Category: Music

After a week on the road and some fun medical procedures (all diagnostic, nothing serious going on, except getting poked and prodded in places I’ve never been poked and prodded before), I’m feeling downright ornery. My iPod and its semi-random shuffle feature appears to be reflecting that in this playlist, both taunting me with some raging and even irritating numbers (“Blood Rag,” “Skid Row Wine,” an unnecessary club mix of a Sting song) and consoling me with some fine Willie Dixon-penned blues and even some gospel.

1. Porno for Pyros, “Blood Rag” (Porno for Pyros)
2. Willie Dixon, “Walkin’ the Blues” (Willie Dixon: The Chess Box)
3. Sting, “Sister Moon (Hani Commission Club Mix)” (Sting Mixes)
4. The Pearly Gates Spiritual Singers, “Not Alone” (There Will Be No Sweeter Sound: Columbia-Okeh Post-War Gospel Sound ’47–’62)
5. Lowell Fulsom, “Tollin’ Bells” (Willie Dixon: The Chess Box)
6. Boston Camerata, “Bransles de village/Il etait une Cendrillon” (New Britain: The Roots of American Folksong)
7. Virginia Glee Club, “The Good Old Song (Second Verse)” (Notes from the Path)
8. Maggie Estep and the Spitters, “Skid Row Wine” (Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness)
9. Koko Taylor, “Insane Asylum” (Willie Dixon: The Chess Box)
10. Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, “Surf Beat” (Greatest Hits)

I’m happy it’s Friday; so happy that I’m about to fall asleep sitting up. This week’s Random 10, drawn using iTunes 7 from my full library, has a lot of good time tunes, for whatever reason, but I’m not complaining:

1. Daniel Lanois, “The Deadly Nightshade” (Belladona)
2. G Love and Special Sauce, “Milk & Cereal” (Rappin’ Blues EP)
3. Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, “Broken Heart Of Mine” (Oh Lord, Stand By Me)
4. Nina Simone, “Chauffeur” (Pastel Blues/Let It All Out)
5. John Coltrane, “Witches Pit” (Dakar)
6. Le Tigre, “All That Glitters (Remix By Rachael Kozak)” (From The Desk Of Mr. Lady)
7. Sting, “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying” (Mercury Falling)
8. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “Drinking Of The Wine” (Ballads, Banjo Tunes, And Sacred Songs Of Western North Carolina)
9. Duke Ellington, “The Deep South Suite: Happy – Go – Lucky Local” (The Great Chicago Concerts)
10. Frank Sinatra, “It Happened In Monterey” (Songs For Swingin’ Lovers)

I have nothing to say about the new Yo La Tengo album, except that it makes me happier than any record that I’ve heard for a while. And of course I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass is an title that instantly joins such fine names as Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow. One wonders if that’s what the band had in mind. In fact, is any album with ass in the title destined for greatness?

EMusic has a serious take, and a completely not-serious take, on the album as well.

As per usual, I’ve been in meetings and on travel all day (in fact, I was in the Pittsburgh airport at 2:30 pm when I started writing this) and am just catching up on Apple’s announcements from earlier this afternoon. Briefly: new higher capacity iPods with click-wheel driven search, new thinner iPod Nanos, a Shuffle that doesn’t look like a USB stick, new radically overhauled iTunes, iTunes store with downloadable movies and games, and a preview of a set-top box.

So read between the lines. What you see is a company trying to answer to Wall Street how it will follow up the iPod, arguably the most successful new product of the first half of this decade. The answer is content and a wider footprint, and a clear statement that the iPod has become not just Apple’s music brand, but Apple’s consumer electronics brand (to use an awful phrase). The iPod/iTunes/iTV family is now solidly positioned in Apple’s product suite for people who watch and listen, but don’t necessarily create.

That’s not a bad thing, and the devices don’t lock out user created content; on the contrary, the embrace of podcasting within iTunes is as significant a factor of the meteoric rise of that phenomenon as anything else. But what this announcement illustrates is that it’s not just the MP3 player makers and the makers of competing DRM; it’s the living room electronics manufacturers who are squarely in Apple’s sights. And having screwed around with dizzyingly complex products for about 40 years now, these guys have a lot to lose. Should be fun to watch…

One last thought: The momentum with which other studios add movies to the newly renamed iTunes Store will probably be considerably slower than the rate at which music studios signed up, and that might really hurt Apple’s odds in this market. Bet Jobs didn’t figure on that when Disney bought Pixar…

Oh, and confidential to ZDNet’s David Berlind. Given the amount of energy the record companies have put into fighting iTunes, the number of alternative companies that are out there, and the still rapidly changing market, I’d say it’s a little precipitous to call for government intervention in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem. Particularly since there is nothing, device manufacturers’s claims to the contrary, that prevents any content manufacturer from getting their content onto the iPod. The format is called MP3, and it trades off restrictive DRM for support everywhere. Look into it. It seems to be working well for eMusic.

My iPod is getting increasingly flaky. In addition to spontaneous reboots it also occasionally refuses to sync, indicating that the disc couldn’t be read to or written from. The middle of a kitchen renovation is a bad time for any small electronics purchase that doesn’t also crush ice, so I’ll have to live with it for a while longer, I guess.

Besides, it still works for the Random 10. Lots of Elvis Costello still on the iPod from his appearance last week at Tanglewood with Marian McPartland.

1. Boston Camerata, “Thomas-Town” (New Britain)
2. Elvis Costello, “Brilliant Mistake” (King of America)
3. Elvis Costello, “Just About Glad” (Costello and Nieve)
4. Radiohead mashed with Ghostface, “Daytona 500” (Me and This Army)
5. Elvis Costello, “They Didn’t Believe Me” (Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz with Elvis Costello)
6. Elvis Costello, “Temptation” (Costello and Nieve)
7. Clifton Chenier, “Jole Blonde” (Bon Ton Roulet)
8. Elvis Costello, “Baby Plays Around” (Spike)
9. Don Cherry and John Coltrane, “The Invisible” (The Avant-Garde)
10. Nouvelle Vague, “Dancing with Myself” (Bande A Part)

It’s a slow Friday before a holiday weekend. Tomorrow will bring Elvis Costello with Marian McPartland at Tanglewood; Sunday and Monday some more kitchen demolition; Tuesday is back to the working week. So I’ve been catching my breath and organizing a few things.

For instance: my Flickr photos are now geotagged, allowing you to find them on the Flickr world map. So there’s that. (It’s a pretty damned cool feature, actually.)

So enjoy photobrowsing while this week’s random 10 plays:

1. Miles Davis, “Selim” (Live Evil)
2. Funkadelic, “Music for My Mother (Single Version)” (Funkadelic)
3. Lionheart, “Veste nuptiali” (Paris 1200)
4. Cathode, “Gravity” (Sleeping and Breathing)
5. Ayub Ogada, “10%” (En Mana Kuoyo)
6. Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Anything But Love” (The Inevitable)
7. Hilliard Ensemble, “Alleluya. V. Nativitas” (Sumer Is Icumen In)
8. Pulp, “Seductive Barry” (This is Hardcore)
9. Sufjan Stevens, “Holland” (Greetings from Michigan)
10. Sting and the Radioactors, “Digital Love” (Nuclear Waste)

Currently waiting for my review at eMusic, once my subscription renews: two early Lucinda Williams recordings, Gillian Welch’s Hell Among the Yearlings, In Camera’s 13 (Lucky for Some), and Scott H. Biram’s The Dirty Old One Man Band.

Currently listening: the Sacred Steel compilation, Max Roach’s astonishing We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, and the Replacements’s Hootenanny.

I don’t know, but every now and then I run across a pile of music that makes me very very happy. This is one of those times.

With the rules of the Random 10, the odds of any mariachi music coming into this list are probably pretty slim. But it should be there anyway: I have a three day business trip to Mexico City next week and will be experiencing that fair country for the first time. Should be a heck of a trip; I’m really looking forward to being there now that some of the post-election fallout has settled.

1. MF Doom, “Who Do You Think I Am? (Feat. King Ceasar, Rodan, Megalon, Kamakiras, and Kong)” (Operation: Doomsday)
2. Chris Bell, “Fight At The Table” (I Am The Cosmos)
3. The Velvet Underground, “I Heard Her Call My Name” (White Light/White Heat)
4. Bettye Lavette, “On the Surface” (I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise)
5. Death Cab for Cutie, “We Looked Like Giants” (Transatlanticism)
6. David Byrne, “Walk on the Water” (Look Into The Eyeball)
7. Mazzy Star, “Mary of Silence” (So Tonight That I May See)
8. Sting, “Shape of My Heart” (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
9. The Cure, “Jumping Someone Else’s Train” (Three Imaginary Boys)
10. Bobby Bare, “Shine On Harvest Moon” (The Moon Was Blue)

Last night’s rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron was … interesting. I can’t add a lot to fanw’s characterization of the rehearsal except to note that it’s a little early in the process to be gathering more than first impressions of the work. None of the singers are secure enough yet in the melodic line to really tell what it sounds like.

In fact, the more I hear of it, the more I’m reminded of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Though reading the fuller text of the poem, where Moore rails against poets who are so abstract as to lose all that is genuine, one might think that she is in agreement with fanw.

But I can’t forget a moment toward the end of last night’s rehearsal, where the tenors and then the sopranos took turns singing a twelve-tone “melody” against a block chord in the other voices that was tonal (at least at first). It was strikingly beautiful, breathtaking in fact. And I’m going to hang in there to see if it gets better as we do, if in fact Schoenberg’s music is “not really modern, just badly played.”

Musical discovery of the week: Sufjan Stevens’ delicate masterpiece Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State takes on additional resonance as you’re driving through the industrial outskirts of Lansing. But it still doesn’t cleanse the chorus of “Snakes on a Plane (Bring It)” from your brain.

We are in town for a morning sales call and will be back on a plane, hopefully without snakes, this afternoon. I don’t think I’ll be seeing Snakes on a Plane tonight, but maybe this weekend—I’ll be in Lancaster County for the family reunion and might have an opportunity then.

1. Peter Gabriel, “Powerhouse at the Foot of the Mountain” (Birdy)
2. New Order, “Blue Monday” (International: The Best of New Order)
3. Erasure, “Too Darn Hot” (Red Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter)
4. Ted Leo/Pharmacists, “Heart Problems” (Shake the Sheets)
5. Sleater-Kinney, “The Fox” (The Woods)
6. Doves, “Caught by the River” (The Last Broadcast)
7. Prince, “On the Couch” (Musicology)
8. Neko Case, “Ghost Wiring” (Blacklisted)
9. Inca Campers, “Vilcabamba” (Outside)
10. R.E.M., “At My Most Beautiful” (Up)

As a cartoon once wrote, “What good is sick leave if you have to spend it being sick?” I’m home today with a random thing that fortunately is showing signs of clearing up, but it’s maddening thinking about all the work I have to do both at the office and here at home and not really being able to touch it.

Ah well. As the Count says in The Princess Bride, “If you haven’t got your health, then you haven’t got anything.”

1. Kronos Quartet, “Forbidden Fruit” (Winter Was Hard)
2. Dexter Gordon, “Gingerbread Boy” (The Complete Prestige Recordings)
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Details Of The War” (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
4. Cascadian Singers, “I. Sometimes with one I love” from “For Comrades and Lovers” (Troy Peters, composer; Walt Whitman, text) (Premiere)
5. Elvis Costello, “Black Sails In The Sunset” (Costello and Nieve: Live At The Supper Club, New York)
6. Spoon, “Take a Walk” (Girls Can Tell)
7. M.Ward, “One More Goodbye” (Old Enough 2 Know Better – 15 Years Of Merge Records)
8. Beastie Boys, “I Don’t Know” (Hello Nasty)
9. Kronos Quartet, “2. November 25, Ichigaya” (Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass)
10. Buddy Holly, “What to Do (Overdubbed Version)” (The Buddy Holly Collection)

Long missing from the US catalog of everyone’s favorite moody goths, this reissue of The Top fills in a void in the CD discography of the Cure—since it was never issued on CD in the US in the first place. But many Cure fans who are hearing it for the first time will find it a puzzling listen. Twenty-two years after its issue, it remains a profoundly unsettled disc that documents a band in transition (and indeed, a band mostly consisting of one member, Robert Smith himself).

My previous review in the Cure reissue series, of last year’s rerelease of Faith, noted that “the darkness that flowered on Faith is what many still consider to be the Cure’s classic sound,” and while that sound is in evidence here, there are a number of other sounds as well—for better or worse. For one thing, the percussion is surprisingly tame for a Cure release, particularly on songs like “Birdmad Girl,” which has a backing track that could have come from any number of 80s acts. The excellent booklet claims that the following track, “Wailing Wall,” was strongly influenced by Smith’s work with Siouxsie and the Banshees, and its atmospherics are appropriately menacing. Other tracks sound familiar in reverse: I found myself wondering if Nick Cave had been listening to “Piggy in the Mirror” when he made “Abattoir Blues,“ the effect is so similar. And the use of the Prophet, that staple of Peter Gabriel’s 1980s recordings, on “Dressing Up” makes the song feel familiar (if dated).

The one track to surface from this album with which I was previously familiar was “The Caterpillar,” which made an appearance on the Staring at the Sea compilation. But where on that release it made a clear connection with other Cure songs like “Lovecats,” “In Between Days” and “Close to Me,” on The Top it stands alone. Yes, the other tracks on the album each have their distinct sound, but nothing prepares you for “The Caterpillar”: the scratchy violin intro, the over-the-top fey vocals, the skittering piano part. This is “happy Cure,” the other personality that is locked inside Robert Smith’s head alongside the glum Morlock, and it still brings a smile after 22 years.

It’s even more amazing that that song crept onto the album when you consider the circumstances of the recording sessions: Laurence Tolhurst drunk or drugged out, Smith himself a few inches from hospitalization (literally—the follow-up tour had to be cancelled thanks to a bad case of blood poisoning), and the rest of the band hardly in the studio (Smith played a lot of this album, except for the drums, himself). In that context, “Caterpillar” seems absolutely miraculous, as does the band’s subsequent revitalization on The Head on the Door.

Bonus material on this deluxe reissue includes the usual assortment of demos and live tracks, including some quite strong demos for never-before-heard songs. My personal favorite, “Happy the Man,” looks forward to Disintegration’s “Last Dance” in its harmonic language even as its lyrics and verbal imagery elude understanding, and was released in its final form as a b-side to “The Caterpillar.”

An essential release? No. But also undeserving of its tag (from Smith himself) of “worst Cure album ever.” There’s a lot on The Top to like.

Osvaldo Golijov visits uncharted territory with his new composition and Music Review: BSO, Golijov appeal with world premiere of ‘Azul’. An interesting pair of articles on Azul, Golijov’s delayed symphonic commission for the BSO and Yo-Yo Ma. Lisa and I attended the premiere and I’m still trying to figure out how the piece actually works.

Boston Globe: After 105 years, BSO to enter a new stage. I’ll be interested to see if there is any audible difference (there will certainly be a difference in the appearance of the floor). I find it interesting that there is so much care taken to reproduce the exact stage floor down to the nails used; certainly Carnegie Hall is a cautionary example, but I don’t think anyone is proposing filling in the sub-stage area with cement. But it’s good to know (albeit a little scary) that the BSO doesn’t know what the stage trap door is for, either…

There were a lot fewer reviews for Seiji’s Mahler 2nd than for previous concerts, though the crowd was much bigger. The reviews were also all about Seiji, though I think the performance of the orchestra and chorus was worth at least talking about:

• Boston Herald: Wiz Ozawa steals BSO shed show (easily my favorite review title ever). “Stutzmann and Murphy sang responsively in their minor solo roles, and the chorus, as usual, sang with nuance and clarity. The orchestra was magnificent, and the roaring from the crowd carried deep into the Tanglewood night.”
• Boston Globe: For Ozawa, an emotional and expressive return to Tanglewood. “The BSO playing was glorious; many episodes, like the brass chorales that used to sputter and splatter, were admirable in ensemble and balance. The hushed entry of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus into the finale was once again an unearthly and spine-tingling moment. There were significant and eloquent instrumental solos from Ronald Barron, trombone, and John Ferrillo, oboe. The vocal soloists were Nathalie Stutzmann, singing with deep-plush contralto tone and warm feeling, and Heidi Grant Murphy, tracing the higher lines with her pearly soprano.”
• Patriot Ledger: Ozawa returns, triumphant, to Tanglewood stage. “In the glorious natural setting of the Berkshires, hearing this epic work capped by the triumphant choral proclamation, ‘Rise again, yes, you will rise again,’ was an uplifting experience.”