Category: Music

It’s spring today and going to be winter on Sunday as we gear up for another foot of snow via a late-season northeaster. Time for a Random 5!

1. Blue 7 – Sonny Rollins (Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz)
2. Ekta Deshlai Kathi Jalao (Light a Match) – Asha Bhosle & Kronos Quartet (Songs from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood)
3. In Christ There Is No East or West – Mavis Staples (You Are Not Alone)
4. Stop This World – Diana Krall (The Girl in the Other Room)
5. Virginia Yell Song (live) – Virginia Glee Club (Songs of Virginia)

Blue 7: This is the second time this track has figured in a Random n post, but since the last time was nine years ago I’ll allow it. Two notes: this was the compilation that I bought, excited to take Scott Deveaux’s History of Jazz class at UVa, and then disappointed that I had to drop the class because it conflicted with a required lab. And Rollins was absolutely  incandescent when I saw him at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival back in the early 00’s. Here’s hoping that I have that level of presence and acuity when I’m his age.

Ekta Deshlai Kathi Jalao: A simply great collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. You can listen to this happily without knowing that a great many of the songs are about marijuana.

In Christ There Is No East or West: Not as transcendental as the Grand Banks version, and not one of the most spectacular fruits of her Jeff Tweedy produced works, but still great. A slow burn that’s buoyed up by the arrangement.

Stop This World: A former coworker of mine who was a local jazz DJ was underimpressed with this album, done in collaboration with Krall’s future husband Elvis Costello, because it saw her leaving the strict jazz repertoire and exploring blues and pop song forms. I love it for the same reason.

Virginia Yell Song (live): The loudest rendition of Linwood Lehman’s UVA football song on record, featuring the Glee Club with the University of Virginia Marching Band in the small confines of Old Cabell Hall. The Club singing in unison so they can be heard over the band gives a small flavor of what it must have sounded like back in the day that students sang at football games.

The Rest Is Noise: For Peter Maxwell Davies. The death of the eminent British composer has me thinking about how hard 2016 has been so far on musicians and artists. First Bowie, of course, and then Glenn Frey, but also Natalie Cole, Paul Kantner, composer Stephen Stucky, George Martin, Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, Keith Emerson, Vanity. And of course Harper Lee and Alan Rickman, when broadening to other art forms.

What gives? Is 2016 a more fatal year than other years? Well,  probably not, thought it’s easy enough to do the comparison in Wikipedia of notable deaths per year (2016, 2015 and so forth). I think what’s happening for me in particular is that musicians (and artists) who helped shape who I am when I was in my teens (meaning they had produced notable works at most 20 years before that) have now hit a particular point in the actuarial curve. It’s kind of a variant of the pathetic fallacy; the underlying drivers are more likely basic human actuarial trends, substance abuse tendencies in musicians active in the 1960s and 1970s, and the worsening of the American diet over the last 30 years than anything more profound.

And yet. It’s hard to escape the feeling of childhood slipping away. The older I get, the more I’m aware that a chunk of what I think of as “me” is defined in terms of how I relate to things outside myself, and while the death of Peter Maxwell Davies does not negate any of the art he produced, his being gone makes those relationships that much more tenuous.

It’s Random 5 time! And my dogs didn’t let me sleep last night, so I’m on my second cup of coffee (this one red-eyed with a shot of espresso) and this update will be accordingly off kilter. I’m going to try a new format for the 5 this time; let’s see if it sticks.

1. Say Goodbye – Beck (Morning Phase)
2. Comin’ Round the Mountain – Bob Dylan (A Tree with Roots)
3. Lullaby for an Anxious Child – Sting (If On a Winter’s Night…)
4. The Parting Glass – The Pogues (Rum, Sodomy & the Lash)
5. L’enfer – Coralie Clément (Bye Bye Beauté)

Say Goodbye: I don’t resonate with this album as strongly as I did with its predecessor Sea Change. That one felt achingly melancholic and honest. This one feels like “It’s time to make Sea Change II.” But you can’t fault Beck’s craft. The banjo seems an unorthodox choice when it drops into the break but it fits. His harmonies have been getting better over the years, and the stacked chords on the chorus introduce some needed tension into the song. It still feels more like an exercise, though.

Comin’ Round the Mountain: A few years ago, Doom and Gloom from the Tomb posted a link to a download of the granddaddy of all Dylan bootlegs, the “full tapes” from the Basement Tapes sessions. This tossed off fragment of the traditional song isn’t essential but it’s fascinating: with instrumentation that sounds like hammer dulcimer along with bass, acoustic guitar and drums, the vocal fades in and out like a half remembered thought and the second verse fades into inaudible mumbles. We know she’s coming but we don’t know when and we don’t know why. Typical of the Basement Tapes, Dylan lifts the corner of an old traditional children’s song and finds mystery.

Lullaby for an Anxious Child: Originally a 1990s b-side, Sting fleshed out the arrangement for this on his surprisingly good winter/holiday album a few years ago, with strings, harp and harmonium (accordion?) supplementing the acoustic guitar. I’ve been vocally dismissive of later Sting work, but I liked this album, and though I could wish for fewer chimes and a less affected vocal on this track (does every entrance need a little swoop?) it’s still lovely and done with a light touch.

The Parting Glass: I like the Pogues, and Shane McGowan, best when they’re rooted in their craft and their tradition. This straight take is fantastic and wouldn’t have been out of place on a Clancy Brothers album… well, maybe on an album of drunken outtakes.

L’enfer: I was introduced to Coralie Clément’s music via the Nada Surf cover of the title song of this album. The title song, with contributions from that band’s Daniel Lorca, is still the essential track on this album for me, but “L’enfer” is a perfect slice of fuzzed-guitar summertime French pop, with Clément’s breathy vocals sounding like Jane Birkin hanging out with an indie pop band. Fun for Friday.

I started rehearsal last night with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for an upcoming series of performances of the Kancheli Dixi. Giya Kancheli is new to me; he’s a composer from Georgia who wrote the Dixi, apparently, partly as a memorial to his mentor, conductor Jansug Kakhidze. It’s going to be a fun work, with huge dynamic swings, lots of interestingly intricate writing for the chorus, and some meaty chromaticism. I’m also interested in seeing what the orchestration looks like—the one recording I have has some passages that sound like they might be written for Ondes Martenot…

I’ve written before about traditional ballads and ballad collectors, but I always feel as though I am discovering new things about the way in which songs are written and passed down. The archetypal music developed (not written) by singers in places as diverse as rural England and western North Carolina and continuing into modern day provenance via folk singers like Dylan and Leadbelly, who then inspired a whole generation of rock musicians to embrace the ballads…

I always feel an electric shock when I find an artifact of balladry. In September 2015 I was lucky enough to discover UVa professor Ernest Mead’s copy of UVA professor and Glee Club alum Arthur Kyle Davis’s More Traditional Ballads of Virginia in a local used book store, documenting the work that he and other members of the Virginia Folklore Society did in collecting ballads from Virginia singers. Last week I had a bill for dinner delivered to me in an 1879 book collecting English ballads (albeit a little heavily focused on lords and kings for my tastes). And of course my discovery years ago that I have western North Carolina’s preeminent folklorist, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, as a distant relative was one of my early connections to the tradition.

What’s interesting to me is that the application of this “oral tradition” to other forms of song, like camp meeting songs and minstrel songs, resulted in some of the most enduring songs that we remember today in the context of universities and student songs. It’s one thing to note that the University of Virginia song “Glory to Virginia” is a football song with words set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It’s another to note that the “Battle Hymn” itself takes a tune that was previously known as “John Brown’s Body,” featuring words collectively written by the members of the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia as a marching tune. But the story doesn’t stop there; the “Tiger” battalion used a tune for their words that had originated as a camp meeting song in the late 18th and early 19th century, “Say, Brothers, Won’t You Meet Us,” with the earliest printed version of the tune appearing from 1806 to 1808 in camp meeting song compilations. And beyond that, credit for the inspiration of the tune is given to an African American wedding song from Georgia, a “Negro folk song,” and a British sea shanty that originated as a Swedish drinking song.

All of which is just to say that authorship is complicated and history is everywhere.

I will forever be wired to seek out new music on Tuesdays, the recent shift to Friday releases be damned. Today I came across a few new goodies:

• Marissa Nadler has a new track, “Janie in Love,” from her forthcoming Strangers. It’s a stronger effort to my ears than her unremarkable 2014 album July, but not as striking as the first album of hers to captivate me, her Songs III: Bird on the Water. I still dig it though and it’s the first tune of hers in a while that’s staying with me, so go listen.
• Someone put together a compilation of Herbie Hancock playing the Fender Rhodes electric piano on other peoples’ albums. The compilation sticks to fusion jazz, so doesn’t include his appearance on Paul Desmond’s Bridge Over Troubled Water or Joni Mitchell’s Mingus, but is still a pretty good survey of the master’s work on what must be the most distinctive of electric keyboard sounds.