Category: Music

In sempibearna saecula

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Every time I come to Tanglewood, there’s something memorable about the rehearsals. Like the time that James Levine forgot about one of the sopranos in the scaffolding above the stage. Or the Meistersinger rehearsal where Johan Botha and James Morris drank their between-solo water from enormous steins.

Today, there was a bear.

Partway through the beginning of one of the movements of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, there was a commotion from the lawn. At first we ignored it; then the words “a bear!” filtered through everyone’s consciousness and we all stopped for a few minutes to watch the adult black bear cut a diagonal across the lawn.

And then we kept singing, as the grounds staff deployed a pickup truck to herd the bear away. One wonders what Rossini would think.

Update: Here’s a photo of the bear wandering the Tanglewood grounds, courtesy Tom Wang.

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Rainy Wednesday blues

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It’s the middle of the week—a three-rehearsal week, two down—and it’s been overcast and rainy all day. Nothing but gray. Which is why all the caffeine in the world isn’t enough and I’m staring at gray skies, and listening to Charlie Haden.

Ah, Charlie Haden. I’ve had the privilege of seeing both Haden and his son Josh Haden (with his band Spain) live. My experience with Charlie was in the context of his Liberation Music Orchestra, with Amina Claudine Meyers on piano and Makanda Ken McIntire, among others. I can’t say that I recall much of the show; I was unprepared to understand the complexities of what that band was playing and didn’t know much about Charlie at that time, including the fact that he had been the bassist with Ornette Coleman’s band featured on The Shape of Jazz To Come. But he made an impression on me for the serenity of his playing and the staggering complexity of some of the music.

What I’m listening to this afternoon is something else entirely. Haden’s other group, Quartet West, performed simpler, melodic, and overwhelmingly romantic jazz, and his 1997 album Now Is The Hour features all of that plus a string orchestra section. The ballads are sentimental and enveloping, the fast tunes are bracing and the playing is absolutely impeccable. Highly recommended.

Twenty years of Cheese Lords

Members of the Suspicious Cheese Lords, Washington National Cathedral, 1998
Members of the Suspicious Cheese Lords, Washington National Cathedral, 1998

Hard to imagine that my first rehearsals with the Suspicious Cheese Lords were twenty years ago this year. The group with the funny name is quite serious about Renaissance music, as my review of their first recording suggests. Some of my earliest posts on this blog were about a visit to the nerve center of the group, stately Cheese Lord Manor; over the years I have watched them develop as a group even as I’ve reminisced about my experiences with them.

I don’t know that I’ve ever properly acknowledged all the debts I owe to them.

First, vocally: I never sang seriously in a small group before the Cheese Lords. Though we were far from exemplary in the early years, I still learned important lessons about tuning, balance, pitch, and other vocal fundamentals that are critical when you’re one-tenth of a group instead of one-fortieth. I began a journey of exploration of my vocal instrument then that continues to this day.

Second, sociopolitically: I had never met anyone like the people I found in the Cheese Lords. Young, urban, gay (and straight), happily single or with long-term partners, they stretched my understanding of humanity–and thankfully were forgiving when I sometimes proved less cosmopolitan than I thought I was.

Third, the debt of friendship. The Cheese Lords sang at my wedding. I sang at some of theirs. Last summer, before this blog was resurrected from an almost certain grave, I sat in a sweltering Boston church to watch their Boston Early Music Fringe Festival debut, then hosted them for dinner. After dinner, we sat down with scores and sang through the Lamentations, puzzling my children and thrilling me.

I wish I could be at the Cheese Lords’ 20th reunion concert. (I’ll be singing Aïda that night.) But my heart will be with them.

Burroughs from beyond the grave

Dangerous Minds: ‘Let Me Hang You’: William S. Burroughs reads the dirtiest parts of ‘Naked Lunch.’  I was exposed at a formative age to the inimitable voice of Burroughs via Laurie Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak (“Paging Mr. Sharkey—white courtesy telephone, please!”). Then my good friend Catherine shared on a mix tape tracks from Material’s Seven Souls, including “Ineffect” and “The End of Words,” that also featured the voice and words of Burroughs. The common thread was producer Bill Laswell. Then I started hearing other recordings, including Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, which were produced by Hal Willner, who apparently recorded the Burroughs tracks that are the basis for this new collection.

As we come up next year on the 20th anniversary of Uncle Bill’s death, it’s delightful to come across new recordings of the master, even if the material is, as Dangerous Minds warns, very unsafe for work.

Thirteen years ago: Pernice Brothers

I forgot a show in my “live shows list“, and a look back through the archives reminded me. Thirteen years ago today I wrote about going to see the Pernice Brothers at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, Washington. It was a great show, and I had forgotten that Warren Zanes was on the bill too.

I did not note, but will note now, that it was also the kind of show and the kind of night that a very drunk 20something girl in a silver Mylar dress could fall on the floor when trying to dance and flirt, bounce right back up, and disappear into the night. Which is honestly the thing I most remember about the evening. Rock on, silver girl.

Low: “In Metal”

I don’t think there’s been a finer, more poignant song about being the parent of a small child.

Filling holes with tiny sounds
Shining from the inside out
Picture of you where it began
In metal
In metal

Partly hate to see you grow
And just like your baby shoes
Wish I could keep your little body
In metal
In metal
In metal
In metal
In metal
In metal

(Click here to hear the original album version of this song, from Low’s 2001 album Things We Lost in the Fire. So good.)

“…and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”

Pitchfork: Blood and Echoes: The Story of Come Out, Steve Reich’s Civil Rights Era Masterpiece. One of Reich’s early experiments in tape loop composition, the composition treats the spoken testimony of 18-year-old Daniel Hamm, who was beaten by police for trying to protect Harlem school children from being injured by an overexcited patrolman.

Later unjustly incarcerated as one of the Harlem Nine, Hamm’s story lives in Reich’s composition. Beaten by six to 12 officers over the course of the night, they tried to refuse him medical treatment on the grounds that he wasn’t visibly bleeding. Hamm recalls that he reached down to a knotted bruise on his leg and “I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them.” Reich loops this appalling statement via two tape players, one in each stereo channel, that drift slowly into and out of phase, into what has varyingly been described as a “raga,” a psychedelic experience, early minimalism, and media overload. To me, it speaks as a reminder that Black Lives Matter is responding to something that isn’t a new problem.

The mysterious history of Wafna

Wafna-tshirt

One of the most beloved traditions of the Virginia Glee Club is its mascot, the pink lawn flamingo affectionately named Wafna. She has been a tradition for “living memory,” meaning since before I was a member from 1990 to 1994. But how did such a rare and unusual bird become the mascot of a 145-year-old men’s chorus? The answer, surprisingly, is a little shrouded in mystery.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, Wafna is named after the utterance of the drunken, angry, naked victim of the Abbot of Cockaigne in the “In taverna” part of Orff’s Carmina Burana:

…et qui mane me quaesierit in taberna
post vesperam nudus egredietur,
et sic denudatus veste clamabit:
Wafna, wafna! quid fecisti, Sors turpissima?
nostrae vitae gaudia
abstulisti omnia!

But how did the name get to be attached to a pink lawn flamingo? And when? The “why” is probably the association of the members of the Glee Club with naked drinking in taverns.

As to when: on March 1, 1987, the Glee Club performed Orff’s Carmina Burana together with the University Singers, the Virginia Women’s Chorus, and the Charlottesville University and Community Symphony Orchestra. By the fall of 1987, there was a pink flamingo named Wafna who hung out at 5 West Lawn. Who acquired the flamingo and who did the naming are lost to history, but it seems pretty certain to have happened between those dates.

What is not lost is Wafna’s continued role in Glee Club lore. Her most dramatic moment was the colonization of the Lawn with more than a dozen Wafna-alikes a few years ago, but she also lives on in tour tshirts (like the one at the top), cocktail glasses, bottle openers, and of course as a pink lawn flamingo, who appeared at events at the 145th anniversary reunion weekend to lift our spirits.

Remembering J. Reilly Lewis

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In the late summer of 1994, twenty-two years ago, I was recently graduated from the University of Virginia and desperately missed singing. I had sung in the Virginia Glee Club for four years and hoped that I could find a similar experience in a chorus in Washington DC. I didn’t find something similar, but I did find J. Reilly Lewis.

Several other Glee Club members had sung in Reilly’s Cathedral Choral Society and spoke highly of it. I had fond memories of the National Cathedral from a young chorister’s field trip when I was in elementary school. It seemed like a good idea. A few weeks later, I was frantically studying my score on the Metro and wondering if I had lost my mind.

You see, I had been exposed to comparatively unusual repertoire as a Glee Club member: lots of Renaissance and medieval music, some modern works (my lifelong love of Arvo Pärt’s music dates to the 1992 Tour of the South), spirituals and Virginia football songs. But very little of the symphonic repertoire for chorus. We had sung a few works in collaboration with other choruses: Mahler 2, the Fauré Requiem, the Duruflé Requiem, and Orff’s Carmina Burana. But that was about it.

So imagine my surprise when the first piece we sang was Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, a challenging work even for mature singers, much less someone straight out of college. Piling on the difficulty, I had spent the summer unconsciously stretching my range, singing along to a lot of female singers (Tori Amos and Shannon Worrell among them). So when I auditioned for Reilly he cast me as a first tenor, not the second I had sung since high school. Suffice it to say I was in over my head.

But I loved it. And I loved singing with Reilly. And that made up for a lot.

Reilly was a musician’s musician. Unlike many conductors I’ve sung with since, he had a keen appreciation for the possibilities and limits of the human voice. He liked to lead us in a warmup borrowed from Robert Shaw in which we sustained a four or eight part chord on a neutral vowel, then shifted to a bright “ah” and heard the harmonic overtones bloom forth in the resonant acoustic of the Cathedral. He led us in other Shaw-inspired exercises over the years: lots of staccato on “doo,” the occasional marching-while-fuguing to ensure that we locked in the parts and could keep the rhythm, and other slightly crazy exercises. He was almost unflappable, so much so that when he lost his temper at a soloist who didn’t make it for a dress rehearsal it was striking.

But most of what I remember singing with Reilly was the repertoire, and the musicians, he introduced me to. I sang my first Mozart, Brahms and Verdi Requiems with him. I will always remember the Modern Mystics concert we did in 1997 or 1998, with music of Tavener, Gorecki and Pärt—in particular the Pärt set (“Solfeggio,” “Cantata Domino canticum novum”) that we sang in the side of the nave next to the positive organ. Copland’s “In the Beginning” from the balcony under the rose window in the rear of the nave. The Bach St. Matthew Passion.

And the Christmas concerts. For a man who legendarily had difficulty choosing Christmas music—he associated the season with the death of a family member—he put together some stunning programs, including the Pärt Magnificat, the Tavener “God is With Us” and “Thunder Entered Her,” Kenneth Leighton’s spine tingling setting of the Coventry Carol, and many more.

Of course, there were the guest musicians. Robert Shaw, first with Hindemith’s When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d, which he had commissioned many years before, then with a return to the Missa Solemnis a year before Shaw died. Sir David Willcocks, who grew so frustrated with our altos’ inevitable inability to follow his beat in the resonant echoes of the Cathedral that he turned around and beat time with his ass, shouting, “Follow this!” And, of course, Dave Brubeck, who came to play his “To Hope!” with us, and who—far from laughing when Reilly jokingly said “I’ve always wanted to do this” before playing the first few bars of “Blue Rondo A La Turk” for him—said “Keep going!”

Inevitably, too, I remember the disappointment when I told Reilly I was taking a leave from the Cathedral Choral Society. I had started singing with the Suspicious Cheese Lords—I was never a founding member, but joined a few months into the group’s existence and found there repertoire that I had missed, starting of course with the Tallis Lamentations of Jeremiah. And I was working crazy hours and newly married and applying to business school. We discussed it over dinner at the Lebanon Taverna. He was so completely consumed with music that he couldn’t understand why I, and other young singers, would want to back out and let our lives be consumed with other things.

I hadn’t seen him since I left Washington. Now I won’t see him again until we meet together with Bach, and Brubeck, and Shaw, and Sir David, and all the others on the other shore.

“Eighty-One”

KGB at the Lilypad in Inman Square, June 1, 2016

KGB at the Lilypad in Inman Square, June 1, 2016

I met some work colleagues at Bukowski’s in Inman Square last night. Generally when I’ve been there in the past it’s been to go to Hell Night, which is a pretty all-consuming experience in itself. Last night I was able to soak in a little more of the ambience.

Like Lilypad, a jazz club that’s only about half a block away from Bukowski’s. As I walked by last night to go to the bar, there was a pretty hot sounding quartet going (Tetraptych, if their calendar is right), but by the time we got back to the club KGB was playing. This trio (Ethan K. on guitars, Patrick Gaulin on drums, Rich Greenblatt on vibes) was sounding pretty good, playing a variety of originals, some standards (a Gershwin tune floated past at one point) and some post-bop stuff.

The last tune was “Eighty-One,” the Ron Carter/Miles Davis standard that he premiered on E.S.P. Here Ethan K. played the melodic line as Greenblatt provided chordal backup, with Gaulin providing elliptical drums underneath. I loved it, but the interpretation was a little different than what I think of as the core of the song, and it got me thinking about what that means.

In the original recording, by the second great Miles quintet on their first album, the essence of the song is the strong central bassline centered on the relationship between F (the tonic) and B-flat and providing rhythmic drive, while the horns play the melody complete with the leap up the octave and into a moment of silence, followed by sustained chords. The same players, with Wallace Roney filling in for Miles on the 1991 A Tribute to Miles, begins with a minute of free playing by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter before going to the melody, and plays up the pause dramatically, with everyone but Carter and Tony Williams dropping out for a whole measure before the tune continues. I’ve heard some live Herbie recordings that do the same trick, with different players spotlighted in the gap, including his V.S.O.P. quintet live recordings from the 1970s. I’ve come to love this interpretation.

Last night, the gap wasn’t there–each player drove ahead into the space, letting the groove take them. It was a great version, but I missed that pause. It clues you in to listen to what’s happening underneath—the groove, the drive, the breakneck craziness at drums and bass that was Carter and Tony Williams at their best.

Friday Random 5: poets edition

Not poets as in “writers of poetry,” but as in “p*ss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday.” Or, more precisely, the Memorial Day weekend. Here’s a quick 5 to take us into the weekend:

The Bad Plus Joshua Redman, “As This Moment Slips Away”: I keep sleeping on this album, which is a mistake. The Bad Plus are astonishing on their own, but as a rhythm section they keep Joshua Redman on his toes and bring out some really strong playing. This tune is a little more controlled than some of the stuff on the album, but I dig the way Redman and Ethan Iverson make improvisation seem effortless, even over 9/4.

The Lonely Island, “Sax Man”: Just silly. Jack Black as a lead vocalist who’s intimidating the saxophonist is hysterical. “Okay, movin’ on!”

Amahl and the Night Visitors, “Oh No, Wait”: Yeah, it’s going to be one of those days where everything turns up on the random shuffle, isn’t it? Amahl was a holiday staple in my house. This moment where the mother acknowledges that she has allowed her despair to overcome her moral center and offers the gold back to the child, followed by Amahl offering to give the only possession he has, is the key turning point, and Menotti pulls it off in just over a minute and a half.

David Byrne, “What A Day That Was (Live from Austin, TX)”: From David Byrne’s superb Austin City Limits show, this key track from The Catherine Wheel gains a little meat on its bones from a string arrangement that owes a little to western Swing.

My Morning Jacket, “Cobra”: An early indication, from the Chocolate and Ice EP, that Jim James and MMJ owed more than a little to funk and R&B. Very different from their earliest stuff, but in retrospect pointed the way to some of the later surprises on Circuital. Heavy heavy bassline. And then after 7 minutes it gets really weird.

“True Love Waits”

"True Love Waits" (found)
“True Love Waits” (via, originally via)

This is the eleventh and last in a series of posts that look at individual tracks on Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.

After the self-loathing breakthrough of “Tinker, Tailor,” the last place you’d expect A Moon Shaped Pool to end up is a twenty year old song famous for never being on an album. But that’s where we are with “True Love Waits.”

Easily the most achingly sad work in Radiohead’s repertoire, the song has been celebrated in its previous live incarnation, anchoring the live album I Might Be Wrong and appearing as the title track of Christopher O’Riley’s first album of Radiohead transcriptions. But it’s never been heard like this. Like the O’Riley version, this version of the song eschews the acoustic guitar that accompanied the original version of the song for piano; but unlike the O’Riley version, which tends like all his early Radiohead arrangements toward busy fills, this version strips everything back: a single echoing piano line that wouldn’t be out of place on a Brian Eno/Harold Budd ambient album, supplemented by a two-note bass pattern and some higher piano excursions high and distant, supporting the voice of Yorke’s narrator.

A narrator trapped. The piece lays bare the tragedy of the album as a whole, for Yorke’s narrator cannot embrace the epiphany and self-discovery he’s found. He is left with the realization that he’s “not living / I’m just killing time,” but he cannot bring himself to let go of his former love either. He pleads, “Don’t leave,” even as the relationship is destroying him. Like a frame of 8mm film stuck in front of a lens—pictured on the cover of the album?—he is caught, immobile, and being slowly destroyed. It’s gorgeous desolation, but it’s desolation nonetheless.

It would have been easy for Radiohead to close this album in a happy place. By depicting the awful finality of Yorke’s narrator’s dilemma, they’ve done something more honest and created a portrait of self destruction on the smallest, most intimate scale possible.

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Thief”

Radiohead: "Something happened." (via)
Radiohead: “Something happened.”

This is the tenth in a series of posts that look at individual tracks on Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.

We are on the home stretch of our review of A Moon Shaped Pool as we consider “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Thief,” hereafter “Tinker Tailor.” The electric piano intro and drum machine playing a slow dirge tip us off from the opening: we are back in the land of low flying panic attacks, as Yorke’s narrator imagines creatures leaving their holes looking for prey. We are also back in the land of unhappy nature, which goes in this song from indifferent to actively hostile.

As the track builds, with strings, acoustic piano, guitar and live drums adding to the arrangement, so does the sense of foreboding doom. But why? The narrator is not concerned about traditional animals; they “stay up in the trees” and “swim down too deep and lonely” to  avoid what’s coming. Instead, he begs his lover, “come to me before it’s too late.” And he warns “the one you light your fires to keep away / is crawling out…”

At this point, the confrontation between the narrator and his fear is complete and he acknowledges it for what it is: it’s not hostile nature, it’s the narrator himself, or something inside him. But he has the power to end the confrontation: “all you have to do is say / yeah.” The track works, in the context of the rest of the album, as a powerful bit of Jung, a breakthrough of the walls the narrator has built to avoid confronting himself. But now he must if he is to be able to act on the insights he achieved in “Desert Island Disk,” “Present Tense,” and “The Numbers.” He has succeeded in opening himself; now he has to confront the behaviors that lurk inside and seek to destroy him.

“Present Tense”

This is the ninth in a series of posts that look at individual tracks on Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.

“Present Tense” keeps the dread and guilt of much of the rest of the album at a distance, with effort. Opening with a description of the narrator’s coping mechanism (“Distance / Distance / It’s like a weapon / Like a weapon / Of self defense / Self defense / Against the present / Against the present / Present tense”), the lyric gradually unfolds until we see what’s really at stake.

Yorke’s narrator seeks to keep the consequences of his past actions, the “world crashing down,” from stopping him from living and moving on. He recognizes that if he allows himself to be caught up and trapped in the negative emotions of his collapsing relationship he will not be able to move on. And so, he dances, “keeping it light.”

It’s a balancing act, one moved along by the bossa nova beat and percussion. This is the moment on the album that’s most honest, in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges, Yes, I know I’ve destroyed my world, but I can’t continue to dwell on that or I’ll destroy myself and any chance of future happiness.

“Present Tense” has been played for years, debuting in 2009 (above) as a Thom Yorke solo song. In the context of the rest of A Moon Shaped Pool, it’s devastating.

“The Numbers”

This is the eighth in a series of posts that look at individual tracks on Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.

The critical consensus seems to be that “The Numbers,” originally titled “Silent Spring,” is Thom Yorke’s protest song against climate change. It might be that, but it’s also a love song—just as A Moon Shaped Pool is an album about relationships gone bad and about natural collapse.

Bear with me on this for a second.

Yes, “We are of the earth / To her we do return / The future is inside us /It’s not somewhere else” and “We call upon the people / People have this power / The numbers don’t decide / Your system is a lie” are fairly bald statements of ecological protest. But compare the first verse to “Glass Eyes” and the narrator’s journey from the alienating train station only to find more alienation in nature. There’s been a transformation somewhere between then and now: “It holds us like a phantom / The touch is like a breeze / It shines its understanding / See the moon smiling.”

What is “it”? The earth? No, its touch is not like a breeze; if you’re being touched by the earth, you’re asleep on it or someone has thrown mud at you. Yorke’s narrator has found something else that reminds him of the embrace of nature, something that has broken through his isolation and despair and left him “open on all channels, ready to receive.” Why not love? What else could do this but the epiphany that “the future is inside us / it’s not somewhere else.”

“The Numbers” is the sound of the narrator breaking out of his isolated alienation and opening himself to the world; ceasing to let himself be defined and victimized by what has happened to him; taking responsibility for his actions and his happiness, “tak(ing) back what is ours,” and recognizing that he can only make progress one day at a time.

The music supports the dual nature of the song. The piano opening strongly references McCoy Tyner’s “Message from the Nile,” with the intersection of piano and struck chords (there, Alice Coltrane’s harp, here heavily treated guitar (I think)); it’s even in the same key. Both situate the listener in nature, explicitly exploring something new to bring epiphanies. Yorke’s choice of English folk-influenced guitar for the main instrument returns us again to “Desert Island Disk” and his previous epiphany about being open and totally alive. The astonishing Colin Greenwood bassline that begins its descent with “Open on all channels” reinforces the revelation and outward turning of the narrator. The string orchestra that threatens to swamp “people have the power” underpins the power of the proletariat but also the revelation that we are not personally powerless in any sphere of life. But the most significant musical moment is the brief choral interlude that supports Yorke’s final “One day at a time.” That’s not a revolutionary statement, but a statement of personal determination.

Is it possible to read the whole album in this dual light, both as a meditation on love and on ecology? Well, “Burn the Witch” is usually read as a criticism of dangerous groupthink; “Daydreaming”‘s video finds the narrator retreating to a deserted cave to escape the anomie of modern life (and his failed relationship); “Decks Dark” imagines guilt and retribution for some awful crime, perhaps personal but perhaps ecological (“have you had enough of me, my darling?” could be apostrophe to the earth); “Desert Island Disk” is that explicit natural epiphany moment; “Ful Stop” contemplates the “foul tasting medicine” visited on those who “really messed me up” and could be viewed as Earth’s reply; “Glass Eyes” is the refusal of Earth to grant comfort to the panic stricken narrator; “Identikit” contemplates the “wreck of mankind” left as the “broken hearts make it rain,” perhaps raising the sea levels?

Okay, it’s a stretch, but I don’t think too much of one to point out that there’s a profound linkage here between the state of Yorke’s narrator’s relationship with people and with the Earth. It’ll be interesting to try to trace it through the rest of the album.