Category: Music

A confession: I wasn’t an online music buyer until Apple’s iTunes Music Store came along. Too many of the stores seemed to offer music in proprietary formats which only proprietary clients could play. All seemed to have a crawlingly limited selection.

Of course, I realized after a week or so happily downloading stuff from the ’Store, the same is true of Apple’s offering. Proprietary format? Close—AAC appears to be supported by a very small constellation of players (fortunately including both iTunes and the iPod). And limited selection? Well, no Radiohead, Sigur Ros, or Beatles, and (at least for now) no indie labels. But, I decided, I was still having a good time with the service.

But what to do about all the indie music? As a loyal KEXP listener, I yearned for something beyond the major labels. Then Scott Rosenberg wrote about eMusic: “If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.” Encouraged, I gave it a try. And Scott was right: eMusic rocks. MP3 downloads, lots of indie labels, and (bonus) enormous swaths of the Fantasy back catalog, including Prestige and Riverside recordings (think Monk, 50s era Miles and Trane, and hundreds of other key jazz records). Over the last week (during my trial membership) I’ve downloaded the Pernice Brothers, Yo La Tengo, Kristin Hersh, Daniel Lanois’ latest (oh well, always at least one clinker), an EP of My Morning Jacket, and some oddities to round out old reconstructed mix tapes, like Peter Murphy. Plus the cover of “You and Your Sister” by This Mortal Coil with Kim and Kelley Deal on vocals.

So that unanticipated side effect? All of a sudden, after Apple’s breakthrough, buying music on line seems like the most natural thing in the world—regardless of who’s selling. I wouldn’t be surprised if eMusic and other online stores get a big lift over the next few months.

It’s true, and it’s in a magazine, Kung Fu magazine to be exact. Apparently Lou has been studying Tai Chi since the early 80s, and he’s hooked up with a pretty major league master, Ren Guangyi. It appears Master Ren may be touring with Lou this summer, which means I’ll get to see him in action when the show comes to Seattle. Should be pretty cool.

There are a few bands that surface over and over again in interviews with rock stars as serious influences on serious musicians. Others rattle the landscape even if they inhabit their own space, free of any imitators or hangers on. Usually they’re bands you’ve never heard, or even heard of. In the past I’ve been richly rewarded by seeking out some of these bands—like the Velvet Underground, Robert Johnson, Robert Cage, Gemma Hayes, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Gastr Del Sol, Dock Boggs, and others.

But I always put off listening to Big Star, despite hearing artists like REM, the Replacements, and the dBs claim them as touchstones. Why? No good reason, really, except that they were from the 70s (their song “In the Street” is the theme song of That 70s Show—in a cover version by Cheap Trick(!!)), and that one of their founding members was Alex Chilton, with whom I associated hundreds of bad a cappella covers of his classic song with the Box Tops, “The Letter.” But I kept wondering. Could they be as good as everyone said they were?

Nah. They were’t that good. They were better.

My first inkling of this was listening to “You and Your Sister,” a rare b-side by the co-founder of the band, Chris Bell (cut less than a year before his death in a car crash in 1977), on the most recent Oxford American Music Issue cd. The voice is haunting and high, the lyrics pained and honest (“Your sister says that I’m no good/I’d reassure her if I could/All I want to do/Is spend some time with you…friends fail every day…”), the melody gorgeous and simple. Okay, I thought, it’s time.

So I picked up Big Star’s first two albums, #1 Record and Radio City, on a single disc budget compilation. And fell in love. The first song, “Feel” has high strained vocals that uncannily recall 70s scream rock (think Cheap Trick, Led Zeppelin, or “Rock and Roll Coochie Coo”) coupled with a chorus that could have been on Pet Sounds. And then the instrumental break busts out an incredible brass line that reminds you that, yes, Big Star came from Memphis. (Most of the rest of the songs mercifully dispense with the scream rock vocals.) “In the Street,” while not as swaggering as the Cheap Trick cover version, is somehow more interesting in the places it goes, sounding a little Beach Boys and REM by turns. Other songs presage Uncle Tupelo and bring echoes of the Byrds. And those are just some of the songs from the first album; Radio City is even stronger. No wonder radio wasn’t ready for Big Star. It’s the sort of music that’s almost too good to share.

Getting some traffic from a new site (as in it’s new to me), No Rock and Roll Fun, who pointed to my February bit about the Charlatans UK. (Permalink on their site broken, I don’t know why I even bother since Blogspot never gets archives right, but it’s still on their front page.) The rest of the articles appear to be a mix of music links and scandalous gossip—excellent late Friday afternoon reading if things at the office get a bit slow. Which they won’t for me, as I get the afternoon off to do an early start on Memorial Day weekend.

I was in a meeting yesterday when someone said June Carter Cash had passed away. It’s like the departure of an elemental force as well as a touchstone back to the Carter Family and the long-lost roots of a distinctly American music. And an American love story. Who else but June could have brought Johnny back to the straight and narrow? Who else but June could have written “Ring of Fire”?

The New York Times has a moving obituary.

One last program for the year with the Cascadian Chorale, this one featuring Fauré’s Requiem and Copland’s In the Beginning. It’s fun to sing the Fauré, though I have to confess that, this being my fourth or fifth lifetime performance, I have to remind myself to stop and listen every now and then to appreciate the beauty.

The Copland is a different story. A rare piece for Copland, it’s written for a cappella choir and soprano solo and is more akin to his early avant garde works than later symphonies such as Appalachian Spring with their explicitly folk-tune based melodies. The piece is is no specific key or meter, but visits about twelve different tonalities throughout, all with hummable melodies and each yielding to the next in a slow chromatic rise of pitch throughout the piece until the final lines are sung in an ecstatic seventh above where the music started. The rhythms are propelled by the natural rhythms of the text, the first chapters of Genesis. The whole work is said to be one of the most challenging choral compositions of the twentieth century. I believe it. But it’s also one of the most beautiful.

Hope to see you all at the concert…

Last week, you could buy Radiohead’s OK Computer in the iTunes Music Store. Not this week. No comment, no notice.

Wonder if the leaking of Hail to the Thief to the web soured Thom and the boys on the whole music download thing? If so, I hope it’s a short term anger…

Also now absent: Sigur Ros. They had a headline in the Alternative section last week.

Update 9 May 9:12 am: See the expanded version of this post at Blogcritics.

Going from my own list of tracks I’m trying to replace from CDs that were sold during college at the end of each semester for gas money (true!), I found some gaps in the Apple Music Store’s 2000 songs. I haven’t gone back to figure out who owns the rights, but I have pinged the Music Store Management using their handy suggestion form.

Here’s the list:

• Peter Murphy: no tracks
• Jesus & Mary Chain: no tracks
• Jesus Jones: only their last album available
• Radiohead: only OK Computer

There were also some tracks I didn’t expect to find, namely:

• U2’s One single, including the fabulous “Lady With The Spinning Head”
• Bugs Bunny on Broadway, including the full soundtrack to “Long Haired Hare” (“L-L-L-Leopold!”)

And finally, some notes on pricing: No apparent discounts for albums; you can only buy some songs, notably those over 6 minutes, on albums (no downloading just the 38-minute version of “Sister Ray” from the Quine Tapes box set for you!).

Although Peter Murphy is not available on Apple’s iTunes Music Store, William Burroughs is. Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie. Track by track.

If you’ve never heard Michael Franti and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy backing up Burroughs’ insane rants on the latter album, you at least owe it to yourself to spend the $0.99 to check out the title track.

Hey, anyone notice you can’t link to anything in the iTunes music store from the Web? Dumb, Apple.

Eric Olsen at Blogcritics reports on Wilco’s celebration of the one-year anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s release with the streaming audio release of an Australian EP featuring alternate versions of YHF material and new songs. Cool, if you can get through.

And if that isn’t enough, another BlogCritic reports that you can get all of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and some of Fight Test via stream here.

Greg writes a eulogy for Nina Simone, who passed away yesterday at 70:

This Is Not the Greatest Post in the World…this is just a tribute — a tribute to Nina Simone, the legendary and fiery-tempered jazz vocalist…you could start anywhere in her catalog and not go wrong. I’m only glad I got to know her work. A roommate hipped me to her when I first moved to Chicago, and I’ve been listening to her ever since.

Eric Olsen at Blogcritics rounds up some great biographical sketches, including one from Salon: “‘To Love Somebody’ was my introduction to Simone, and I’ll never forget the way she berated her musicians during the intro to ‘Revolution.’ She harshly tells them, ‘Hold it! This is louder than usual. Let it groove on its own thing.’ Cool. I thought. This woman can kick butt…”

Listened to the family-and-friends-only CD that the Suspicious Cheese Lords made (back when I was in the group), Incipit, on the way in this morning. It’s a schizoid disc, half devoted to a bunch of new music members of the group wrote for a theater production of Romeo and Juliet that we recorded but which was never used, half to new and old lamentations. The centerpiece and title piece of the album is Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, which was the musical work the group was originally formed to perform and which is still in my head. A fascinatingly complex work, with intricate five voice polyphony and loads of double meanings. The text, Jeremiah’s lament for the fall of Jerusalem, can be read as Tallis’s lament for the suppression and demise of Catholicism, his tradition of faith, in England.

We performed this piece many times, but almost always during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, as part of Tenebrae and Holy Friday services. Here the Lamentations would take on additional meaning in the Christian context of lamenting the sinfulness of man and the attendant sacrifice of Christ. But despite all the lamenting, these were always happy times. The group would perform two or three times during the week, steep itself in the religious tradition, and get to be part of some truly moving observances of faith. And spend a lot of time together as friends.

The Lamentations have a double meaning for me as well, since I first sang them with the Virginia Glee Club under John Liepold in his first season. Favorite memories of performing the piece: a morning performance on a spring break trip after a night in New Orleans at a private school with an, um, impaired group (during the course of the fifteen minute work, we sank a full minor third under pitch); and performing it with seven or eight good friends in resonant stairwells and arcades in academic buildings and on the Lawn.

So this piece with its deep message of despair came to be a familiar friend and a comfort to me over the years. There is, I think, something to be said for the liturgical emphasis during Lent of recognizing grief as a key part of the church year, and as a necessary precursor to the joy of Easter.

I wanted to add a new CD to the “Current Listening” section below (see my actual home page, all you RSS viewers who are missing this feature), but I was stymied because Amazon doesn’t list it. But go check out Michael, the Athens, GA emo-pop band, and PayPal the album. It’s pretty damned good.

My friends in the group in which I sang in Washington, DC, the Suspicious Cheese Lords, will make their satellite radio debut on Sirius XM this Sunday (scroll to the bottom), in promotion of their new album
Maestro di Capella. Go listen.

Suspicious Cheese Lords In Concert
Vox – XM 112
Noon ET
The early-music ensemble Suspicious Cheese Lords join us live at the XM Studios for a special performance of sacred music.

A college friend now employed by the Berklee College of Music, Adam Olenn, writes to say he is coordinating Berklee’s involvement in a charity concert, called A Night of Healing, for the victims and survivors of the Rhode Island nightclub fire that claimed the lives of 100 Great White concertgoers:

 

On February 20th a fire consumed The Station nightclub in Rhode Island at a Great White concert. There were almost 300 people in attendance, and 3 minutes after the pyrotechnics were deployed, 100 were dead and over 150 were badly burned. 

To put this in perspective, the population of Rhode Island is around 300,000. Which means that something like 1% of the population was involved in that fire.

West Warwick, RI is a working-class community in which people don’t tend to have a lot of cash lying around. This becomes a problem when they are suddenly hit with a minimum funeral cost of $5,000 or medical bills of $350,000.

Again, some perspective – the minimum cost to bury the dead from this tragedy is half a million dollars. That doesn’t begin to get into medical bills, or the costs of losing a family provider.

Under the auspices of Berklee College of Music, I have teamed up with Century Productions to produce A Night of Healing.

A Night of Healing is a benefit concert to aid the victims and survivors of The Station nightclub fire, and will be held on April 22 at the Providence Performing Arts Center from 7pm to midnight. Tickets are $35, $45, and $50, and can be purchased through the PPAC box office (401-421-2997) or through Ticketmaster. If you can possibly attend, I ask that you do so.

On Saturday April 26, A Night of Healing will be broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS in the Southern New England region and nationally on the Comcast Network from 7-10pm. During the broadcast, we will display an 800 number to solicit donations for The Station Fire Nightclub Fund which has been set up by the governor. If you cannot attend, please watch the telethon and call in your donation.

The performers at A Night of Healing include: Pheobe Snow, Billy Gilman, Blue Oyster Cult, Gary Angelin & the CCCM Gospel Choir, Black Hawk, Andrew Douglass of Berklee, John Anthony, Servants & Saints, Rick Derringer of Zebra, Vanilla Fudge, James Montgomery, Lennon Murphy, Chris & Meredith Thompson, Shortino from Quiet Riot, Larry Hoppen of Orleans, and Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad

If you can come to the concert, please do that. If you cannot, please tune in on Saturday evening and make a donation. If you have questions about the fund, visit http://www2.sec.state.ri.us/feb_event/. If you have questions about the event, please email me.

If you or your company can provide sponsorship to help us cover the costs of producing A Night of Healing, please contact me at your earliest convenience.

I thank you all for your time and attention, and for your generosity as we help the people of Rhode Island heal from this tragedy.

Official site here; press release (on VH1.com) here.