Category: Music

My first BSO concert of the season is coming up: a performance of Sir Michael Tippet’s oratorio A Child Of Our Time under the direction of Sir Colin Davis. The work, a response to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, particularly Kristallnacht, in the days leading up to the Second World War, alternates highly chromatic and difficult choral passages with settings of African-American spirituals. While on first blush the description sounds too “high concept” for comfort, the choice of spirituals is appropriate: the texts of the spirituals evoke images from Old Testament (i.e. Jewish) history as a response to slavery, particularly “Go Down Moses” and “Deep River” (“my home is over Jordan”), and the juxtaposition of the spirituals with the texts about persecution brings things full circle.

Rehearsals with the chorus have been good so far. We start orchestra rehearsals next week, and performances are at the end of the month (the Mozart Posthorn Serenade is also on the program), on the 27th, 28th and 29th. I hope some of my Boston area readers can make one of the shows.

It’s difficult for me to write an objective review of the new Long Winters EP, Ultimatum, because I can hardly bear to listen closely to the first track. It’s not that it’s bad—far from it—just wrenching. “The Commander Thinks Aloud,” which appeared in an electronically remixed form on Barsuk’s Future Soundtrack for America compilation, is a moving meditation on the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia from the point of view of the crew. It makes me think that John Roderick must have been doing the same thing I was that February morning in 2003: saying “no no no no no” to the radio and weeping for our future. The final coda, “The crew compartment’s breaking up,” is almost unbearable in its stately majesty.

The rest of the EP, coming two-plus years after the band’s sometimes rollicking, sometimes touching triumph When I Pretend to Fall, is consistent in gravity and musical excellence. The cover image, of falling sere leaves, is appropriate: this is autumnal music.

The melancholy of autumn is there in lyrics of the title cut, though it’s kind of a juvenile melancholy with echoes of Cummings and even Simon and Garfunkel: “No one can harness the rain/And I can make myself into rain/You’ll feel me on your cheek/And on your sleeve” is reminiscent of nothing so much as “Kathy’s Song.” The same echoes recur in “Delicate Hands,” which has one of the finer lines of regret I’ve heard in a pop song recently: “I want to feed you/butter-rum candy/But someone beat you/to me.”

The final two songs on the EP, live solo Roderick performances of “Ultimatum” and “Bride and Bridle” from When I Pretend to Fall, solidify the impression of a band in a more reflective place. The band has gone through a fairly tumultuous history in its five years, with an eight-member “emeritus” list on its official bio page (to be fair, many of them were touring members or producers only, and one—Sean Nelson—has his own band to look after. But Ultimatum makes the case that John Roderick in his own right is a substantial talent and that in the context of this band he can produce some genuinely moving stuff. A big impact from a short release. I’m looking forward to hearing the full-length, due out next year.

This review also published at Blogcritics.

PS: Shout out to the omnipresent Merlin Mann (of 5ives and 43 Folders fame), who also maintains the Long Winters web site. Small world, innit?

Item number 1: Seattle band Harvey Danger, of “Flagpole Sitta” fame, has released its newest album as free MP3 downloads from its website and via Bittorrent. Should be good stuff. (Via Slashdot)

Item number 2: Indie stalwarts Steadman have released their major label albums for free download from their website. (Via BoingBoing)

Finally, the 31 tossed-off-in-an-afternoon tracks of Van Morrison’s contractual obligation album, featuring such fine songs as “Ring Worm,” “Blow In Your Nose,” “Want a Danish,” “The Big Royalty Check,” and “Here Comes Dumb George,” are available for download at WFMU. Go nuts. (Again, via BoingBoing)

I bet you thought the CD Project was done or abandoned, didn’t you? No such luck. As the title says, I’m only about a third of the way through, and it just keeps going and going.

The milestone this week was finally completing ripping the contents of the first drawer of my CD cabinet. (I would have been there much sooner except for the fact that I’m simultaneously ripping the jazz in the third drawer.) This is the first visible sign of progress I’ve made to date, other than the mounting stats in iTunes. To wit:

• 180 artists
• 230 albums
• 2745 tracks
• 9:09:01:06 total time
• 61.49 GB

As before, this does not include the existing contents of my library. It also includes the removal of a small number of duplicates—apparently iTunes doesn’t recognize that a track has already been ripped if title, artist, or album name have changed since the track was first imported. As in, removing the word “the” from an artist’s name. Sigh. Fortunately only a few playcounts were lost when I went back and deleted the duplicate track.

Annoyances? The classical metadata problems also continue. This week, it’s going in, sorting by composer, and learning how many CDDB submitters think that Aaron Copland is Stewart Copeland’s brother. No e, people.

Salon’s Audiofile free download today is a pointer to a pair of classic Dock Boggs tracks from the late 1920s, “Pretty Polly” and “Country Blues.” More than any other track on the Anthology of American Folk Music, the latter earns Greil Marcus’s nickname for this old pre-genre music: the old, weird America. And yet it’s a blues, through and through. If you double the first line of every couplet and drop the “good people/poor boy” interjections, you can sing it to just about any twelve bar blues. My favorite is to take it against Bob Dylan’ “Meet Me in the Morning.”

And I disagree with the assessment that Dock’s 1960s recordings are better. Yes, Dock going back after 40 years in the coal mine and picking up his banjo to revisit some nearly forgotten songs is impressive, but not as impressive as Dock leaving the coal mines to go and do something totally alien and then being forgotten for 40 years. Plus there’s more menace, for me, in the earlier recordings.

I wrote my woman a letter, good people
I told her I’s in jail
She wrote me back an answer
Saying “Honey, I’m a-coming to go your bail”

All around this old jailhouse is haunted, good people
Forty dollars won’t pay my fine
Corn whisky has surrounded my body, poor boy
Pretty women is a-troubling my mind

Two years ago, a Nada Surf review would have begun by mentioning their 1996 novelty hit “Popular,” and their subsequent fall from grace (and the majors). Today, any review of a Nada Surf album has a different reference point: their brilliant 2002 release Let Go, held by Blogcritics and other reviewers to be one of the top 5 albums of 2003 after it was re-released on Barsuk. This shift in perception is both a blessing and a curse for the band. On the one hand, they spent years trying to escape the shadow of “Popular.” On the other hand, following up an album as richly melancholic, quietly epic, and idiosyncratic as Let Go is a tall order. With The Weight is a Gift, Matthew Caws, Daniel Lorca, and Ira Elliot have produced a worthy album that, while not on the same plane as the desperately yearning Let Go, has its own rewards.

If there is less desperation on this release, it is for a good reason: the band is tighter and more self-assured in its playing and songwriting than before. (They would have to be, to put in an 11 song set in under 40 minutes.) The band’s songwriting focus is more outward looking at the same time: where much of Let Go felt like internal monologues from one side of failing relationships, The Weight is a Gift paints a series of portraits of people in different stages of disassembly, from the burned out loveless loser of “Concrete Bed” to the control freak of “What Is Your Secret.” The elliptical, closely observed writing can sometimes mislead, as with the apparently happy “Oh f*ck it/I’m going to have a party” that starts “The Blankest Year,” before it becomes a a darker set of observations set jarringly against bouncy pop rhythms: “i”d like to return this spell/it’s not my size/and your lies are so much bigger/than my lies.” Other interviews with band members have suggested that the songs are inspired by Matthew Caws’ unspecified difficult experiences over the past year, but the lyrics escape the narrow focus of the personal to suggest universal pains and fears.

The standout cut for me at this stage is probably “Your Legs Grow,” which seemed forlornly out of place on last year’s polemic Future Soundtrack for America but which gains immeasurably by its surroundings on this album. Freed of trying to read political meanings into the lyrics, it reads as a lifeline thrown out to a troubled friend.

On most of the songs, the lyrics stand in contrast to the music: incredibly compact pop songs that veer from rocking to quiet ballads while burrowing a groove into your ears. This is some seriously catchy songwriting, with smart performances aided and abetted by the skilled production of Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla at his Hall of Justice studio in Seattle (as well as some time in über-multitracker John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco). There’s a depth to these recordings that repays deeper listening, both on the purely sonic level and lyrically.

If there is a flaw to the record, it is its insistence on keeping its true feelings difficult to find. Unlike Let Go, The Weight is a Gift doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, and where it gets guarded, it gets difficult to approach. But at the core it is a worthy successor, musically and emotionally, to an excellent album, and I don’t think I could personally ask for more.

The album hits stores on Tuesday the 13th. In the meantime, you can visit the band’s website to listen to three tracks and download “Do It Again,” the first single.

This review was also published at BlogCritics.

The CD Project proceeds apace; yesterday I finished ripping all my John Coltrane CDs to Apple Lossless format. As I looked at each disc in turn, annotating the files with session notes and musician info, I found myself drawn into memories of my self-education in jazz.

Growing up I listened to nothing but classical music until I was maybe 12 years old, when I discovered the Police—angry yet mannered, literate rock. At the time I wasn’t totally comfortable with the angry part, but I latched onto the mannered part. Listening to Sting felt rebellious but safe. A big part of that, particularly in the subsequent solo records, was the jazz influence. I decided I needed to learn more about jazz, and so I started at the logical jumping off point of Branford Marsalis, who at that time was playing with Sting.

Exploring jazz through Branford—a young player who was trying to establish his own identity but who provided few direct links back to the old tradition, simply because he generally only played his own compositions or a few standards—was difficult. But I liked what I was hearing, the interplay of the horns with the drums, and decided I needed to go deeper. By this time it was 1988 or 1989 and Bono was name-checking John Coltrane and A Love Supreme on U2’s grandiosely overblown Rattle and Hum—which naturally I also loved. (I was 16. Whaddaya want?) So I went out and got a copy of the pivotal Trane album.

I wish I could say that I was immediately blown away, but the truth is it took some time. There were things about the record that I thought were cool—the chants and the blazing solos on “Resolution,” made my hair stand on end. But I didn’t really get the modal melodies and couldn’t appreciate the extended drum solos at the heart of the piece. But I kept listening.

In another year or so, I was a first year at UVA, and shoring up my insecurity and loneliness with CD shopping at Plan 9. I desperately wanted to be cool and to be listening to things that no one around me was, and so I spent a lot of time spelunking throught the jazz racks, anchored to the few artists I knew anything about, which at that point consisted of Trane and Branford (and, somehow, Thelonious Monk—but that’s another story). I had no education, didn’t have the sense to start listening to jazz radio, so I used the copy on the back of the CDs to decide which ones to take home. This brought me to the Prestige and Fantasy releases (the so called “Original Jazz Classics”), which inevitably contained review capsules on the back cover of the CD with raves or claims of “instant classic.”

And that was how I came to pick up Lush Life: it was the Coltrane Prestige recording that had the highest ratings and the most stars on the back.

I took the disc back to the dorm and started listening. My then-roommate Greg was in the room and we soon were both listening: to the tremendous blown run that begins the album and “Like Someone in Love,” to the percussive experimentation of “I Love You” and the walking bass of “Trane’s Slo Blues.” And then the title cut, introduced by Red Garland’s piano followed by perfect choruses by both Trane and Donald Byrd. Partway through Byrd’s second chorus, Greg turned to me and asked, “How do you find this stuff?”

I wish I could have told him the truth, but I think I just mumbled something about being lucky.

I went on over the next few years to discover the rest of Trane’s work and to branch out into Miles, avant garde jazz, and the great blowing sessions of the 50s. I’ll be digitizing all of it in the weeks to come, but I think that none of the tracks will be as often as the five tracks from this set. I can’t even guess how many other versions of “Lush Life” I’ve found over the years (at least not without sitting in front of my home computer, though I can think of versions by Roland Hanna, Bobby Timmons, Joe Henderson, Duke Ellington (of course), and Johnny Hartman in a subsequent date with Coltrane), but this one remains the gold standard.

From Seattle, Samantha reports Mike Doughty + Death Cab + Lemony Snicket = goodness. To have been a fly on that wall…

The Great CD Ripping Project continues, after a brief hiatus while I was out of town on business. New totals: 108 albums, 1317 songs, 4:04:52:01 total time, 28.02 GB.

I’ve had to add a few new smart playlists to keep up with The Project. I still want to listen to all the music as it comes in, but the large lossless files won’t all fit on my iPod. So I’ve had to build a small Never Played playlist, limited to 100 or so tracks, to manage. I also built a smart playlist where “kind” contains Apple Lossless so that I could easily identify all the tracks that have been ripped as part of the project, and I could easily track my progress.

I’ve also had more than one occasion to bitch about the CDDB, and more particularly, about people who mangle the data for classical CDs. One version of the rant is contained in this comment on a MacOSXHint. The hint claims to provide a good way to manage classical tracks, but instead actively encourages inaccurate data.

The worst, though, is people who use the Artist field to put the movement name and put the name of the work in the Title name. This is all over the CDDB. It’s driving me up the wall, because it’s taking me at least three times as long to rip a classical CD. I’m afraid if I import the tracks with bad data, I’ll never be able to find them to reconcile them again.

Well, it took two years, but Run-DMC is finally available in the iTunes Music Store as of Tuesday.

(One) day when I was chillin’ in Kentucky Fried Chicken
Just mindin’ my business, eatin’ food and finger lickin’
This dude walked in lookin’ strange and kind of funny
Went up to the front with a menu and his money
He didn’t walk straight, kind of side to side
He asked this old lady, “Yo, yo, um…is this Kentucky Fried?”
The lady said “Yeah”, smiled and he smiled back
He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac!
You be illin’

Just got word from RL Burnside’s label, Fat Possum, that the late blooming blues musician passed away today in Memphis at the age of 81. Going from a hardscrabble life as a sharecropper and fisherman, he recorded for the first time in 1968 but didn’t make it into the public eye until his 1996 collaboration with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. A great bluesman and a great voice.

Because I’m obsessive and am going to lose the links unless I note them here:

• Micrographia: the Microscopy of Vinyl Records
• Shure M97xE High Performance Cartridge
• Stereophile: Tweaking your Record-Player
• Van den Hul: Turntable System Setup
• Audiophilia: A Beginner’s Guide to Cartridge Setup
• Audio Asylum Audio FAQ
• And, just for kicks, the Stereophile Complaint Form

Esta, who arrived on Wednesday evening for a few days of R and R, is helping me with a very important task: auditioning a new turntable. A coworker was looking to unload a circa 1983 Denon DP-45F that hadn’t been played in eleven years.

So far the results have been mixed. On the plus side, the full automatic action is smooth, and the sound can be quite good, even without the grounding strap connected. On the minus side, the unit is an inch or so too deep for our AV shelf, meaning I would need to do another cutout (if I could and still be able to lift the glass on the turntable). More damningly, the thing skips on brand new records. I’m not sure if that’s because it needs a new stylus, because it doesn’t like 180 gram vinyl, or what. I’ll play with it a little more this weekend and see if I can isolate the problem without shelling out the money for a new stylus or cartridge (which could be substantial, according to this thread).

It is a sweet looking turntable though.

Courtesy Doveman, here’s Dead Air Space, which appears to be a group blog by the members of Radiohead. So far: announcement of a studio session, during which the guys worked on songs entitled “Suits Don’t Fit” and “Pigsee” or “Pigs Ear.” Also discussion of the band’s time off in 2004 and an intriguing confession from Thom that “it has taken me a long time to get my CONFIDENCE BACK.”