Music roundup

It’s a measure of how busy I’ve been over the past few months with work that I didn’t post at all in December. So much for New Years resolutions!

Here’s a few things that came across my radar while I wasn’t posting, starting with music:

Funky16Corners: The Return of the Mothership. Looks like I’ve been sitting on this one for a long time, almost a year! Great hour long mix of afrofuturistic funk, rock and related grooves (listen directly).

Stereogum: Ugly Beauty: The Month in Jazz – September 2018. Always a good read, I’m pointing back to this column from a few months ago thanks to its review of Randy Weston’s life and career. I got to see Weston play over 25 years ago at UVa and the fierceness of his playing stuck in my memory, along with pointers to the Alice Coltrane Warner Brothers recordings and Temporary Kings, both of which I need to actually go back and listen to…

Aquarium Drunkard: Spiritual Jazz Sunday. This came out as I was working on my “Holy Ghost” mix. It was worth looking over to see what I should include and where I should diversify (for instance, avoiding leaning too heavily on the John Coltrane/Alice Coltrane/Pharoah Sanders axis).

Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Duke Ellington and His Original Cotton Club Orchestra – Publix Allyn Theatre, Hartford, Connecticut, April 11, 1932. Eight minutes of history from the earliest known existing Duke Ellington radio broadcast.

Stereogum: Watch Paul Simon’s Record-Breaking 9th SNL Performance. Because “Can’t Run But” is one of my favorite of Simon’s songs and I love that he decided it needed more attention.

Mark Guiliana: Thank You (featuring Brad Mehldau). A really lovely Thanksgiving present from Guiliana-as-songwriter, featuring Mehldau’s poignant performance of his tribute to his mother before she passed away.

Bach Collegium Japan Chorus: Verbum Caro Factum Est – a Christmas Greeting. I had the great pleasure to sing with Masaaki Suzuki a few years ago (Bach’s St. John Passion), and am looking forward to hearing this Christmas recording even after the holiday has been put away for another year.

Spain: Blue Moods of Spain: a History, Vol. 1. Archival recordings from before the band’s official birth.

Approaching the manger

It feels a little early to be writing about Advent. It’s a week past Thanksgiving but — thanks to the funny gap in the calendar this year between that moveable feast and the end of the month — Christmas seems like it’s still far away. And yet: we will put up a Christmas tree Saturday, Holiday Pops starts next week… and Sunday is Manger Sunday at Hancock Church.

There are so many things about joining a new church family that feel like learning to speak a foreign language. I remember listening to the pastors talk about Manger Sunday in our first full year of attendance, over ten years ago, and wondering what all the fuss was about. “Manger Sunday” seemed like another one of those magical words or phrases. You know the ones, if you’ve been in a church any time in the past forty years. The words that someone says, and you just know they’re freighted with all sorts of history and baggage, and that there are probably perfectly good English synonyms for them but that the preacher won’t ever use them. (“Covenant” and “stewardship,” for me, are in danger of being some of those words. It’s not just in churches, either; at my kids’ schools, I hear an awful lot of “growth mindset” uttered in much the same hushed tones as “covenant.” Or “lift up our joys.”)

So, Manger Sunday. I thought, It’s a bazaar. Or, It’s … stewardship? No, we did that already. Is it mission work? Well, kind of. What is it?

Manger Sunday has been observed in this way, for the past 149 years, at Hancock Church in Lexington: You bring an item that someone less fortunate than you might need—warm clothes, a coat, socks, mittens, gift cards, toys, books games—and you get up with the whole rest of the congregation, from four year olds to 94 year olds, and you walk down the aisle and around the pews while singing Christmas carols and you bring your gift and you add it to the pile in the unlovely but sturdy twelve foot by four foot by three foot wooden “manger.” By the end of the procession, which lasts for about six hymns (each sung with all the verses), the manger is so full that there are secondary and tertiary and quaternary piles all around it on the floor. The gifts are given to families in need through the City Mission Christmas Shop

It sounds so simple. It really is simple. But it makes a powerful impact. In 2017 City Mission, through Hancock and other churches, distributed 5,000 gifts to families through their partner agencies. That’s 5,000 happier Christmases right there.

And the impact doesn’t stop there; in fact, I’m not sure who makes out better, the recipient or the giver. There’s a world of difference between supporting “charity” by check and credit card, and going shopping for something that someone—granted, someone you’ll probably never know, but some one—will wear to keep warm, or find joy in playing with during an otherwise bleak winter, and taking it with your own hands and carrying it down the aisle. All, mind you, while singing about God’s magnificent leap of faith in our worthiness to receive his gift to us.

I don’t know what being a Christian means. But sometimes I feel like Manger Sunday is a pretty good answer.

In the name of love

Election Day 2018 has come and gone. And while no one got everything they wanted, I can reflect on two things in particular that give me some comfort. 

First, one-party rule in Washington is over. The Senate races in Florida and Texas were heartbreaking, but no legislation will be passed in the next two years without coming to terms with the new Democratic majority in the House. That’s a big deal.

Second, Massachusetts voters roundly rejected the attempt to roll back transgender rights.

So it felt good last night to be on stage for Tech Tackles Cancer, singing “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and knowing we had collectively raised almost (as of 11/5) a quarter of a million dollars for pediatric cancer research and care. And knowing that there is always hope for the future, even if you have to make your own.

Exfiltration radio: Thirty years ago today

This is the second of two recent Hackathon playlists, and where The Holy Ghost was all about the Spirit, this one’s all about the body.

I have trouble believing that 1988 was thirty years ago, but then I also have trouble believing that my being old enough to drink happened before some of my youngest coworkers were born.

Lots of material that I omitted that might have made a volume II, in favor of more recognizable (though still oblique) corners of 1988. But it’s worth recognizing that the iconic rubbery shredding guitar on that iconic early Morrissey solo number is by none other than Durutti Column frontman Vini Reilly. And that Janet Jackson wouldn’t do anything as innovative as Rhythm Nation for basically the rest of her career (though she’d have bigger hits). And that Madonna would ultimately prove more transgressive than what Thurston did to “Into the Groove,” but that the combination of the two would be as dark and unsettling as Leonard Cohen. And… Well, you get the picture. There was a lot of darkness around the corner everywhere in the late 1980s.

  1. Eye of Fatima, Pt. 1Camper Van Beethoven (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
  2. Birth, School, Work, DeathThe Godfathers (Big Hits, Skinny Ties:New Wave)
  3. In Your RoomThe Bangles (Everything)
  4. I Don’t Mind If You Forget MeMorrissey (Viva Hate)
  5. Peek-A-Boo (Single)Siouxsie and The Banshees (Peep Show)
  6. Cupid ComeMy Bloody Valentine (Isn’t Anything)
  7. Everybody KnowsLeonard Cohen (I’m Your Man)
  8. Into The GrooveyCiccone Youth (The Whitey Album)
  9. Miss You MuchJanet Jackson (Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814)
  10. Silver RocketSonic Youth (Daydream Nation)
  11. ColdsweatThe Sugarcubes (Life’s Too Good)
  12. Dad I’m in JailWas (Not Was) (What Up, Dog?)
  13. Don’t Believe the HypePublic Enemy (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back)
  14. ChristineThe House of Love (The House of Love)
  15. Carolyn’s FingersCocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll (Remastered) [Remastered])
  16. Under the Milky WayThe Church (Starfish)

Exfiltration Radio: the Holy Ghost

It’s been a hard day for many folks, after a hard year and 259 days. But in these days you have to do what you can, and not worry about what you can’t.

For me that translates to seeking out what’s important in music. Which is why the fifth volume in my series of one-hour Exfiltration Radio shows is about spiritual jazz. 

(Why that name? The music takes some of the techniques of free jazz and infuses it with the searching, looking beyond that Coltrane brought to the table with A Love Supreme. It’s a broad banner, as the multiple volumes of the Spiritual Jazz compilation series show.)

This one mixes up a track from one of my favorite McCoy Tyner albums, his Extensions, with other tracks from Alice Coltrane, Donald Byrd, Wayne Shorter, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the redoubtable Pharoah Sanders, and a few other goodies that I’ve found over the years on Bandcamp or other spots. It’s a good one-hour introduction if you’re feeling sinister—and it’s a good reminder that not everything that is in the world is of the world.

Enjoy…

  1. Rainbow WarriorsAlan Braufman (Valley of Search (Reissue))
  2. Journey In SatchidanandaAlice Coltrane (The Impulse Story: Alice Coltrane)
  3. Message From The NileMcCoy Tyner (Extensions)
  4. Dance! Dance, Eternal SpiritsJoe Bonner with David Friesen, Billy Harper, Virgil Jones, M (Black Saint)
  5. ElijahDonald Byrd (A New Perspective)
  6. Ja MilHastings Street Jazz Experience (Spiritual Jazz)
  7. JuJuWayne Shorter (JuJu (Rudy Van Gelder Edition))
  8. Spirits Up AboveRahsaan Roland Kirk (Volunteered Slavery)
  9. ColorsPharoah Sanders (Karma)

Marketing killed the telephone. Is it killing email?

I still have a landline telephone, albeit reluctantly. While it’s theoretically useful to have a phone number where we can be contacted at home, the theoretical usefulness of this concept is destroyed by the mounting avalanche of calls that promise to lower our credit card bills or switch us to a different electrical provider, to say nothing of the hangups, the “hello? are you there?” calls, and the well meaning seekers of local office. Of course all of the above come from our area code and exchange, meaning that it’s impossible for us in a thirty day period to tell whether the call coming through is from our child’s school or from a telemarketer using neighbor spoofing to look like they’re calling about something of local interest.

This is old news. I would guess that if you’re under 50, the only reason you have a landline is that it came as a bundle with your internet and TV service. (That may be the only reason you have old-fashioned TV as well.)

But what I’ve watched with dismay over the last few years is the mounting marketing avalanche that seems determined to kill my email inbox, just like it did my landline.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about enlargement spam, or any of the other overt pests that used to fill our mailboxes. By and large, modern mail services and mail clients take care of that.

I’m talking about aggressive email marketing campaigns from companies that I actually do business with.

I have no idea why I receive three copies of newsletters from that bow-tie company in Vermont (though I suspect having filled in a different forwarding address somewhere along the way has something to do with it) or four copies of every email from Organizing for America. At least the latter is entertaining, since you can sometimes watch them test different optimizations for the subject line. But five or more emails a week from the kitchen store or the online music store, none of which reflect my interests or purchase history, seems to me like a bridge too far. 

That’s even before you count all the emails going to stupid people who think that my Gmail address is theirs. I’m looking at you, Teresa Jarrett and Taijah Jarrett and Ted Jarrett and all the other people who just can’t remember that they don’t have their first initial plus their last name at gmail dot com.

It adds up. I’m regularly deleting more than 50 emails a day unread. It’s worse sometimes when Teresa or Taijah or Ted sign up for a site that does its own marketing emails.

What kills me about this is that the failure of this communication channel that’s been a locus of my personal and professional interest my entire adult life is caused by the same thing that killed my landline. It’s marketing gone amok.

I have done marketing (of a kind) for a living, and I know the pressure of building the “top of the funnel.” The problem is that you can touch a heck of a lot of people at the top of the funnel and make your marketing numbers look great, only to have none of those people convert into business because they weren’t ever really interested in your product to begin with. But the challenge is that if you go the opposite route and try to target too precisely, then you’re dealing with the kind of surveillance technology that gives Internet marketing a bad name.

So what are you going to do? Well, it turns out there are a few sites that I regularly get email from where I actually read the emails. Religiously. Even though they update a couple times a week. Discogs is one, because it emails me about things that are relevant to my vinyl collection and my extended interests. But that’s information I gave them, not that they observed by watching over my shoulder. I think that’s the key — the information sharing has to be consensual and I have to get some genuine value from giving away my data. 

Cocktail Weekend: the Deadly Sin

Another long delayed cocktail post, this one about a creation I’ve been enjoying for years and haven’t shared yet.

The Deadly Sin is a cocktail I first came across in a now-defunct iOS cocktail app, Cocktails+. The principle is simple: take the Manhattan formula (two parts bourbon or rye to one part vermouth, add bitters and stir), and play with the vermouth portion by replacing a portion with a fruit based liqueur. In this recipe the addition is Maraschino liqueur, that delightful cherry based elixir from northern Italy—or Croatia.

Girolamo Luxardo S.p.A. is the best known producer of Maraschino that’s available in the States. The firm apparently started on the Dalmatian coast in a town now known as Zadar before moving to Torreglia after World War II. So the history of the distillery has war, exile, and murder behind it—appropriate for this drink.

So why Maraschino in this cocktail? Maraschino (along with dry Curaçao) were among a very few liqueurs available to Gilded Age bartenders like Jerry Thomas, who famously defined “fancy” cocktails to contain a splash of Curaçao and “improved” cocktails to contain both Maraschino and absinthe. (The imported liqueurs were thought to display the higher class of the drinker.) In this spirit, the Deadly Sin may benefit from a substitution of Curaçao for Maraschino.

Despite the classic flavor of this cocktail, the Deadly Sin is a relatively recent recipe credited to Gary Regan’s Joy of Mixology in my defunct app, though there is also a claim to the recipe by Rafael Ballestros. Enjoy!

Music roundup

There are a bunch of recordings and bootlegs that I’ve been trying to check out over the summer. Here’s the list, off my browser tabs and onto the blog:

Yo La Tengo: Two live radio sessions from 1997, circa I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One. Little capsules of perfection.

Herbie Hancock: 1972-03-25, De Doelen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. A surprisingly acoustic session from the Mwandishi period.

Prince and the Revolution: Dream Factory, via the Albums That Never Were blog. A reconstruction of the album that would have been Prince’s last with the Revolution and which eventually morphed into Sign ‘O’ The Times.

Musicophilia blog: The home of the 1981 post-punk magnum opus mixtape has no fewer than three big sets I’m looking forward to digging into: The Sensory Replication Series, which explores mixing ambient and atmospheric tracks with music of all other kinds and genres; Post-Punk 1968-1977, which locates the roots of the “post-punk” era in much earlier music; and Afrominimalism 1966-1978, exploring non-Western versions of minimalist composition.

Last, not a bootleg but something I’m really excited about, a lost Thelonious Monk session from Copenhagen, with Charlie Rouse on sax, cunningly titled Mønk. I’ve pre-ordered the 180g vinyl and I’m really looking forward to hearing the set.

 

September, I remember

It’s been a pretty whirlwind summer, jumping from England into Tanglewood to the normal August madness that is the Black Hat concert, to a week with my parents. And now school has started once again. It’s enough to make one really feel the passing of time.

The Boy has found his way a little into Harry Potter, speaking of the passing of time, and we’ve watched up through The Prisoner of Azkaban, which remains my favorite of the movies, some fourteen years after I first wrote about it. The timing of the arrival of a new wave of HP Lego is welcome; he got the Whomping Willow for his birthday and was eager to build Mr. Weasley’s Ford Anglia and the Willow. The bricks for the set’s section of Hogwarts have stayed in their box.

But the biggest way the passing of time made itself known was my visit to my Grandmother’s house. “Mama Linda,” as my uncle Forrest has always called her and which makes it easy for us to tell the kids which “grandma” we’re talking about, made her home with Papa Olin in a small house that my great-grandfather Zeb Jarrett built, and my grandfather added onto. Up until my grandmother’s death while I was in grad school, we still felt her animating presence throughout the house. Now, it seems more like a museum. Rearranged by my aunt, who modernized it a little, removing most of a wall between the kitchen and the tiny dining room and made it into something that could be rented, it sat empty until my aunt’s death. Now my cousins have redecorated it a bit, taking down some of my aunt’s generic mountain pictures and cleaning it with my sister’s considerable help. But it still sits empty and waiting.

Battery Park Book Exchange

Lisa and I got a rare night without the kids last night. We made the most of it, with dinner at Cúrate, but not before stopping into the Battery Park Book Exchange for a “best of both worlds” visit: Lisa got a glass of champagne and a board with cheese and bread, and I got to explore and find books.

My finds: Everyone but Thee and Me, an Ogden Nash collection still in its original jacket (albeit in third printing); Walter M. Merrill’s biography of William Lloyd Garrison, Against Wind and Tide; and Tidewater Tales, which I had passed up before and am still a little hesitant about. I’ll guess that ultimately the stories about original Virginia family settlements will outnumber the ones that are irrevocably tainted with the original sin of race and slavery, but I will probably be wrong.

In the garden



We’re visiting my parents in the hills outside Asheville, North Carolina this week. The hardest challenge is using the days before they fly by.

We lucked out on Sunday, though. We were on the road early enough to get to my parents’ before dinner, and ended up having spectacular Mexican food and coming back home in time to catch my aunt and uncle on their porch—and see a deer in their backyard. Yesterday was just running menial errands during the day, but an Asheville Tourists game at night (a 2-1 loss, but at least it didn’t rain on us! And there was ballpark food!). And today we get to have date night in Asheville and the kids get to have a sleepover with their aunt, who will by morning be their long-suffering aunt.

But it’s also just silly things, like the fact that my dad (also probably long-suffering) says “thank you” when I drop another pile of jazz CDs on him. Or that my North Carolina family will eat grits with me (I’m a solo grits eater in Massachusetts). Or that we’re all having fun with each other.

Like the car ride home last night from the ballgame, in which my sister called to say that our cousin was going to bring home some (inaudible) to us. I hung up, turned to Lisa and said, “Did she say he was bringing mackerel?” “Yes.” “No, record albums.” “No, macarons.” “No, white lightning.” (It was macarons, and they were delicious.)

Today: downtown Asheville so the Boy can spend his birthday money at the general store, and lunch of some kind. Then a rainy afternoon (UVAopoly, anyone?) and on to dinner. And then who knows?

Wireless

I love my Bluetooth headset—a Bowers and Wilkins P5, comfortable over the ears and great sound without “noise canceling” trickery—but I sure wish I’d remember to charge it before climbing into an airplane.

Fortunately JetBlue has under the seat power. So I’m sitting at 38,000 feet, about ninety minutes to Las Vegas, listening to Delvon Lamarr and Daniel Bachman and wondering, why can’t I sleep after getting up at 3:30 this morning for a 6am flight? And answering, probably the two cups of coffee I’ve had before and after boarding.

Flights are productive for me. Not work necessarily; this flight is loaded with staff from every security company in the Boston area, so it’s not the time I want to work on a roadmap deck. But it’s a great time to write. Another eight pages competed before my brain switched off. JetBlue is also winning at inflight Wi-Fi today. All sorts of wireless in this future world of ours. Except, of course, the USB cable running from headphones to the power brick that’s plugged in under my left knee.

Friday random 5, swimming in soup edition

It’s a muggy muggy day in the Boston suburbs. Let’s stay cool with some Random 5!

  1. Oingo Boingo, “Nothing Bad Ever Happens” (Skeletons in the Closet – The Best of Oingo Boingo)
  2. Zola Jesus, “Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake” (Conatus)
  3. Chamber Domaine, “Requiem für Eine Polka, for Piano and 13 Instruments” (Henryk Górecki) (Górecki: Life Journey)
  4. Katie Hanley & Godspell Ensemble, “By My Side” (Godspell – 40th Anniversary Celebration)
  5. Go-Gos, “Lust to Love” (Beauty and the Beat)

Morning listening: Daniel Bachman, “New Moon”

Aquarium Drunkard: Daniel Bachman, The Morning Star. I’ve been listening to a fair amount of “American primitive” guitar work recently—mostly guitarists who follow in the steps of John Fahey, but also the psychedelic work of Steve Gunn and, especially, the rural energy of Daniel Bachman. I’m pretty excited to get Bachman’s latest release, The Morning Star. There’s a good combination of hypnotic guitar-work and hypnotic drone in the excerpt posted here and on Bachman’s Bandcamp page. Now the only decision is, digital download only or digital + vinyl?

Bonus, via Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: a twenty-minute live Bachman set from Philadelphia last January.

Revisiting the 2016 election, precinct by precinct

New York Times: An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 election. What’s fascinating to me is how transitional some of the maps are—and how well they map to urban/rural, high income/low income, and white/black lines. My old neighborhood growing up went for Hillary at about a 60%-33% margin, less than neighboring streets that are (or were 20 years ago) home to lower income housing, but much more than some of the other areas of our suburbs.

My current house is in the middle of a big blue bubble, of course.