Weinerbrot

In my youth, Sunday morning coffee was often accompanied by some variety of Danish – cheese, prune, apricot, or what-have-you. I figured the Danes must be really good bakers to have such delicious pastries named after them. Turns out that the Danish word for "Danish" isn't "Danish" at all: it's "weinerbrot", which is Danish for "Viennese Bread". This tells you a lot about the Viennese; so does the music of Fritz Kreisler.

Today's work CD is My Favorite Kreisler, recorded by Itzhak Perlman on violin accompanied by the redoubtable Samuel Sanders on piano. This is an assortment of pieces, some Kreisler originals mixed with his arrangements and pieces "in the style of" other composers. They're a tasting menu of lyrical/romantic and virtuoso courses, served a la Perlman, shmaltz included. Perlman, who is the heir of the Isaac Stern style, is a master of the romantic voice; while technically flawless, his sentimentality always come through in his interpretations. This includes a shining layer of schmaltz - and not just any chicken-fat, but the best organic free-range poulet de Bresse schmaltz, which gives it a unique flavor that I, for one, find delicious.

Kreisler, a native of Vienna who traveled and lived elsewhere in Europe and died an American citizen, wrote music that always brings to mind a society café somewhere in mitteleuropa. An evening at the Opera has ended; elegant ladies and their formally-clad escorts are sipping sweetened dark (but never bitter) coffee out of porcelain cups, about to take another bite of sachertorte. A violinist, accompanied by piano, is playing "Caprice viennois, Op. 2", "Shon Rosmarin", and "Liebesfreud", and the waiters are going from table to table with shining sterling tureens filled with schlag, snowy mountains of schlag.

Classical Gasbag

Here's yet another in the vast pile of boring attacks on atonal music. Actually, if you want good examples of dissonance, read the comments and counter-comments. I'm no big fan of Schonberg - but I do like The Bad Plus and Indonesian gamelan music, not to mention Chinese opera and Thelonious Monk's chord changes.

The Velvet Foghorn

Yesterday my meeting-to-doing ratio was out of control, so I didn't have much time to listen to the work CD of the day, The Many Sides of Fred Neil. Well, it's a two-disc set anyway, so I'll be listening to it again today. Fred Neil was a seminal figure of the Village folk scene, an early fuser of folk and rock (especially instrumentation), a fine songwriter who generated hits for other people but none for himself, and a figure of mystery who appeared, made his mark on people like David Crosby, John Sebastian, and Dylan, and then totally dropped out of the music scene.

But the most important thing about Fred Neil is his voice - a deep, dark, bass-baritone, sweetened by a drawl, and capable of bending notes like a blues guitar. He's got a midrange, too, and a good one, but it's those low notes that get you (subsonics, maybe?). Some artists have a tear in every song, no matter how happy the melody and lyrics; Fred Neil makes every song he sings a blues, filled with an undertone of yearning.

This disc contains three Capitol albums he recorded (Fred Neil, Sessions, and Other Side of This Life), along with some early singles and several unreleased tracks. It's worth getting primarily for the Fred Neil sides, which include some of his best and best-known songs (best-known - unfortunately - for their covers by others, like Harry Nilsson's hit release of "Everybody's Talkin'" or Tim Buckley's "The Dolphins"). He also does personalized versions of some classic folksongs - "Green Rocky Road" for example, and "Sweet Cocaine" - and makes them his own. The other two albums on the CD are secondary - they've got some good work on them (though the last is more of a "fulfill the contract" set, with live tracks and odds&ends), but don't rise to the level of Fred Neil

He had two earlier albums, available in a double CD set - Tear Down the Walls, recorded with Vince Martin, and Bleecker and MacDougal, which is almost as good as Fred Neil and contains my favorite lyric blues, "Little Bit of Rain". If you can get your hands on that double set and today's selection, you'll have all of Fred Neil's significant work - which is both great and too bad.

In the song "Bleecker and MacDougal", Fred sings:

I was standing on the corner
Of the Bleecker and MacDougal
Wondering which way to go
I've got a woman down in Coconut Grove
And you know she love me so

I wanna go home
I wanna go home
Now don't you tell me your troubles
Troubles of my own
I wanna go home

In 1971, he cut his last commercial album, went home to Florida, and never looked back. He died in 2001, a blue day for music.

Wimoweh (Mbube)

The first version of Solomon Linda's Mbube I recall hearing was the Weavers’ hit song Wimoweh, in the fifties; I knew it was vaguely “African”, maybe “Zulu”, but those terms didn’t really mean much to me at the time. I liked that it was about hunting lions (turns out it's about chasing them away, which is close enough).

My father favored classical music – chamber in particular – but was also, among other things, a lifelong Social Democrat, a strong union man, and a lover of folksongs. We didn’t have a lot of records, but along with his trios and quartets and my mother’s operatic baritones and bassos(she adored Ezio Pinza), you’d find the Weavers, Josh White, Burl Ives, Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, Josef Marais and Miranda, Harry Belafonte. At first, I associated the song with the Pete Seeger vocal. It was the Weavers version that we sang around the campfire at Camp Wel-Met, along with other songs they had brought to our attention like "Good-night, Irene", and "Twelve Gates to the City" and "If I Had A Hammer".

A Kingston Trio version came and went and then, when I was in High School, The Tokens rearranged Wimoweh as doo-wop, sweetened the harmonies, and smoothed out the “folky” qualities. In the early sixties, although things were changing, the pop was basically still all about true love and romance (rock got to be about sex; sometimes they crossed lines, like the Shirelles' "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow"); the Tokens version of Mbube/Wimoweh, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", isn’t a hunting song, it’s a lullabye, a soothing reassurance ("Don't worry - the lion is sleeping") – and I’ve always liked it just for what it is - not overinterpreting it as a song whose subtext is the suppression of masculine libido. :)

So a few years ago, I was watching a rerun of a PBS special, produced by Spike Lee and called “Do It Acappella” which brought together different kinds of acappella groups including The Persuasions (who released a terrific set of Beatles songs a few years ago), a jazz-infused gospel number by Take 6, and – to my delight – Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

For the last number, they combined with a solid doowop styling group, the Mint Juleps, and together they did a version of Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight that combined Ladysmith’s Zulu bottom (and occasional solos by Joseph Shabalala, whose last name is a doowop phrase) with the Tokens’ parts floating above, ably sung by Mint Julep. I liked it enough - along with the other numbers - to buy the CD Soundtrack of the show, and I still like it now when I play it, which I did at work today, occasionally singing under my breath. The only downside was that I didn’t get to watch Ladysmith’s rhythmic movement and dancing, which can be purely joyous.

Wake Up Call - 6/27

Years ago, I was browsing in J&R' Record World, an emporium down by NYC's City Hall which has since extended to cover most of the block it's on and now includes computers, office supplies, appliances, electronic gear and who knows what else. Back then, it was basically records. They had great stock and decent prices, and the manager's music selections were tasty. That day they were playing a kind of music I hadn't heard before, and which grabbed me so completely that I bought the album on the spot. It was Induku Zethu, by Zulu musicians Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whom Paul Simon later made famous in the USA on his Graceland recording (and who also appear on this week's selection and today's work CD, Do It Acappella). This album was my introduction to contemporary African music in general, and I've been a fan ever since. My favorite genres include Algerian rai, Congolese soukous, Malian music for the kora, the acoustic guitarists of Madagascar, and the South African township/mbaqanga style.

I first heard that last type of music on this week's wake-up set, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (which is now volume 1 of a series). This is a compilation of South African urban pop from the 80's, call-and-response style songs with a rolling, bouncing beat coming off an up-front bass line, the kind of music you can't sit still and listen to – you've just got to get up and move, usually with a big smile on your face, which makes it perfect wake-up music. I've set the opening track to a piece featuring the growling, gritty voice of Mahlathini, who sounds like I feel until the music gets me going.

Hi-yo Silver

Friday's CD was the Horace Silver Quintet's Blowin' The Blues Away, which also has two trio cuts. This hard-bop classic shows off Silver's skills as pianist, composer, and leader; it also contains some of the best work done by the other quintet members (Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor, Gene Taylor and Louis Hayes laying down the bottom on bass and drums respectively). The tracks range from the runaway train that opens the set ("Blowin' the Blues Away") to the gospel-rooted "Sister Sadie" to the romantic lyricism of "Peace" - and they all swing, some hard, some gently. It even has the now-ironic "Baghdad Blues"! Silver's compositions work the head and the body, like a good boxer, and he never lets you forget that the piano is a percussive instrument. He lays down changes and breaks up the rhythm with force, intelligence, and wit (not to mention funk), and gets fluid, dynamic music from the group seemingly without effort.

The disc is one of Blue Note's remastered originals in the Rudy Van Gelder series. These are by and large outstanding recordings from the fifties and sixties, and include important work by Silver, Coltrane, Rollins, Miles, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, and many others. They're very reasonably priced, sound great, have the original liner notes plus new ones, and include added tracks (often recorded at the original sessions - and not just alternate takes). They're a great way to extend a jazz collection or replace vinyl albums.

Doctor My Ears

I don't know how many people have heard of Doc Pomus, but I'll bet that just about everyone knows at least one of his songs. Doc was a Brill Building songwriter, a trustee of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, an indomitable polio victim (those of us who grew up in the fifties will remember how common this crippling disease was - and how frightening; I was in the first batch of testees when the Salk vaccine came out - we got official "Polio Pioneer" buttons and certificates; some of us, me among them, were in the group that actually got the vaccine), and an elected member of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He wrote for people like The Drifters, Ray Charles, and Elvis Presley.

Today's CD was a disc released several years ago on Rhino (a great label), entitled Till The Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus, a release that demonstrates how good the often misconceived tribute album can be.

My personal highlights are Lou Reed's imitable performance of "This Magic Moment", John Hiatt's rocking "A Mess of Blues", Los Lobos' fuzztoned take on "Lonely Avenue", and Brian Wilson's production of "Sweets for My Sweet". Other songs covered by the likes of Dylan, B.B.King, Aaron Neville, Shawn Colvin, and Dion (BRONX BOY!!!) include "Young Blood", "I Count the Tears", and "Save the Last Dance for Me" (although my favorite cover of this by - yes, Emmylou Harris - is not part of this set). The range of artists itself is a tribute to the writer and his songs.

These songs were written by a man out of the tin pan alley tradition who put his heart into his work. In the days of the singer-songwriter, the old school pros are sometimes looked down upon as commercial hacks without genuine feeling or soul.

Not Doc Pomus.

Homework Mix

I'm working from home today (waiting for a cable installation), and when I'm doing that, I like to put a 5 CD mix on the main stereo and run it at full random. The mix doesn't usually have a formal theme - more like a mood grouping - but there's always that mental connection that leads me to group the 5 discs together. Today's mix has a kind of Latin-Caribbean-North African vibe going. Here's the list:

• Chavez Ravine (Ry Cooder) about which I've written a lot. I'm still coming up the learning curve on this one, and each listening has been rewarding.
• Street Signs (Ozomatli). An anonymous commenter linked this LA group with Cooder and Los Lobos and I picked up their latest this week. Wow. Latino, hip-hop, rock, jazz, and - on this one - Algerian/Morrocan dance elements all fused tightly. Great energy, and - on two cuts - Eddie Palmieri.
• The Rough Guide to Rai (Various) is one of many Rough Guide CDs I've accumulated over the last few years. This worldbeat series offers collections of classic, neo-trad, and new artists in all the various manifestations of world music. Rai is Algerian dance-pop, that blends modern instrumentation with North African riffs (no, not Rifs), mastered by musicians like Cheb Mami, Cheb Khaled, and Fadela & Sahraoui. If you're at all interested in this kind of music, this CD is a great intro with the excellent liner notes common to the Rough Guide series.
• Wingless Angels are a Jamaican group characterized by hand drums and unison vocals - an uplifting chanting sound with an African soul. Keith Richards hooked up with the group, and recorded them in his backyard in Ocho Rios. His production is light-handed, and doesn't interfere at all with the grounded authenticity of the sound. Another great wake-up set.
• No Quarter (Jimmy Page & Robert Plant) has the Zeppelin leads reworking songs from their past in a largely unplugged context that includes Morrocan and Egyptian musicians.

Frabjous Day!

Struts and Frets has been indexed by Google and will now actually come up on the listing if someone searches on "Debussy Van Morrison Mississippi Sheiks". Fifteen minutes of fame (which I think has deflated to about 5 these days), here I come!

Classical Banjo - and that's no joke

Yes, it's classical banjo day courtesy of eclectic master banjoist Bela Fleck's CD, "Perpetual Motion". Banjos and banjoists take more than their share of abuse - for example, here's the canonical list of banjo jokes many of which started out as ethnic, lawyer, or - more appropriately - accordion jokes. But Bela Fleck and his banjo are no joke.

There's a category of recordings of classic music with unusual instrumentation (ignoring the "original instruments" group which would say that about every recording of pre-Classical era music that uses post-18th century instruments, and the common transcriptions of harpsichord music for piano, etc.). Some examples from my own collection that immediately come to mind are Walter/Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach, Synergy's synth arrangement of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (yeah, not strictly "classical" but the same concept), and the Swingle Singers' baroque vocalese.

There are two recordings in this category that I really like. One is Bob James' arrangements of Rameau for synthesizers, a set that can best be described as charming in a weird, electronic way. The other is the current selection, Fleck's Perpetual Motion. One thing that sets this CD apart is the use of all acoustic instruments. Fleck's banjo is supported on various tracks by marimba, acoustic bass, violin, mandolin, cello, and guitar (some fine musicians, too, including Edgar Meyer, Joshua Bell, and mandolin monster, Chris Thile of Nickel Creek). This helps him particularly when he branches out of Baroque selections (in which tonal coloring and dynamics are not as important as mathematical precision and clean lines) into pieces by Chopin and Brahms. Even there, most of the Romantic pieces are more Baroque-like, including a transcription of Paganini's tour de force for violin, Moto Perpetuo and Beethoven's Seven Variations on "God Save the King". Most of it works very well, including - to my surprise - a lovely take on Debussy's Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum. The weakest pieces, though, are those whose nature runs counter to the banjo's emotional capabilities like Tchaikovsky's Melody in E-flat.

That said, this is a disc I like for rainy afternoons, late night and early morning, and work. Fleck, whose eclectic nature is evident from his discography, does bluegrass/fusion/jazz work with the Flecktones, straight-up bluegrass with people like Dave Grisman, Jerry Douglas, and Tony Rice (the last cut is a reprise of Moto Perpetuo in bluegrass style), and a variety of solo projects, has gone out on a small limb here and hung on successfully for the greater part. I hope he cuts another like it in the not-too-distant future.

Duke of Earle

Sometimes I wonder whether Steve Earle is the country Bruce Springsteen or Bruce is the suburban Steve Earle. No matter; they're both exceptional songwriters with wide-based musical knowledge - the kind of artists who are rooted in tradition (Steve in country, Bruce in rock, and both in folk), but don't hesitate to extend it, which makes them my sort of musicians, and I listen to them both periodically.

Today's CD was Steve Earle's "Train a Comin'", an all-acoustic set performed with a small group of first class string musicians - Norman Blake primarily on guitar, dobro, and Hawaiian steel; Peter Rowan mainly on mandolin; Roy Huskey on bass. Two of the cuts feature Emmylou Harris' vocals. I think Emmylou sings harmony lines better than most people sing leads, and her presence adds class to whatever she touches. The songs are performed in traditional country style, although they span genres; even a cover of "I'm Looking Through You" is in the string group style (Steve refers to the Beatles as "the stuff I cut my teeth on - middle class white boy roots music") as is the umpteenth cover of "Rivers of Babylon". Highlights for me are a sweet honkytonk ballad, "Sometimes She Forgets" and the gunfighter tale of "Tom Ames' Prayer".

Back to Steve. He started as a country act, with songs like "Guitar Town", went through some personal hard times, came out as what the Grammy's call a "contemporary folk" artist (he won the category in 2005, and previous winners include Emmylou for "Red Dirt Girl" and Bruce for "Ghost of Tom Joad" along with Dylan, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, John Prine and other worthies) . He's also been nominated in the bluegrass category for the album he cut with the Del McCoury Band - "The Mountain". That one features a set of tracks which sound like traditional songs you can almost recall; Steve wrote them all. If you're at all partial to this kind of music, it's an outstanding set. In fact, just about all Steve's CDs are worth picking up, including "I Feel Alright" and "El Corazon" from some years ago.

I like "Train a Comin'" for its small scale and more traditional folkie approach to songs; then again, my two favorites are probably "The Mountain" and - most of all - "Transcendental Blues", on which Steve shows his talents for a wide variety of song styles. His two most recent albums, "Jerusalem" (with the notorious song, "John Walker's Blues" - a small, well-crafted piece that tries to get inside John Walker Lindh's head), and "The Revolution Starts...Now". In these two, Steve leads with his left, and puts his politics up front - which these days is more than worthy of praise. Steve has always been a strong anti-death penalty advocate (and has written some fine songs on the subject, particularly "Ellis Unit One" from the "Dead Man Walking" soundtrack - now available on his miscellany album, "Sidetracks"), but these two albums extend into the political world in general.

I think "Revolution" is the more successful of the two, and songs like "Home to Houston" about a truck driver in Iraq, and the accusatory "Rich Man's War" are very effective both in content and music. Not everything works; as others have noted, his reggae love note to Condeleeza Rice ("Condi, Condi") is a throw-away idea that should have been sung for fun, cut from the mix, and forgotten. But that's a minor quibble.

Steve Earle is on my personal "A" list, where the "A" stands for automatic: I'll buy what he sells unheard until I'm disappointed. He hasn't failed me yet.

A final note: Steve has a weekly show on Air America radio; the show also streams on the web, and the online archives contain PODcasts and .mp3s of previous shows for listening online or downloading.

Wake Up Call - 6/20

My CD organization is all over the place, but there are definite subsections, and ordering within them (an analyst is an analyst, even at home). One section is devoted to blues artists in alphabetical order (which doesn't prevail everywhere); in that order are several discs that begin with "Blind" and include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and this week's wake-up musician, Blind Blake. BTW, the handicapped name thing is a whole other story of an era whose time has clearly passed - anyone remember Pegleg Bates, the one-legged dancer or baseball player Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown? I suppose our modern sensitivity accounts for why artists (and recording industry publicists) have stopped marketing handicaps, and why we don't have recordings by Blind Stevie Wonder or Blind Jose Feliciano or Albino Johnny Winter - and no, Blind Faith and Blind Melon don't count.

Blake, who arrived mysteriously on the scene as an accompanist and vanished just as mysteriously a few years later (after cutting over 70 sides), is an absolute master of rag and country blues guitar. He's got a perfect rhythmic sense, and a light and agile style that allows him to play piano ragtime music with both the left and right hand lines going on together; some writers refer to him as the originator of country blues finger-picking style. He's also a pleasant mid-range vocalist who phrases as well with his voice as he does with his guitar.

The CD I've got put in the disc-alarm for this week, Blind Blake: Ragtime Guitar's Foremost Fingerpicker, is a 28-track Yazoo release, with Blake playing both solo and with other musicians, that I believe is now out of print; however, they've replaced it with a more recent compilation. My selected wake-up cut is "Police Dog Blues".

Blake's lightness of touch (on the selected cut, he hits harmonics like he was ringing bells), the jaunty rag-country blues rhythm, and his easy vocalizing make this disc just about perfect wake-up music. Be warned, though - if you're a finger-picking guitarist and haven't heard him before, (a) it's about time and (b) his playing will knock you out.

Walking In On Bruce

This morning's New York Times had an article and link to a listing of Bruce's Springsteen's "walk-in" music - the songs playing as concert attendees are arriving. It's a long and tasty mix primarily of what's generally referred to these days as "Americana" - alt.country, folk, gospel, and blues music, both traditional and contemporary - the sort of list that very closely resembles what I hear on WFUV every day. I like and admire Bruce Springsteen, who is a musician of great talent and seems to possess an uncommon personal and political integrity. I'm pleased but not surprised that his list includes so many artists whose work I also like.

There are even a few surprises that encompass some favorites of mine - several gospel cuts from Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, whose music is genuinely inspiring, "Saint James Infirmary Blues" performed by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five (I'll have more to say on the Hot Fives and Sevens, which is in my regular rotation), Sandy Bull's "Carmina Burana Fantasy", which sets Orff's classical themes to banjo, and Jay Farrar's "Barstow".

There are also a handful of names I'm not familiar with (e.g. The Handsome Family, Song Dog, Hamell On Trial). On the basis of his other selections, I'll have to look them up (along with Ozomatli, an LA band recommended in a recent comment).

Shout Out

A quick thanks to the folks at the Music Library Association (linked in the sidebar) who've added Struts and Frets to their list of music blogs!

Fun, Fun, Fun

It's a beautiful June day, the sun is shining, and I'm thinking about the beach. We'll be heading down to Cape May Point soon for a short get-away. The Point is at the southern tip of New Jersey, where Delaware Bay flows into the Atlantic; it's a quiet and peaceful spot - no hotels, no restaurants, etc. - with a lighthouse, dunes, beach houses (including some that go back to the 19th century), and a lot of birds (and a branch of the Audubon society); we've been spending part of our summers here for almost 25 years. The Victorian resort of Cape May proper is a few miles east, and the honkytonk of Wildwood is 10 minutes to the north, but we're happiest at the Point, where the only things to think about are which book to read next, when to walk to the beach, and what to grill for supper.

In anticipation, I'm listening to the Beach Boys, the ultimate summer band, today; more specifically, I'm listening to a one disc-30 track compilation released two years ago by Capitol as The Very Best of the Beach Boys: Sounds of Summer. The set spans their career and includes pretty much everything you'd expect. It's not in chronological order, but most of the cuts are from their peak years in the 60's (there's nothing from So Tough or Holland, for example), and the track sequence, which opens with"California Girls" and closes with "Good Vibrations", plays well. A few of my personal favorites are missing ("409", "All Summer Long", "The Farmer's Daughter") , and some of the later cuts are pretty lame ("Getcha Back" and an adds-nothing-to-the-original cover of "Come Go With Me"), but if you're looking for a one-disc Beach Boys collection, this is the one to buy.

When I went off to college in the early 60's, I attended the University of Rochester, in upstate NY - right in the middle of the snow belt that runs along the coast of Lake Ontario. Winters were long and the snow started falling in late October and ended sometime around April. L, a friend and fraternity brother (oh yeah - lot of stories there!) , detested the snow and thought seriously of transferring. Only the Beach Boys kept him going. He'd play them endlessly, 45's and LP's alike. His room had pictures of the California surf; he wanted to "Catch A Wave", fall in love with a "Little Surfer Girl", and above all, have "Fun, Fun, Fun". When we finally graduated, L. went to law school and then headed straight for southern California and never looked back. Last I heard, he was still practicing law and living in Santa Monica - and I'll bet he's got this disc in permanent rotation: behold the power of music!

Driving Home 6/16

Nasty traffic jam driving home today, but plenty of good music on the radio. A couple of thoughts:

1. Whoever decided to put mariachi horns on Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire deserves some kind of award.
2. You wouldn't ordinarily think of teaming up Graham Parker and Lucinda Williams, but Cruel Lips works just fine.
3. So I'm driving up the Henry Hudson on the last leg of a long trip home, and a deluge of biblical proportions opens up just as the DJ puts on Crowded House singing "Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you", satisfying my minimum daily requirement of irony.

Ornette lives

BTW, Ornette's still playing (he's 75); check out this fan's recent review. Here's a quote:

...he looked frail but supercool. Wearing a snazzy whitish/yellow? suit (the lighting disguised the actual colour) and one of those pork-pie hats with the little feather in the side that if I wore would make me look like a cheesy bookmaker at the racetrack but on him looked – a Hat Supreme. He also played trumpet and a smattering of violin – and the old controversies about his mastery or otherwise of his secondary instruments seemed irrelevant. The trumpet was fluid, plaintive, the violin just right – I’ve heard him play wilder stuff on record – but tonight it just blended into the string driven sound so well.

Don't Blame Ornette

This is the man whom many hold responsible for the death of jazz as a popular form of music. Not me. That long, drawn-out event starts with the be-boppers, and the end of jazz as dance music. Ornette just followed his head, and took off in a new, but in retrospect, predictable direction - and if he wasn't such a good musician as player, leader, and composer, no one would have noticed or cared. Miles even cared enough to call him crazy - "Hell, just listen to what he writes and how he plays. If you're talking psychologically, the man's all screwed up inside." And Miles would know, right?

Today's listening is the Ornette Coleman set in the Ken Burns Jazz single artist release series. Whatever else can be said about the Jazz series, the single artist releases offer excellent career overviews of some fine jazz musicians. The tracks are carefully selected to be representative of career changes and peaks, and through some miracle, Burns was able to get rights from just about every label that counts, so that a single album can have cuts from Atlantic, Columbia, Verve, Blue Note, Riverside, etc. and this is no small achievement.

I'm liking Blues Connotation, which is very boppy with clear improv lines and solid bass work from Charlie Haden (great sidework from Haden all over the disc and some fine work from Don Cherry, too); I'm also liking the playful European Echos with its waltz quotes in oompah-pah time. The driving Theme From a Symphony (Variation 2), from his recording with the guys who later became "Prime Time", adds two electric guitars laying down funky riffs and rhythms over which Ornette builds a fast dance line with a North African vibe (I'm putting the source album for this track, Dancing In Your Head, on my short list).

That said, I definitely don't dig some of his harmolodic work, like the cut from Skies of America. There's plenty going on, for sure, and I don't doubt for a moment his sincerity or the quality of his chops - but I just don't enjoy listening to it (and you sure can't dance to it - but like I said, the last time you could dance to jazz was long ago). It is funny, though, how relatively tame so much of his work sounds in retrospect - like Stravinsky or the Post-Impressionists, who went from "crazy" to icons. Ornette has now become iconic enough to be graced with a Ken Burns Jazz disc all his own, the audio equivalent of a museum retrospective.

Moody Mood

In the summer of 1970, I was visiting lovely Camp Drum in Watertown, NY, courtesy of the US Army Reserve. We had two weeks of annual training, highlighted by racing 2 1/2 ton trucks up the thruway and back (they had a dual-range automatic shift, so anyone could drive them). The rest of the time was spent doing typically useless army things, including a field outing involving camping in the woods. Well, the first night up we met a corps of doctors from Connecticut and struck up a pleasant acquaintance. They suggested we show up at the next sick call; we did, and they kindly certified a dozen or so of us as suffering from severe allergies and therefore restricted from field ops. Hoohah!!

Our CO, whose own reviews were impacted by his unit's field performance, was not amused and, frustrated by his inability to override the MDs, restricted us all to barracks, which was fine from our pov - Camp Drum wasn't exactly a resort and the barracks was as good a place to pass time as any other. I don't remember the device's identity, but one of the guys had brought along a portable record player and a bunch of records; the hit of the barracks was the Moody Blues' To Our Children's Children's Children.

The Moodys were a great headphone band and did their best work in the studio. Their production involved layers of early synthesizers (mellotrons?), lots of timbres, and various sound effects. They wove this together into naively pretentious tracts on the nature of reality in a kind of anticipatory New Age framework. It was psychedelia without the edge, a series of highly romantic hallucinations framed by album covers that were often full-size (front and back making a continuous picture). Their first 7 albums are a guilty pleasure, and I've still got the vinyl.

That said, I never replaced them when CD's came along. Don't know why, exactly, but I just didn't get to it. OTOH, recently while strolling the racks, something triggered a moody mood and I picked up The Best of the Moody Blues, which I've been listening to this afternoon. On headphones! The music is more an exercise in nostalgia for me at this point than anything else, although some of the songs hold up even without their context (their albums really were capital-c Concepts, intended to be played from end to end, although they did release some successful singles). The album also has the pre-conceptual Go Now, a good piece of British Invasion pop that holds up well. Too much filler from their later stuff, though (post Seventh Sojourn), and I doubt I'll be giving it much play. Maybe I should pick up In Search of the Lost Chord...

Ravine, Continued

Last words for now on Chavez Ravine, which I listened to again this morning. First, this review from the Guardian is as good a representation of my viewpoint as anything I'm likely to throw together in the next few hours. Personal update on second listen-through: this is a fine set, a politically spirited attempt to recapture a piece of history and the vibe of another time and place; it's an ambitious effort that's surprisingly successful. The package includes a thick booklet with all the lyrics and an individual introduction to each track, illustrated with drawings and photographs. My current favorite song is 3rd Base, Dodger Stadium, a soft Latin-tinged ballad in which an aging groundskeeper who used to live where the ballfield now stands talks about the past, mapping the vanished community that haunts the infield - a sort of geographical palimpsest (and how often do I get to use that word). The voice is the distinctive one of Bla Pahinui, a Hawaiian musician whose own culture is also disappearing, and who brings a genuine feeling of loss to the lyrics.

Riding with John Prine

The featured artist on FUV this week is John Prine, which means his work gets a lot of play. Prine's reedy voice, finely crafted songs, and country-folkish melodies are a good combination. And while he can be serious (take the chorus of Sam Stone,which begins "There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes"), he's got a great playful quality. On my way in to work this morning, they played That's The Way That The World Goes 'Round:

I was sitting in the bathtub counting my toes,
when the radiator broke, water all froze.
I got stuck in the ice without my clothes,
naked as the eyes of a clown.

I was crying ice cubes hoping I'd croak,
when the sun come through the window, the ice all broke.
I stood up and laughed thought it was a joke.
That's the way that the world goes 'round.

It's really not a funny song, but Prine squeezes humor out of the human condition, and as I sang along to the chorus in what's left of my second tenor voice (second violins, second tenor - are we seeing a pattern here?), I couldn't help but smile.

Chavez Ravine

So I did get out this afternoon, and picked up Chavez Ravine. I listened through once (with lots of interruptions), and my first impressions are very positive. It's a Concept Album (I thought they were an endangered species), and Cooder's basic idea is to present a musical collage of the culture and history of the Chavez Ravine section of LA in the 1950's when the existing neighborhood was razed as part of an Urban Removal project to make way for a stadium pending the arrival of the Brooklyn Dodgers and that traitor, O'Malley. I haven't followed it concentratedly yet, but he takes several different musical tacks - lots of Latin beats with some songs sung by the originator/authors, a cut about the Red Scare with voice quotes, and so on. One song that jumped out at me is a cover of Leiber & Stoller's Three Cool Cats. I grew up on their songs, particularly the many Coasters hits they wrote (Charley Brown, Poison Ivy, Along Came Jones, etc.), and give a plus to anyone who covers them - not that Cooder needs it.

More to come when I dig into it; meanwhile, if you're a Ry Cooder fan at all - or like the concept - get this record (his word - see cover!).

Ry Cooder for Living National Treasure

The Japanese recognize certain masters of art and craft genres as Living National Treaures - - people who transmit national cultural traditions. It shouldn't be a matter of rote imitation, though. As master Japanese potter, Kaneshige Michiaki said:

Tradition is sometimes confused with transmission. Copying Momoyama pieces is transmission. Producing contemporary pieces incorporating Momoyama period techniques is tradition. Tradition consists of retaining transmitted forms and techniques in one's mind when producing a contemporary piece. Tradition is always changing. A mere copy of an old piece has not changed; it is nearly the same as its prototype of four hundred years ago. Tradition consists of creating something new with what one has inherited

With that in mind, my first nominee for an American Living National Treasure is Ryland "Ry" Cooder.

Aside from being an absolute master of the slide guitar, acoustic and electric, Cooder is an untiring devotee of the many forms of American folk, blues, and popular music. His work as lead and sideman has incorporated delta and country blues, Hawaiian slack key, jazz roots, conjunto and norteno, folk ballads, gospel, and rock – to all of which he brings a deep knowledge of the workings of the traditional forms coupled with an ability to swing, rock, or two-step as the occasion warrants. This week, Ry has a new release coming out, Chavez Ravine, which I expect to pick up shortly. With that in mind, I've been listening to Ry at work the last two days.

Yesterday, it was "A Meeting By The River", on the Water Lily Acoustics label. Cooder has an active interest in world music, and has made albums focusing on African and Latin forms (for example, he produced and played on the "Buena Vista Social Club" album). On this disc, he teams with Hindustani vina master Vishwa Mohan Bhatt (who has created his own version of the instrument, called the Mohan Vina, which functions as a kind of Indian lap steel guitar), along with percussion by Sukhvindar Singh on tabla and Joachim Cooder (Ry's son) on dumbek, a north African drum. Beautiful music, including tracks like "Ganges Delta Blues". The album is dedicated to Hawaiian slack key master Gabby Pahinui, and the final track, "Isa Lei", is a lyrical slack-key piece wrapped in a blend of hawaiian-style steel and Indian microtones . Maybe Living International Treasure would be more accurate.

Today, it's Ry the sideman on the John Hiatt set, "Bring the Family". Hiatt's a fine songwriter, covered by a wide variety of artists, and this is one of his best albums, raw voice and all (but that's another post for another day). Even so, Cooder's work on slide guitar is worth the price of admission. His lines are always in support of the lead, never upstaging Hiatt – but their elegance and tastiness illuminate every track.

Wake Up Call - 6/13

A few years ago I got one of those Bose CD/radio/clock units for the bedroom. The main reason was to have a decent music source for that room without having to run speakers; the Bose is a small unit with a lot of power, produces good sound (including a reasonable bass) at relatively low volume, and more than does the job. I also like to listen late at night before going to sleep and my wife is out before me, so I wanted something that would (a) take headphones and (b) have a remote, since it's across the room from the bed. The Bose has a nice little creditcard sized remote, which I keep on my night table, and while it doesn't have a phone jack (at least at that time - don't know if they've added one to later models), it has RCA outputs - so I picked up an RCA-to-headphone jack converter at Radio Shack, and it's worked just fine.

My wife likes to rise quietly; luckily, she gets up before me and has her own alarm clock, which uses increasingly bright flashes of light to wake her - it only gets noisy if ignored too long (like so many of us). I, OTOH, like to rise to music. The Bose has alarm settings that let you specify buzzer, radio, or CD - I always use CD. It defaults to track 1 (and has no random setting for wake up), but you can pick a specific track as the starting point, as well as a snooze interval and max wake-up volume level.

Usually I pick a disc for the week, and select a track. I keep the max level moderate, and like music that doesn't assault me while I'm still reaching full consciousness (or as close as I get to it). The Bose starts the track at very low volume, and slowly increases it to the max setting. It's a very nice little device, actually. I'll generally hit snooze once (on the remote), and then - on the second run - listen to the track run through before actually climbing out of bed (literally - we have a new bed/mattress/boxspring combo, and are a good 32" off the floor).

As a regular part of the blog, I'll post my wakeup choice for the week; other recommendations are welcome.

This week, the disc is the Grateful Dead's "American Beauty", and the starting track is the beautifully harmonized #9 (number 9, number 9): "Attics of My Life".

I've never been a Deadhead, and although I respect their talents (particularly the late Jerry Garcia's chops - I also like some of the work he did with master mandolinist David Grisman) and their integrity as a band, they're not a favorite of mine. In fact, there are only two Dead albums in my collection (this one and "Workingman's Dead") - but they're two discs I return to repeatedly. Of course, they're more structured, tighter, and less "jammy" than the Dead's more typical output, and that's probably why I like them - that plus the strong American folk and blues roots-base, and the outstanding songwriting that characterizes them (Box of Rain, Ripple, Friend of the Devil, Casey Jones, Uncle John, Dire Wolf, etc. - just about every track on both sets is a keeper) .

As for the selected track, I'm a sucker for harmonies, and this cut's layered vocals go very nicely with the sunrise (the bedroom faces east, and we're up early). The words work well for the pre-coffee moments, too:

In the secret space of dreams, where I dreaming lay amazed

When the secrets all are told, and the petals all unfold

When there was no dream of mine, you dreamed of me.

Why?

Why this blog and what's with the title? Let's start with the title. For one thing, It's a partial quote from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" - the soliloquy that goes "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage...". This is my small stage, and a place to do my own share of strutting and fretting. For another, "struts" and "frets" are parts of an acoustic guitar, one of my instruments, and this blog is in no small part about music.

I studied the violin as a child, taking lessons and music classes (history, theory, harmony, composition) at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music's branch school in Flushing, NY. I played through High School, including a stint in JHS in the Queens All-boro Orchestra, and as first chair in the 2nd Violin section of my High School orchestra (a very good one, actually). It was also in High School that I got caught up in the folk revival of the late fifties/early sixties, and picked up acoustic guitar; when I graduated HS, my chosen gift from my parents was a Gibson J-50 with an adjustable bridge, and I played it for many decades.

I also grew up in a home with a piano (my sister got the piano lessons, I got the violin - my mother dreamed of recital halls), and learned to fake that pretty well; later on in life, I acquired a few keyboards (including a rackmount Casio CZ-101, an early model that lets you design your own envelope), picked up some harmonica along with a neck brace for Dylan-style performing, bought a cheap autoharp, was given a lovely old tenor banjo by a friend - well, you get the idea. These days, I'm trying to get back into the violin, but with a folk fiddler kind of bent (cajun, Irish, old-timey). I had my old one cleaned up and picked up a new bow; now all I have to do is carve out enough woodshed time to scrape the rust off. I'm looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, I listen to a lot of music, and thought this would be a good place to talk about it. I work as an analyst, and spend a lot of my workday in front of a PC; since it has a CD drive and a headphone jack, and since I've been working to music since Junior High (doing homework while listening to Murray the K and his Swingin' Soiree), I bring one CD per day to work, and listen to it through a few times while doing my documents. Why only one? Well, I've got a lot of music at home (probably close to 1000 CDs at this point plus cassette tapes and a bookcase full of vinyl), and it seemed a good opportunity for close listening; repeating the disc through the day gives me a chance to really hear it.

I drive to and from work (about 45 minutes each way), and give that time to the radio. I listen pretty much exclusively to two stations - WFUV and WBGO. FUV is "Fordham University's Voice" (90.7 in the NYC metro area) and plays a progressive mix of folk, country, pop, blues, and world. It's got professional DJs, who are given a wide latitude in playlist and no commercials (it's membership supported and yes, I am a member). BGO calls itself "Jazz 88" (88.3 out of Newark, NJ), and is also listener-supported (no commercials). It plays a wide range of jazz and blues, focusing on what the DJs call "the 4 B's - blues, bebop, ballads, and bossa nova", although it ranges far afield of that group. On weekend mornings, for example, they play a lot of R&B, including doo-wop, funk, soul, and so on. Both stations are worth a listen, and both are good ways for me to find out what's new in the kinds of music I particularly enjoy. Incidentally, if you're out of range, they both stream on the Internet.

So - folk, jazz, progressive rock, trad country & bluegrass, world (particularly African genres - Congo, South Africa, Mali, Madagascar, Algeria), singer/songwriter - these are the types of music I listen to most frequently...and then there's classical. I was trained classically, and my parents were classical music lovers; my father was a chamber music fan, and my mother was a opera buff. I still enjoy and listen to classical along with the other musical forms I mentioned earlier (although - despite many attempts - I've never gotten into opera; but that's another posting in itself).

In postings to come, I'll be talking about the music I listen to, the whys and wherefores. I'll post about the daily CDs and my wake-up music for the week (I've got one of those Bose CD/radios in the bedroom, and wake up to music each weekday) and the various sets I put together for myself and friends. I'll also post about the NYC theatre, which my wife and I both enjoy a great deal, and other topics that cross my mind.

I invite comments from anyone who stumbles upon this blog, particularly if you like to talk about music (no flames, please - they're not worth your effort or mine), and especially if you've got something to recommend. I figure anyone who searches on a string like "Debussy Van Morrison Mississippi Sheiks" will get here - and deserves to!

If you've somehow found your way here - Welcome! I hope you find it worth revisiting.