Jacobs recordings of Bolcom, Busoni, Stravinsky…

Actually, French Dances of the Renaissance was one of the recordings from my parents’ library that I presented to them with the announcement that I was filching it. With their blessings, they said. Odd that Jonathan likes this stuff, but that’s OK. And Peter Frankl playing the Chopin Ballades too? Sure! Take it!

A digression: Nonesuch will ever be, in my mind, in a kind of Righteous Corporation category. There was a triumvirate: Nonesuch, Penguin Books, and Dover. Impossibly obscure stuff reprinted and made available to you—you! The impoverished student with bizarre interests! You have friends and benefactors!—for a song. Penguin: Bede, Celtic Miscellany, Chaucer (that one wasn’t a very good translation, actually), Dante, Virgil, Pliny the Younger, Adam Smith…for a song, folks. The stuff you only see cited elsewhere is yours! Dover: music availability, old books, Debussy’s M. Croche, Jamews Huneker on Chopin… Surely they’re taking a loss on this stuff! I worked fast food jobs for a while, and would bring Penguin classics to get me through. Remember Macchiavelli’s account, from his exile from Florence, about dressing in his best clothes every evening and dwelling among the Ancients and conversing with them? That was me at 19, minus the good clothes—Virgil and Pliny on my break, and the miserable Burger King on Holt Avenue in Pomona would fade into invisibility around me. I mean, come on! Pliny was talking about aqueducts!

When I was in London in the mid-1970s, there was a Penguin Bookshop. All Penguin books! No lie. It was like walking into heaven. All in one place. Sweeter than any candy store.

For what it’s worth, Penguin is still around—not so obscenely low-priced, but sic transit gloria mundi—as is Dover. I look forward to receiving my Dover catalogues. Now, Borders and, I think, Barnes and Noble also have cheap editions of Great Classics. I don’t know how good the editions are, but—damn it—blessings on their heads. I won’t start hectoring about how Youth Today ought to read this stuff, because I don’t think Youth ever did, but I applaud those companies that at least make it available.

To return to old recordings: I find I listen to favorite classical recordings like I do rock recordings: with loving familiarity, humming along, pausing for the best bits. Maybe it’s a lazier kind of listening, because I don’t necessarily have to focus every last moment and be challenged and so on. But it is a wonderful feeling to listen to my old recording of, say, Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, and remember lying wide-eyed in my room, late at night. My God, do you suppose there’s more music like this? Then, after that, I could put on the Renaissance records (Du Fay, Obrecht) I would drive into Tower Records in Los Angeles to get…

I have more money now, and much less time. I try to hear new things, but revisiting the old is important too—it’s like a tune-up. It is true that listening to new things is more challenging and that repetition is most likely a sign of a less mature listening practice, but there are times when only the familiar will get you through.

Meno Mosso

Phil’s meditation on tempo here has much to chew over. To the discussion of “I Kissed A Girl” (a song I find creepy but, then again, I’m old) I would add another example. I don’t know how many of us remember “Jennifer Eccles,” a chirpy pop song (1968) by the English band the Hollies. Schoolyard crush, except they’re clearly of different classes:

I used to carry her satchels
She used to walk by my side
But when we got to her doorstep
Her dad wouldn't let me inside

So: childhood thing about the cute rich girl—fairly close to a universal, I suppose. Never a big hit in the U.S., I think; class issues simply don’t have the cultural resonance here that they do there in the Land of Hope and Glory, with the divide between the vocational schools and the elite public schools, the European heritage of caste and birth and all that. (Yes, I know “Society’s Child” by Janice Ian, but that’s about race, not just class). The 1995 cover of “Jennifer Eccles” by the Eels, however, is at about 1/3 tempo, and its agonizingly off-center, I’m-not-a-singer vocals make it (to me, at least) heartbreaking. The class divide is now high tragedy, because the singer does not sound like a kid, he sounds like an adult shattered by a childhood experience. This is the dead opposite of chirpy, and it gives the song something the Hollies’ version denies it—real pathos. I wish I could attach both versions here; it makes for a striking comparison, and the difference in tempo is the key element.

The question of what exactly constitutes slow practice, as raised by Phil in the same blog, is a complicated one. Certainly, the usual mechanical and unthinking drudgery of getting the fingers in the right places and nothing else—time after time after time—is not real practice at all, because the mind is soon so deadened that the benefit is down to about 5% of what practicing ought to be. I would suggest, though, that finding the way for the slower tempo to be expressive is only part of the task: the pianist should experiment with a wide variety of such, and should make sure to intersperse enough quicker “checks” on the passages to make sure that the fingerings etc. will work at faster tempi. Practicing become a much more multifaceted discipline this way, and especially for people like me much more about the journey than the arrival. In the odd moments I have been snatching to wrap my fingers around Brahms Two I find myself thinking this again and again. Different tempi produce different reactions, understandings, thoughts, whether one is practicing or hearing a familiar pop song done in a very unfamiliar way.

Where is the edge?

Another day, another Oblique Strategy: "Where is the edge?" is the card I pulled this morning. I confess that this isn't the first one I pulled, but it seemed most relevant to the day's business. (Am I doing this wrong?) I'm going over to WFIU later today to do and interview with David Brent Johnson on the 1957 film noir The Sweet Smell of Success for an upcoming Night Lights show. This is one of those miraculous films where absolutely everything went right: a crackling script by Clifford Odets, gritty black-and-white location photography, a great charismatic villain in Burt Lancaster's JJ Hunsecker, Tony Curtis's turn as a corrupt, brilliant, doomed press agent "running a fifty-yard dash with both legs cut off"  -- and, of course, the jazz score, which like I Want To Live had both a crime jazz underscore and a first-rate diegetic jazz performances, here by the Chico Hamilton quintet. So it's an obvious great subject for a jazz show, but there's something less obvious as well. It's a hip movie --  hip in the sense of knowing, but knowing in a particular way. It's not just smart but wised-up, spinning fantasies of hidden power, wheels within wheels, luxuriating in the mechanisms of conspiracies,  finding and following the hidden boundaries and lines of force between things: parts of the city, angles of conscience, connections between people, official stories and secrets. There is an edge to everything, and noir finds it.

More Blue Note covers, since you can never have too many Blue Note covers. How could I have forgotten the inspiration for this blog's name?

I had this cover, not the Hitchcock film, in mind when I came up with "Dial 'M' for Musicology." Its just so cool: Sonny Clark's photo on a desk blotter with a notepad and uncradled phone, like a clue to a crime investigation or a Person of Interest in an ongoing investigation, maybe our source in the street, Our Man In Jazz. Commenter Rootlesscosmo writes that he tends to imagine Blue Note covers "as always including an upward-drifting plume of cigarette smoke under a strong spotlight in a darkened space." I think this says something about the way Blue Note draws noir imagery into its overall aesthetic. The Blue Note look (which is to say, the look Reid Miles created for it -- notice how different the post-Miles, post-1967 albums* look from what we think of as "Blue Note") is a compound of different influences -- black vernacular culture, Bauhausy design modernism, and film noir. Some more noir-ish Blue Note covers:
 

And of course there is the wonderful 'Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia cover in my previous post.

*Generally a sad scene, although this McCoy Tyner album from 1970 makes a rather witty move within the Afrocentric space of the time:

Make room for squares

In response to my "Taboo" article David Cavlovic suggested I should check out LP Cover Lover. Whoa. That's a lot of crazy covers. How to pick? Out of so many extremely strange and grotesque covers, I kind of liked this one:

But actually I want to direct your attention to another, more specialized album-cover site. A couple of months ago my student Alisa (who is writing a dissertation on the Blue Note jazz label) sent me a link to a Japanese site that has every Blue Note album cover (recto and verso) scanned in at pretty high resolution. So you get both the album cover art --  Reid Miles' designs for Blue Note are justly legendary -- and the liner notes, written by heavyweight jazz critics like Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff. So this is quite a find!

Once again, I find myself with an embarrassment of riches on my hands. But how could I not include the cover for No Room for Squares?

Or 'Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia?

Or Judgment!

There are the bold experiments in using typography as an element of abstract design:

And, it must be admitted, the occasional plagiarism:

Cf. The Man With the Golden Arm (from this post)

Though god knows the Blue Note look has been plagiarized often enough:

I assume that most of these borrowings are intentional -- either homages or else attempts to recreate something the cultural mood associated with the original design. One of the albums I've been listening to a lot over the summer is Madlib's Yesterday's Universe album. Madlib is a hiphop producer probably best known for making the beats for the Madvillainy album with MF Doom. A few years ago Madlib making records as "Yesterday's New Quintet," playing and multitracking together all the instruments of a fictional early-1960s Blue-Notey jazz group a la the Three Sounds. What's always been interesting about Yesterday's New Quintet is that the music doesn't really sound like the music of the era it samples even though it perfectly conveys the ambient flavor of that era -- or at least period flavor as someone like myself, born a few years later and armed only with grainy low-fi memories of the time that followed a few years later, might imagine it. Yesterday's Universe moves the frame of reference forward to the late 1960s and early 1970s -- there's a lot of Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock in the sound  -- and splits Madlib's alter egos into a number of different imaginary groups, each outfitted with its own album cover (complete with wear marks and discount stickers).

Here is a good blog post about the album design from The Cover Up, yet another excellent album cover art site. The writer of this post points out that the Stones Throw art director, Jeff Jank, did a neat homage to an old Ornette Coleman album on Atlantic, Ornette!

As the guy at The Cover Up says, Jank (like Madlib) is "creating identities for artists that don't exist. The covers have a vintage feel that would have some to believe they are long lost albums from the 70's, found in someone's dusty basement."  This is very cool.