Category: Music

I was surprised and saddened to learn of the death of two jazz luminaries this weekend. Michael Brecker was a pretty stellar saxophonist, Grammy winner and collaborator with pop luminaries ranging from Paul Simon (“Still Crazy After All These Years,” The Rhythm of the Saints) to Steely Dan (Gaucho, Gold) to Parliament (Trombipulation) to a host of jazz gigs under his own leadership, including multiple Grammys. I will always remember him for his superbly wry and understated guest spot on Dave Brubeck’s Young Lions and Old Tigers, the “Michael Brecker Waltz.” Leukemia took him too soon.

I was saddened about Alice Coltrane too, though reportedly she had been in poor health for a number of years. Fans of her husband John’s work generally are of two minds regarding Alice’s contributions to his later works, when she replaced McCoy Tyner on piano in his performing ensembles. Either they think of her as Yoko to his John (particularly those who don’t like the later, more experimental albums), or they recognize her work as a passionate collaborator and an important contribution to the sound and concept of such albums (Expressions, Stellar Regions). She was also an important contributor to the work of McCoy Tyner himself (Extensions). She will be missed.

Well, an exhausting week draws to a close. Really, I’m not sure what else I can say. I’m ready for a three day weekend and that’s all.

Oh yeah, and we might get some snow on Monday. So suck it, Seattle. (Boy, am I pissed that the city of rain has gotten more snow than we have so far this year.)

1. Tadd Dameron and John Coltrane, “Super Jet” (Mating Call)
2. The Cure, “The Blood” (Head on the Door)
3. Beastie Boys, “I Don’t Know” (Hello Nasty)
4. Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, “O Ignis Spiritus” (Mnemosyne)
5. Herbert von Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic (Johannes Brahms, composer), “Ein Deutsches Requiem, 3. Solo: “Herr, Lehre Doch Mich” (Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem)
6. Ayub Ogada, “Ondiek” (En Mana Kuoyo)
7. Sonic Youth, “Brother James” (Screaming Fields of Sonic Love)
8. Beck, “Nothing I Haven’t Seen” (Sea Change)
9. The Reindeer Section, “Raindrop” (Y’All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear?)
10. U2, “All Because of You” (How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb)

New at Art of the MIx: the difficult listening hour 2: chichester and other. As a favor to my mom, I put together some modern and contemporary choral music selections. I’ve sung the Chichester and In the Beginning several times, have read through the Beatitudes, and just missed the chance to perform El Niño. They’re all pretty spectacular pieces. I just wish I could have found a better recording of the Aaron Copland piece.

I have my new 30 GB iPod loaded up with a bunch of my favorite mix tapes cum playlists in addition to the purely random playlists that I used to keep on the old model. So this week’s playlist will be random samplings from songs I like a lot as well as stuff that I haven’t really listened to yet.

1. Mint Royale, “Show Me” (Dancehall Places)
2. Morrissey, “Alsatian Cousin” (Viva Hate)
3. Morrissey, “Late Night, Maudlin Street” (Viva Hate)
4. Morrissey, “I Don’t Mind If You Forget Me” (Viva Hate)
5. Pixies, “Born in Chicago” (Rubáiyát)
6. Frank Black, “Whatever Happened to Pong?” (Teenager of the Year)
7. Frank Black, “(I Want to Live On An) Abstract Plain” (Teenager of the Year)
8. Frank Black, “Calistan” (Teenager of the Year)
9. Frank Black, “Freedom Rock” (Teenager of the Year)
10. Hilliard Ensemble, “Credo” (The Old Hall Manuscript)

Oops. I keep forgetting that the “shuffle by album” setting applies to the master Shuffle Songs menu item as well as regular play. So here’s a bonus random 10 that is a little more random… even though it begins and ends with a Tom Waits track from Orphans:

1. Tom Waits, “What Keeps Mankind Alive” (Orphans)
2. Youssou N’Dour, “Fakastulu” (Set)
3. Last Exit, “Every Day’s Just The Same” (Last Exit Demos)
4. Above the Law, “Freedom of Speech” (Pump Up the Volume)
5. Robert Johnson, “Malted Milk” (The Complete Recordings)
6. Beck, “Rowboat” (Stereopathetic Soul Manure)
7. The Rolling Stones, “Get Off My Cloud” (Singles 1965-1967)
8. The Corn Sisters, “She’s Leaving Town” (The Other Women)
9. Melissa Etheridge, “Similar Features” (Melissa Etheridge)
10. Tom Waits, “First Kiss” (Orphans)

I look forward each year to KEXP’s Top 90.3 Albums list, not only to see how my own favorites from the year fared (and, really, stack-ranking spectacular albums against each other has limited appeal. What does it mean to say that Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is better than Supernature? Each is a kick-ass album in its own way), but also to catch items that I may have missed. Yesterday I found the 2006 list on KEXP’s website and created a copy on Lists of Bests. So now you can use the List of Best version of the KEXP Top 90.3 Albums of 2006 to track your listening progress against some of the best music that was released in 2006.

I’ve actually done this with past Top 90.3 lists as well (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and (created by someone else) 2005), and it’s interesting that I always hover between 25 and 30% coverage on these lists.

I’m also creating a list in eMusic which tags albums I haven’t heard yet that are on the KEXP lists and available in eMusic. —Yes, I am a music geek.

The Hardest Working Man in Show Business has taken his last curtain call. Obituaries: AP, New York Times plus local reactions, Washington Post plus appreciation.

I first became aware of James Brown through “Living in America,” I’m sorry to say, but even that throwaway song became mystery and power when he grunted out “I feel good!” at the end. There were other echoes of Mr. Dynamite around in the 1980s—Eddie Murphy’s “hot tub” had an army of middle school kids aping Eddie aping the Godfather of Soul. And the appearance of “I Got You (I Feel Good)” on the Good Morning Vietnam soundtrack inspired one Jewish kid I know to learn that simple yet smoldering saxophone solo and play it for hours in echoing stairwells. But mostly JB’s influence was invisible, embedded in a thousand rap songs and cultural-ironic remixes.

For me personally, that changed in college, when on a whim and a flier I picked up a discount copy of 20 All Time Greatest Hits through my CD club (you remember CD clubs, right?). And then I found out that it was just the teaser for Star Time, and that found its way to my doorstep too. And then I was hooked. Throwing on “Sex Machine” at parties, driving down the road with fellow musicians deconstructing the beats on “Funky Drummer”…

James Brown taught this white Presbyterian boy about soul power. Without JB, I probably never would have discovered Parliament—first because I wouldn’t have known that I liked funk, and second (thanks to JB alums like Bootsy Collins) Parliament never would have existed.

Another appreciation from Funky16Corners.

Christmas albums by popular artists face a pretty significant challenge: how to make the holiday canon, which ranges from medieval plainchant (“O come, o come, Emmanuel”) to high classical music to Tin Pan Alley tunes and children’s TV show theme music, sound like it belongs to the artist and not let the artist be overwhelmed by what can be a lot of schlock. There are three basic approaches to the challenge: go ultra-traditional with the arrangements, create a bunch of originals in the Christmas spirit, or just be yourself and damn the torpedoes. My latest favorite Christmas album, Bootsy Collins’ Christmas is 4 Ever, takes the third path with a vengeance and ends up with one of the most fun Christmas albums I’ve listened to.

Bootsy, for the uninitiated (though that hardly seems possible), is the funky, funky bass player behind James Brown’s late 60s output (“Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,”) and George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic (where he gained notoriety for his costumes—star-shaped sunglasses and thigh-high rhinestone studded space boots as well as his outer-space bass playing), and a pretty substantial run fronting his own combo, Bootsy’s Rubber Band. This, in sum, is a man who could definitively answer Funkadelic’s question, “What is soul?” So what, pray tell, is Bootsy doing facing down such white bread Christmas classics as “Jingle Bells,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” and “Silent Night”?

As you might expect, Bootsy solves the clash of genres by throwing a party. And a pretty damned good party too. The arrangements on this collection are tight, with key contributions from fellow ex-PFunk stars Bernie Worrell, Garry Shider, and Fred Wesley (who arranges the tight horn charts that propel the most spectacular songs and is the other James Brown alum on the record), and an array of guest vocalists ranging from the traditional R&B styles of a bunch of folks whose names I didn’t recognize to some rap contributions by Snoop Dogg. There are voice cameos from other friends of Bootsy, from Buckethead to George Clinton to the late Roger Troutman, bringing Christmas greetings.

And damned if it doesn’t all hang together. The horns make it feel like a Parliament reunion, and there’s a propulsive funk beat that runs through the whole album that makes one want to stand up and dance. (For this writer that’s no mean thing.) But for me the standout moment is deep in “Silent Night,” which may be the only time this holiday standard has grooved, where Bootsy answers the sung line “Sleep in heavenly peace” with a fervent “You and me, baby!” Aah, right on.

This post also at BlogCritics.

Very cool: the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (New Mozart Edition), an online archive of scores to all the composer’s works. Please note the Personal Use Only warning before you download a set of scores for your next concert performance…

The resource is going to be invaluable for scholarship. Why, I myself have already downloaded the scores to KV. 231 and 233 (the “Kiss My Ass” canons) for further study.

The Pops Christmas season is upon us. Last night I sang the opening night performance for the Boston Pops Christmas concerts. It’s a fun concert as always, even if the repertoire isn’t very highbrow. As I said to someone last night, “I have probably 10 or 20 CDs of Renaissance and Medieval Christmas music, but I don’t have but one or two of traditional Christmas music, and sometimes it feels like I should reverse that ratio.”

That said, there was one extremely pleasant surprise on the program, an orchestral work by Resphighi called The Adoration of the Magi, which I had never heard before and which is a haunting, stately work. The crowd, which at a Pops concert can get kind of noisy with the drink service and so forth, was hushed at the conclusion, which is a rare thing indeed.

Oh! And there was Seussiness as well! We did an orchestra plus chorus plus spoken word rendition of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, complete with the Who Christmas anthem (“Da-who dorays, fahoo forays, welcome Christmas…”) and “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” And it was pretty awesome, in a way that only acting out a favorite childhood TV Christmas special on stage with the world’s greatest Pops orchestra can be.

And now I’m dragging. But it’s OK. The other joyous thing about this Christmas season is that last Friday’s trip to Washington, DC was the last business travel of the year for me. (Insert wild Kermit-the-Frog arm-waving cheer here.) Being on the road more or less continuously since August has really wiped me out. I’m looking forward to being offline for a while to recharge.

I thought I’d do a rare Sunday post. It’s clear and beautiful here in a so-far-dry late autumn/early winter kind of way. Even the snow flurries at the beginning of the week and the snow squalls on Friday left no lasting traces. Much like my Christmas planning so far: we have a photo and text but no card yet. (Tomorrow.) And I still don’t know if our Christmas tree will light up after this spring’s flood.

But the holiday recordings are out! Well, technically, I didn’t have to pull anything out from anywhere. In the pre-iTunes days, around the first of December I would pull all my Christmas CDs out from the back of the drawer and replace them with the world music CDs, not from any animosity to Afropop but because they were filed right in front of the Christmas discs. This year, all I did was go into iTunes, select the Holiday genre, and command-click to check them all for inclusion in the normal shuffle. Then Lisa and I listened to hours worth of Christmas recordings yesterday, from the Stax Christmas collection and the Blind Boys of Alabama in the morning to the new Sufjan Stevens Christmas box (which rocks, btw) as we made spaghetti amatriciana last night.

So in honor of the season, here’s a random playlist of holiday music for your ass:

1. Bootsy Collins, “Boot-Off (aka Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer)” (Christmas is 4 Ever)
2. Cathedral Choral Society (J. Reilly Lewis, cond.), “Hallelujah Chorus” (The Joy of Christmas)
3. Ella Fitzgerald, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas)
4. Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge (Christopher Robinson, cond.), “The Lord’s Prayer” (John Tavener, composer) (Christmas Proclamation)
5. Boston Camerata, “Gaudete, gaudete” (A Renaissance Christmas)
6. New York Ensemble for Early Music, “Orientis partibus” (Nova: A Medieval Christmas)
7. John Denver and the Muppets, “Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913” (A Christmas Together)
8. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, “Joy to the World” (It’s Christmas)
9. Anonymous 4, “Liber generationis” (A Star in the East)
10. The Sixteen (Harry Christophers, cond.), “Drive the Cold Winter Away” (An Early English Christmas)

I got an early birthday present last month when I saw my Mom and Dad, but managed to forget about it until I dug it out of my briefcase last night. (What can I say: things have been a little hectic up in this joint.) It was a documentary on DVD called the Madison County Project, and it was pretty amazing. The documentary goes around my father’s home county in North Carolina and interviews ballad singers, keepers of the oral tradition of “murder ballads” or “love songs” as they’re variously called in the movie, and looks at what happened thirty years ago when academics and folk ethnographers first recorded the mountain ballads. In addition to the DVD, there’s a multimedia website (still technically in beta), and you can download movie cuts in progress, outtakes, and even a low-res version of the final edit of the movie in iPod suitable format from the project blog.

The amazing thing about this music is that it’s still alive and well, as a glimpse of the website of Sheila Kay Adams and her husband Jim Taylor testifies. If the Cold Mountain filmmakers had wanted to do something authentic with mountain music, they could have looked much closer at hand than where they ended up.

Oh, and that Folkways record that they made? All but one track can be downloaded from eMusic, and the full album is available from Smithsonian Folkways along with a bonus DVD of John Cohen’s original documentary.

I was saddened earlier this month to realize that I couldn’t sing in the concert I was most looking forward to in this symphony season, the Boston premiere of El Niño (The Child) by John Adams. I was particularly down because I would be missing the chance to sing with Dawn Upshaw, who has been one of my favorite soloists since I stumbled across her stunning voice on the definitive recording of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 … wow, twelve or thirteen years ago now.

I’m now sadder because I wouldn’t have had a chance to sing with her in any circumstances. According to a news clip buried in yesterday’s Globe, as well as an earlier alert on the TFC grapevine, Ms. Upshaw is bowing out of the concert and other performances because she is being treated for early stage breast cancer. According to her manager, she plans to be back on stage in three months, so hopefully this is simply one of those things that has been caught in time. I hope I will have many chances to sing with her in the future.

My newest mix, doin’ the outside dance, has been posted to Art of the Mix and iTunes. I’m experimenting with iTunes’ new blog sharing code to put the songs on my site (see below). Unfortunately, only the parts of the mix that are in iTunes show up on the live preview.

The mix is composed of songs that were left over from the last mix… as well as some other odds and ends. I guess that makes it the Amnesiac to the last mix’s Kid A… which hopefully doesn’t mean that I’ll start singing about myxomatosis. It also obeys my informal rule about having songs by Mission of Burma and Big Star on all my mixes.

The deluge appears to have stopped here for the moment, so I can contemplate spending another few hours with the leaves tomorrow, in between painting and other house chores. I figured the few leaves left on our tree wouldn’t be a big burden after I got everything else up on Saturday, but I was wrong, wrong—after Sunday’s rain the back lawn looked like a compost pile. Ah, domesticity. Maybe I’ll get some other stuff done, too; there is at least one mix struggling to be born. In the meantime, we’ll settle for a Random 10:

1. Sam And Dave, “Soul Man” (Soul Men)
2. Kim Kashkashian, viola – Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor, “Trauermusik” (Lachrymae (Hindemith, Britten, Penderecki ))
3. The Blind Boys Of Alabama, “Just Wanna See His Face” (Spirit Of The Century)
4. Thurston Moore, “Psychic Hearts” (Psychic Hearts)
5. Pixies, “Tame” (Doolittle)
6. U2, “Stories For Boys” (Boy)
7. Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam” (The Best of Nina Simone)
8. Richard Hickox; Collegium Musicum 90, “”Paukenmesse”: IV. Sanctus” (Haydn: Te Deum/Paukenmesse/Te Deum)
9. Elvis Costello & The Attractions, “Shipbuilding” (Punch The Clock [remastered])
10. Monty Python, “Bookshop” (Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album)

The recent announcement that Microsoft would share $1 of revenue for every Zune sold with Universal Music Group—because, according to UMG Chairman and CEO Doug Morris, iPod-like devices are “just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it”—sounds familiar. So I went back and found the precedent for this apparently unprecedented business model: the 2004 CD MAP settlement. This madlibbed version of the Zune revenue-share announcement should clarify the similarities:

In 2004, the music companies, including UMG, agreed to share revenue from CD sales with consumers. Forcing the issue were Attorneys General of 43 states, Commonwealths and Territories. UMG refused to admit to price-fixing but agreed to compensate consumers between $5 and $20 per claimant.

“These companies are just repositories for stolen consumer money, and they all know it,” this consumer says. “So it’s time to get paid for it.”

And after pulling highway robbery via price fixing for six years, these guys call us thieves? As Laurie Anderson would say, “It takes. It takes one. It takes one to. It takes one to know one.”