Midweek Music Break: Scott Joplin’s “Solace”

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I caught 1973’s The Sting on TV recently. By now, I’ve seen it often enough that the kick of the plot has pretty much evaporated, leaving behind the not inconsiderable on-screen pleasures of watching the cast at work. (Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan, I just learned from Wikipedia, did not have to fake his limp: “Shaw had slipped on a wet handball court at the Beverly Hills Hotel just a week before filming began and had split all the ligaments in his knee.”)

To which I’d have to add, always, the textural pleasures provided by the soundtrack.

It’s hard not to like Scott Joplin’s ragtime music, which — though already out-of-date in the real-world 1930s — somehow “sounds” right to our ears for that period. It’s so… so… so bubbly, y’know?

But one song always stood out in my mind as the best of the lot — and although Joplin wrote it, it didn’t even sound like ragtime, to my uneducated ears: “Solace.”

[Below, click Play button to begin Solace. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:34 long.

[audio:solace_joplin.mp3|titles=’Solace’|artists=by Scott Joplin-Marvin Hamlisch on piano]

The complete title of the song is “Solace: A Mexican Serenade”; published in 1909, it was, says at least one source, “the only work by Joplin to employ a tango rhythm.” Which caught me completely by surprise — not that my ears are any smarter about tango than about ragtime. But when I heard “Solace,” I just couldn’t picture a couple of sleek and smoldering Spanish dancers clinched together, eyes locked, as they swirled about on a dance floor.

According to the All Music Guide to Classical Music, however, the “Solace”-as-tango story isn’t quite that straightforward:

[Solace] is a four-minute gem of a habanera, which, as one might divine from the word, has roots in Havana. There is also in Solace something of the tango form, which, though distantly related to an African folk dance tradition, is more recently of the same Latin extraction as the habanera. Solace is, then, a true musical mish-mash…

Fans of George Bizet’s Carmen are invited to sit back, listen to Solace, and enjoy the same gently rocking habanera rhythm as is heard throughout the Frenchman’s famous Habanera.

So, since you, too, may wonder about that comparison… here’s Bizet’s “Habanera”:

[Below, click Play button to begin Habanera (from ‘Carmen’). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:11 long.

[audio:habanera_bizetcarmen.mp3|titles=’Habanera (from Carmen)’|artists=Bizet-London Festival Orchestra]

How about that?

[At the time this posts on Wednesday morning, I’ll be in mid-air, en route to a four-day reunion with my sisters and brother. If all goes as planned between now and then, though, another of these magically pre-created missives will appear on Friday. I will be checking in online “for real” from time to time, too, both here and via email.]

 

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Midweek Music Break: “St. James Infirmary”

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Laissez les bons temps rouler, eh? And among the songs often regarded as “typical New Orleans,” we have the subject of today’s Midweek Music Break.

No way could I even begin to match the masterful job of documenting its history which Robert W. Harwood undertook with his I Went Down to St. James Infirmary. One hundred ninety pages. Subtitle (all by itself practically a foreword to the book): Investigations in the Shadowy World of Early Jazz-Blues in the Company of Blind Willie McTell, Louis Armstrong, Don Redman, Irving Mills, Carl Moore, and a Host of Others, and Where Did This Dang Song Come from Anyway?

Briefly, though (and thank you, Wikipedia):

“St. James Infirmary Blues” is based on an 18th century traditional English folk song called “The Unfortunate Rake” (also known as “The Unfortunate Lad” or “The Young Man Cut Down in His Prime”)… “The Unfortunate Rake” is about a sailor who uses his money on prostitutes, and then dies of a venereal disease…

The title is derived from St. James Hospital in London, a religious foundation for the treatment of leprosy.

Doesn’t sound much like an invitation to party, does it? No good times rollin’ here! But then we find these relevant lyrics, almost sketching for us a picture of a completely classic New Orleans funeral march:

“Get six young soldiers to carry my coffin,
Six young girls to sing me a song,
And each of them carry a bunch of green laurel
So they don’t smell me as they bear me along.

“Don’t muffle your drums and play your fifes merrily,
Play a quick march as you carry me along,
And fire your bright muskets all over my coffin…”

Here’s “The Unfortunate Rake,” in a suitably mournful interpretation by A.L. Lloyd (vocals) and Alf Edwards (concertina) (complete lyrics here):

[Below, click Play button to begin The Unfortunate Rake. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:59 long.

[audio:unfortunaterake_alloyd_alfedwards.mp3|titles=’The Unfortunate Rake’|artists=A.L. Lloyd & Alf Edwards]

By the time Louis Armstrong got hold of it, “The Unfortunate Rake” had morphed into a mysterious What exactly is going on here? sort of song. Now it’s no longer the rake, but his woman laid out in the hospital. And the guy? Well, the sound is right. But the words? He’s strangely, awfully damn ready to sing his own praises…

I went down to the St. James Infirmary
Saw my baby there
Stretched out on a long white table
So cold… so sweet… so fair

Let her go… let her go… God bless her
Wherever she may be
She can look this wide world over
But she’ll never find a sweet man like me

When I die Baby in straight-lace shoes
I wanna a boxback coat and a Stetson hat
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the boys’ll know that I died standing flat…

[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Louis Armstrong). This clip is 4:46 long.

[audio:stjamesinfirmary_louisarmstrong.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Louis Armstrong]

Finally, we have straight-up instrumentals — no need for any of these to retain a single lugubrious scrap of “The Unfortunate Rake.” This is sweetly swinging Allen Toussaint, on the piano:

[Below, click Play button to begin St. James Infirmary (Allen Toussaint). This clip is 3:51 long.

[audio:stjamesinfirmary_allentoussaint.mp3|titles=’St. James Infirmary’|artists=Allen Toussaint]
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The Fundamental Things Apply

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[Below, click Play button to begin well, playing. During this time, volume control will appear at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:22 long.

[audio:lovewalkedin_errollgarner.mp3|titles=’Love Walked In’|artists=Erroll Garner]

On March 1, 1991 — twenty years ago yesterday — I got an email from a stranger who’d downloaded and read an unpublished story of mine.

The story in question, “The Last Supper,” was a slender-little-nothin’ of a horror story about a church congregation who disposed of each pastor, when they tired of him, by consuming him at a communal covered-dish meal. My new correspondent just wanted me to know (a) she had enjoyed reading it and (b) in a word, Eeeeewww…!

Gross-out aside, the tone of the note was a little fangirlish. And in my reply, I — who’d written but not yet published a mystery about an email stalker — was simultaneously a little puffed-up and evasive.

Unfortunately, neither of us retained a copy of that first exchange. We both remember it, though — oh yes we do. And we both remember (in sometimes excruciating detail <g>) the long-term effects…

Erroll Garner’s piano provides the soundtrack to this post: “Love Walked In.” Seven years after George Gershwin composed the music, Ira Gershwin added the lyrics, the first verse of which goes:

Nothing seemed to matter any more,
Didn’t care what I was headed for.
Time was standing still,
No one counted till
There came a knocking at the door.

The rest fits, too.

Love you, Baby.

[Comments closed for this post, obviously.]
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Midweek Music Break: The Mellotron, and The Moody Blues

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[A view of the interior of the Mellotron M400. To learn more about how the Mellotron works, see the Out of Phase: Magic Machines Resources “information about Mellotron, Fairlight and other vintage keyboards” site.]

A dim little back corner of the cabinet which houses musical-instrument history is occupied by an odd device called the Mellotron. It was an early “synthesizer,” sort of. But it didn’t create the sounds of other instruments artificially, by generating electronic pulses and sending them directly to amplifiers and sound boards. The Mellotron played strips of audiotape, several seconds in length, on which had been recorded a host of musical instruments: at its simplest, one note per instrument per strip of tape. Choose your instrument and press a key on the keyboard; the corresponding tape strip moves over a playback head; and out comes the sound of that instrument playing that note. When you release the key, the tape is repositioned so the playback head returns to the beginning of the strip.

(It puts one in mind of that Samuel Johnson wisecrack: “It’s like a dog dancing on its hind legs. The wonder is not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.”)

[Read more…]

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Midweek Music Break: Madeline Kahn

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Not only was the late Madeline Kahn almost unnervingly funny; she could seriously unhinge me with her voice. Says a writer for the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s Opera News:

That note! Madeline Kahn’s sustained “Ah!” on A-flat, the first volley in Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” and the climax of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein — has any singer ever made more impact with less?

Here’s the moment he refers to:

In that one Opera News article, by the way, I found more information about her singing than anyplace else I’ve seen. It includes the tidbit that Kahn did in fact briefly consider an opera career before settling on theater and films. Not really surprising — either the opera possibility, or her ultimate choice.

In the Sesame Street clip below, she again puts both extravagant talents to work, with Grover, in “Sing After Me”:

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Midweek Music Break: Grails

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How could a band named Grails not attract my attention, at the very least?

Luckily, I like their sound (at least what I’ve heard of it). It’s straight instrumental and rather free-form, featuring various effects both acoustic and electronic. Figuring out what to call that sound is tricky, however. One reviewer from their native Portland a few years back said:

A typical Grails song (if there is such a thing) starts with a loosely strummed guitar, or wind, or ocean tides, and layers are slowly added bit by bit until a pulse of bass and drum-driven groove reveals itself. Plenty of stereo effects and creative mixing ensure that sheets of sound dance in one speaker and out the other. The organic analog tones naturally blend acoustic instruments with vintage synths. Kraut-rock jams culminate in a final hook or epiphany, often stopping before the listeners can nod their red-eyed heads a second time. Guitarist Zak Riles defends this method: “We do not have vocals so we end up trying to figure out the best way to make a song interesting compositionally without blowing our wad.”

On Amazon, reviewers tend to describe them via simile: they’re like Explosions in the Sky, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Santana. (One reviewer of an album there sums up: “a dreary droney, Hawkwind meets Gore sort of dirgedoom vibe. Epic and amazing.” It would probably help if I recognized the Hawkwind/Gore references, but that passage still feels slightly out of my mental reach.)

As for Grails themselves, on their MySpace page, they identify their genre as “soul.” Um, okaaaay…

Two selections for you today. The first is “I Led Three Lives,” from their forthcoming album called Deep Politics. It does remind me of what I called “thought music” in a post a couple years ago.

[Below, click Play button to begin I Led Three Lives. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 8:49 long.

[audio:grails-i-led-three-lives.mp3|titles=’I Led Three Lives’|artists=Grails]

Next, an earlier, more acoustic-driven number, “Broken Ballad,” from 2003’s Burden of Hope:

[Below, click Play button to begin Broken Ballad. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:47 long.

[audio:brokenballad_grails.mp3|titles=’Broken Ballad’|artists=Grails]

The Grails Web site is here. Note that the trailer for the new album includes no actual music from that album; instead — for reasons unknown (to me) — they’ve chosen as their soundtrack “Feels So Good,” the 1977 hit from jazz-pop flugelhornist Chuck Mangione. Which I honestly don’t mind listening to, but ah, the freedom to make enigmatic artistic decisions…!

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Midweek Music Break: “Froggy Bottom”

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Almost every chapter in Seems to Fit revolves around a single one of the main characters, even when others are present. It’s a little complicated to move from one character’s head to another’s, in the space of a few days, so I’ve developed some little gimmicks to simplify it for myself.

One of these gimmicks: I listen to that character’s music as I work on his or her scenes.

Yeah — each has his or her own playlist. One favors classical; one, easy-listening music from the 1950s-60s; one, New Age… Two of the characters prefer Big Band jazz from the 1920s through 1940s, but even they have their differences of opinion: one votes for smooooth, even syrupy, and the other for raucous and energetic, even unhinged.

I was working on a chapter from the point of view of one of those latter two guys, his playlist rolling in my headphones, when I suddenly had to look away from the word processor to ask: What the heck is that? Understand, now: these playlists consist of music I own. I’m not using an “Internet radio station” to generate them on the fly; I’ve heard all these songs, many times. But on this occasion a particular number jumped out at me.

That number is called “Froggy Bottom,” and the recording comes from the soundtrack of Robert Altman’s 1996 film Kansas City. Altman grew up in that city. The excellent summary of the film at the Senses of Cinema site points out that the film — superficially (and satisfactorily) about politics, gangsters, and other features of the period which Altman may have remembered — is, at a deeper level, about much else:

These sorts of things are what half the movie is about. The other half is a dream memory of Kansas City jazz. The philosophic, vicious monologist gangster Seldom Seen [played by Harry Belafonte] runs a club in which his space for crime business is contiguous with the musicians’ performance space, and it is his indulgence to have the musicians playing 24 hours a day for his pleasure (like Duke Ellington keeping his orchestra together when it wasn’t profitable). The jazz creeps into the film bit by bit. The music numbers get longer. The music intrudes itself into the other scenes. The music becomes its own story as some of the best jazz musicians of the 1990s play in period costume their version of music 60 years old… At the end of this film, there is only the music.

As for “Froggy Bottom” itself, and the rest of the soundtrack, it is of that era and that place, not commissioned for the film. The song was written by Mary Lou Williams, who was something of an anomaly as a member of various big bands… but not as a singer (the conventional slot for women performers). Rather, Williams was a ferociously talented pianist and songwriter, who remained active well into the 1980s. (The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers says she penned “more than 350 compositions.”)

This isn’t Williams in this selection from the Kansas City soundtrack, however. As the Senses of Cinema review above says, the original Kansas City performers were played by modern jazz musicians. The part of Mary Lou Williams was played by Geri Allen — herself a woman of no small accomplishment, and a master of the jazz keyboard in her own right.

If you’d like to compare the version below with the “real thing,” at least one recording has made its way to YouTube: Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy (!), with Mary Lou Williams herself on piano.

Here’s “Froggy Bottom,” featuring Geri Allen on the keyboard, David “Fathead” Newman on alto sax, and Mark Whitfield on guitar (as well as other personnel I haven’t yet identified):


_________________

P.S. See Soul on Soul, Tammy Lynn Kermodle’s biography of Mary Lou Williams, for an analysis of Williams’s style arranging and compositional styles — especially as demonstrated in “Froggy Bottom” and another piece, “Mess-a-Stomp.”

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Midweek Music Break: Harlan Pepper

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[I don’t know if this is turning into some sort of series or what, but I seem to keep dropping these little barely annotated video/music clips sometime between Tuesday and Thursday…]

No idea if these guys are going anywhere, but I have to admit that I like their sound. Says one reviewer:

These young men write and play like old souls. There are roots in traditional country, the Grateful Dead, and the great folk rock and alt-country bands of the past like the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Band, and Buffalo Springfield… they are so young that there is just no telling what will develop down the line. There are already great writers here. They are already accomplished musicians, and they are surrounded and nurtured by some of the finest musicians and artists in Canada. Of all the young groups I’ve seen in the past year, this is the one with the best chance of remaining true to their vision.

(Quotation found at the Harlan Pepper Web site.)

Young? Oh yes. As in “just out of high school” young. Maybe at some point they’ll tire of hearing that, maybe even before they grow out of the label. (And the one on the banjo (Dan Edmonds)? I haven’t seen this in any of the reviews I’ve read so far, but my gosh he reminds me of another skinny curly-haired nasal-voiced sorta-folkie singer-songwriter…) In the meantime, they do write and play some enjoyable music. Don’t expect to find a lot of it so far — their first CD, the aptly named Young and Old, just came out — but all the tracks I’ve listened to share the same sort of easy-going confidence.

Note: Would have posted lyrics if I’d been able to find them yet. Will keep my eyes open.

Update, 2010-01-27: I should have but did not offer a hat tip for the Harlan Pepper heads-up to the Beat Surrender blog, which specializes in promoting Americana/roots music of interest to its proprietor, Simon.

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Music Hath Charms…

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A recurring question here at RAMH — thanks to its proprietor’s stubborn innocence of just about all art forms and languages other than written English — is: How does art/music/dance work, in the first place? It never fails to amaze me that our brains are wired somehow to respond emotionally, even physically, to artificial sensory stimuli — that is, to those which have no counterpart in the “real world.” And we respond that way cross-culturally; it’s obviously not really learned behavior, right?

NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concerts” series invites musicians and entire bands to perform “at the desk of All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen in the NPR Music office.” (“All Songs Considered” is the name of another NPR feature.) The above session featured Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal, who play, respectively, the “Malian kora” and the cello.

Says the page at the NPR site where I found this:

When the performance began, a hush came over the NPR crowd. Western ears don’t hear the kora often enough, and its natural beauty — combined with Sissoko’s mastery of the instrument — stunned those in attendance. But Segal wasn’t content to play, well, second fiddle. Halfway through the duo’s second song, “Balazando,” Segal adjusted his fingering and the angle of his bow, and all of a sudden, his cello turned into an African flute. If we’d had a third camera facing the crowd, you would have seen jaws hit the floor.

Yeah, I picked up on that, too: “don’t hear the kora often enough.” Like I’d heard it before at all. Still, that moment with the cello is indeed a jaw-dropping one.

[Thanks, Jules, for the heads-up to this video!]

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